About

Gavin Sullivan joined Kent Law School as a Lecturer in Law in January 2016. Prior to joining the School, he worked as a doctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. Gavin’s current research focuses on the politics of global security law. He uses socio-legal and ethnographic methods to examine security techniques and problems of transnational governance. Gavin is especially interested in understanding how law changes when trying to counter unknown future threats and how different materials, forms of expertise, governance technologies and knowledge practices help create what law is.

Recent publications include:

Gavin is a practising solicitor with a background in public law and human rights litigation, at the domestic and international level. He has represented clients in proceedings before the High Court and Court of Appeal, the European Court of Human Rights and before thew Ombudsperson of the UN Security Council. Gavin previously directed the Counterterrorism Program at the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin (Germany) and has worked as a litigator with Leigh Day & Co (London), Treasury Solicitors (London) and Public Interest Lawyers (Birmingham).  He has advised peacebuilding organisations working in Somalia on the impact of counterterrorism measures on their work. He currently coordinates the Transnational Listing Project – a global law clinic providing pro bono legal representation to people targeted by security lists worldwide.

Gavin is an Associate Researcher with the Centre for the Politics of Transnational Law at VU University (the Netherlands); an alumni of the Transnational Law Summer Institute (TLSI) at Kings College (London) and an editor of the journal Transnational Legal Theory. He is currently preparing a monograph on UN sanctions against Al Qaeda and ISIL – entitled The Law of the List – for publication with Cambridge University Press in 2019.

Staff Profile

https://www.kent.ac.uk/law/people/academic/Sullivan,_Gavin.html

Last updated 27th October 2020