The Long Story
The Life Behind the Work
Dr. James Nyawo's career has been a deliberate weaving together of two threads that scholarship often keeps apart: the rigour of international law and the lived reality of humanitarian crisis. Few academics have stood in both the lecture halls of Copenhagen and the displaced-persons camps of Northern Uganda. Fewer still have published, from those dual vantage points, a monograph that has become standard reading in its field.
"I didn't just study humanitarian law. I lived it — in the camps, the corridors, and the crises."
His doctoral work at Middlesex University, supervised by Professor William Schabas and examined by Dr. Dapo Akande of Oxford, confronted a question that has dominated debates about the International Criminal Court for two decades: whether the Court's overwhelming focus on African situations constitutes selective enforcement. That research became, in 2017, the Intersentia/Cambridge monograph that today sits in legal libraries across continents.
Before the academy claimed him fully, he spent more than ten years in the field — in Angola, Northern Uganda, Sudan, South Sudan, and Zambia — working alongside the United Nations and international civil society with landmine survivors, internally displaced persons, and refugees. That experience is not biographical decoration. It is the ground from which every argument he writes ultimately rises.
"Africa must negotiate as a bloc, under the African Continental Free Trade Area as a platform."
Today he lectures at Strathmore University's School of Humanities and Social Sciences in Nairobi, holds research affiliations with the University of Copenhagen and Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and continues to publish, speak, and advise on the questions that have animated his career from the start: African justice, African dignity, African voice.
The work continues.