Francesco Romani

Research Fellow

International Humanitarian Law / International Human Rights Law / International Cultural Heritage Law / International Responsibility and Litigation / Theory of Sovereignty

Dr Francesco Romani is a Research Fellow at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, where he coordinates the IHL Expert Pool and contributes to several projects on evolving themes in international humanitarian law. He is also a Visiting Professor on international responsibility and litigation at the Catholic University of Lille and has been invited to give lectures and seminars on international law topics in France (University of Aix en Provence/Marseille), Italy (Borromeo College, University of Pavia and Università del Piemonte Orientale) and Switzerland (University of Geneva). He is the author of Belligerent Reprisals from Enforcement to Reciprocity: A New Theory of Retaliation in Conflict (CUP, 2024), and his research interests include international humanitarian law, international cultural heritage law, human rights law, and the theory of sovereignty.

Prior to joining the Geneva Academy, Francesco was a post-doctoral researcher at the Art-Law Centre of the University of Geneva, where he acted as Principal Investigator for the Swiss National Science Foundation project ‘The Temporal Dimension of Sovereignty in Light of the Restitution of Cultural Artefacts’. He also worked for the ICRC’s Customary International Humanitarian Law Project at the Lauterpacht Centre and was a Research Associate at Wolfson College (University of Cambridge). Francesco has conducted legal research in academic centres (Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict, Geneva Graduate Institute’s Global Governance Centre) and policy-oriented organizations (Interpeace, Justice Rapid Response).

Francesco holds a PhD in International Law from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies of Geneva. During his doctoral studies, he was a Grotius Research Scholar at the University of Michigan Law School and a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School.