Dr Anna Hood is a lecturer at the University of Auckland. Her academic research focuses primarily on public international law and security issues. She also has a keen interest in how international law is used, understood and portrayed in New Zealand, Australia and the South Pacific.

Her presentation: "The Securitization of Article 39 of the UN Charter" to the 2015 New and Emerging Scholars Symposium centers on her current research.

Constructing threats to peace and security

Anna’s current research project is focusing on understanding how threats to international peace and security are constructed by the international community, and in particular the UN Security Council. Over the course of its life, the UN Security Council has greatly expanded the notion of ‘a threat to international peace and security’.

Traditionally a threat to the peace was understood to refer to the existence of an international armed conflict but over the decades states have increasingly conceived of the concept in ways that are so broad that the term is at risk of becoming devoid of meaning.

Simply concluding, however, that the content of ‘a threat to the peace’ is becoming an empty shell is rather simplistic and unsatisfactory. It may be the case that the Council is eroding the substantive limits of the concept but this does not explain why the Council comes to see certain issues as threats to the peace and not others.

By examining Security Council debates over the last 70 years she hopes to shed light on the rhetoric that states use to construct threats, the role that certain individuals and states have played in constructing threats, and the influence that contextual factors, precedent and other matters have had on the construction of threats.

Qualifications

Anna has a BA/LLB from the University of Melbourne, an LLM (International Legal Studies) from NYU and a PhD from the University of Melbourne.

Contact

Anna Hood

Email: a.hood@auckland.ac.nz