I am Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), Fellow of Christ’s College, and Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. I have been British Academy Newton Fellow, and Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Affairs. In 2023-24 (Lent term) I will be an Early Career Research Fellow at Cambridge University’s CRASSH centre.

Theoretically, I am interested in the operation of social pressures in diplomacy, global governance, and international legal processes. Empirically, my research has investigated the politics of international lawmaking through multinational archival research, with emphasis (so far) on the international law of armed conflict, human rights law, and weapons regulation. I am broadly interested in the study of historical global governance through primary research.

My research has appeared, among others, in International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, the European Journal of International Relations, the European Journal of International Law, the Journal of the History of International Law, and Global Governance. My first book “Lawmaking under Pressure: International Humanitarian Law and Internal Armed Conflict” (Cornell UP, 2020) received the 2021 Francis Lieber award as the best book in the law of armed conflict from American Society of International Law, and a Best Book Honorable Mention (2021) from the American Political Science Association’s “International Collaboration” section.

Key Publications

Mantilla, Giovanni. “Deflective Cooperation: Social Pressure and Forum Management in Cold War Conventional Arms Control.” International Organization 77, no. 3 (2023): doi:10.1017/S0020818322000364 

Mantilla, Giovanni and Carsten-Andreas Schulz. “The Turn to the History of International Law in the Discipline of International Relations” in Cambridge History of International Law, Vol. I, Anne Peters and Randall Lesaffer, eds. Cambridge University Press (Forthcoming 2023).

Mantilla, Giovanni. “The Politics of Armed Non-State Groups’ and the Codification of International Humanitarian Law” in Armed Groups and International Law: In the Shadowland of Legality and Illegality, Katharine Fortin and Ezequiel Heffes, eds. Edward Elgar Publishing (2023).

Mantilla, Giovanni. Lawmaking under Pressure: International Humanitarian Law and Internal Armed Conflict. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (2020). Winner of the American Society of International Law's Francis Lieber Prize 2021 as the Best Book in the Law of Armed Conflict, and recipient of an Honorable Mention from the American Political Science Association's International Collaboration Section 2021 for Best Book runner-up.

Kinsella, Helen M, and Giovanni Mantilla. “Contestation before Compliance: History, Politics, and Power in International Humanitarian Law.” International Studies Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2020): 649–56. 

Mantilla, Giovanni. “Social Pressure and the Making of Wartime Civilian Protection Rules.” European Journal of International Relations 26, no. 2 (2020): 443– 468.  

Mantilla, Giovanni. “The Protagonism of the USSR and Socialist States in the Revision of International Humanitarian Law (IHL).” Journal of the History of International Law 21, no. 2 (2019): 181–211.  

Mantilla, Giovanni. “Forum Isolation: Social Opprobrium and the Origins of the International Law of Internal Conflict.” International Organization 72, no. 2 (2018): 317–49. 

Mantilla, Giovanni. “Conforming Instrumentalists: Why the USA and the United Kingdom Joined the 1949 Geneva Conventions.” European Journal of International Law 28, no. 2 (2017): 483–511.  

Mantilla, Giovanni, “The Origins and Development of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Additional Protocols,” in Do the Geneva Conventions Matter?, Matthew Evangelista and Nina Tannenwald, eds. Oxford University Press (2017). Pp. 35-68. 

Mantilla, Giovanni. “Emerging International Human Rights Norms for Transnational Corporations.” Global Governance 15, no. 2 (2009): 279-298.