Erna Burai
Senior Lecturer at the Geneva Centre of Humanitarian Studies
Erna is a Senior Lecturer at the Geneva Centre of Humanitarian Studies and a Research Associate at the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Global Governance Centre, specialising in international relations and humanitarian affairs. Her research interests include norm development and contestation, responsibility and accountability in global governance and inclusive academic practices.
She previously worked on collaborative research projects as part of the “To Save and Defend: Global Normative Ambiguity and Regional Order” SNSF project (2018-2022), and the “Global Norm Evolution and the Responsibility to Protect” project (2012-2015). She held visiting research fellowships at the European University Institute, The Montreal Centre for International Studies and UCL’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies. She led the International Relations program of a Hungarian higher education institution between 2011 and 2015. She worked with Ground Truth Solutions, a Vienna-based research & advocacy NGO as a consultant.
She holds a PhD from Central European University (CEU), titled Responsibilities to Protect: accountability and responsiveness in protecting populations from atrocity crimes, which traces the genealogical origins of “protection” as a norm and how this shapes the normative structure of RtoP.
Erna is the faculty lead for the Certificate of Advanced Studies in Accountability to Affected People, and Visiting Faculty at the Master in International & Development Studies (MINT) programme. She is a convenor of the writing politics research group. Erna teaches courses on concepts and theories in international relations, qualitative research design, interview and survey methods and academic writing. In addition to her native Hungarian, she is fluent in English and French and speaks Spanish.
Selected publications:
Ground Truth Solutions (2024) Strengthening Systems So People Can Take Charge. Cash Recipient Experiences in Ukraine
Hofmann, S.C., Andreska, A., Burai, E., & Uribe, J. (2023). ” Porous organizational boundaries and associated states: introducing memberness in international organizations “. European Journal of International Relations, 29(4), 929–959.
Burai, E. (2023). Book review. “Norm contestation, sovereignty and (ir)responsibility at the International Criminal Court: debunking liberal anti-politics “. International Affairs, 99(4), 1791–1792.
Burai, E. (2021). “Negotiating protection through responsibility.” In The Routledge Handbook on Responsibility in International Relations, by Hannes Hansen-Magnusson, Antje Vetterlein, 192–202.
Burai, E. (2020). Responsibilities to Protect: Accountability and Responsiveness in Protecting Populations from Atrocity Crimes. Doctoral dissertation, Central European University, Budapest.
Burai, E., & Hofmann, S. C. (2020). “Constructivism and Peaceful Change.” In The Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Change in International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Burai, E. (2016). “Parody as norm contestation: Russian normative justifications in Georgia and Ukraine and their implications for global norms.” Global Society, 30(1), 67–77.