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Staff profile

Overview

Romain Chuffart

PhD

Affiliations
Affiliation
PhD in the Durham Law School

Biography

Romain is a current PhD candidate in law at Durham Law School within Durham University's Arctic Research Centre for Training and Interdisciplinary Collaboration (DurhamARCTIC). Romain holds a MA in Polar Law from the University of Akureyri, Iceland. He is a Research Associate at the Washington DC-based think tank The Arctic Institute. Between October 2018 and March 2019, Romain was also a Research Fellow at the Polar Cooperation Research Centre at Kobe University's Graduate School of International Cooperation Studies in Japan. His research interests include public international law, human rights and the rights of indigenous, international environmental law, and law of the sea. 

Current Research

Romain's research focuses on re-imagining principles and concepts of international environmental law (e.g. prevention, precaution, sustainability) to fit the evolving needs of human societies and the environment. On a theoretical level, this research aims at going beyond the traditional doctrinal approach of international environmental law and to offer a new perspective of jus gentium that focuses on long-term sustainability of humankind and the environment. On a more practical level, this research tries to answer the question of whether there is a need for an international treaty harmonizing domestic environmental impact assessments processes across Arctic States to include indigenous and human rights standards in light of the impact such harmonization could have on rapidly developing regions in the Arctic. 

 

Selected Publications

Verena Huppert and Romain Chuffart, 'Collaboration Across the Arctic: A Tool of Regionalization or Simple Pragmatism?' (2017) Arctic Yearbook, 151

Romain Chuffart, 'Speaking of Rights: Indigenous Linguistic Rights in the Arctic' (2018) 9 Yearbook of Polar Law, 3

Romain Chuffart and Andreas Raspotnik, 'The EU and its Arctic spirit: Solving Arctic climate change from home?' (2019) 18 European View 2, 156

Romain Chuffart and Akiho Shibata, ‘Editorial: International law for sustainability in Arctic resource development’ (2020) Polar Record (first view)

Supervisors

Dr. Anashri Pillay 
Dr. Henry Jones 
Dr. Philip Steinberg (Geography)