Profile
Lys Kulamadayil profile

Lys Kulamadayil

SNSF Ambizione Fellow
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Spoken languages
English, German, Malayalam, French

Lys Kulamadayil is a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Fellow and principal investigator of the four-year research project Law by Colour Code: Locating Race and Racism in International Law based at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy and the International Law Department. Her research interests span extractivism, mineral resource governance, the legal regulation of food-, and ecosystems, human rights, economic law, legal theory and philosophy, as well as international law’s role in social hierarchies, particularly with regard to racism and ableism. She has published widely on these subjects in peer-reviewed journals, including the London Review of International Law, the Leiden Journal of International Law, Transnational Legal Theory, and the Journal of the History of International Law. She is also the author of the monograph The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law.

 

Prior to joining, she was a Senior Research Fellow at Helmut-Schmidt University conducted research as an SNSF early-postdoc mobility scholar at the Amsterdam Center for International Law and served in the humanitarian affairs division of the German Federal Foreign Office. She served as research advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food (2022, 2025-26). She completed visiting fellowships at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna and Harvard Law School and the University of Cambridge. Dr Kulamadayil holds an LL.B. jointly awarded by the Universities of Bremen, Oldenburg, and Groningen, an LL.M. from LSE, and a PhD in International Law from the Geneva Graduate Institute.

 

Selected Publications 

Books

  • Kulamadayil, Lys, Tor Krever, and Praggya Surana, eds. Social Hierarchies in Catastrophic Times: International Law, Critique, and Structural Change. Oxford: Hart Publishing, forthcoming
  • Kulamadayil, Lys. The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law. Hart Publishing, 2025.

Peer-reviewed articles and essays

Book Reviews

  • Miriam Bak Mckenna ‘Cover Reckoning with Empire: Self-Determination in International Law’, Asian Journal of International Law, 14(1) 2024
  • Marie Petersmann ‘When Environmental Protection and Human Rights Collide’, Transnational Environmental Law 12(2) (2022)
  • Mbenguem, Makane, and Jean D'Aspremont, eds. Crisis Narratives in International Law. Leiden: Brill, 2022 & Bandopadhyay, Saptarishi. All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State. Oxford University Press, 2022, Asian Journal of International Law, 12(2) 2022.
  • Eliana Cusato ‘The Ecology of War and Peace: Marginalising Slow and Structural Violence in International Law’, Asian Journal of International Law 12(1) (2022), 197–98.

 

SELECTED GREY LITERATURE PUBLICATIONS AND POLICY WORK

Blog Posts News Media, Policy Work

  • On ‘Taking Back Venezuelan Oil’: What Is New about the Trump Administration’s Imperial Expansion?, Völkerrechtsblog (2026)
  • Die globale Politik gegen Hungersnöte und das Völkerrecht. Deutsches Institut für Menschenrechte (2024)
  • Die Reproduktion Sozialer Hierarchien Im Deutschen Jurastudium, Verfassungsblog, (2024)
  • Germany: an elegy for principled humanitarianism, Social Europe, (2024)
  • Germany’s Reliance on Its Healthcare ‘Brown Angels’ Social Europe, (2022)
  • Self-Reflexivity on the Judicial Bench, Völkerrechtsblog (2021)
  • The Unexplored Nexus between Money-Laundering and Humanitarian Needs, The Global (2020)
  • Informed Dissent or Misinformed Rebellion? Making Sense of India’s Farmer Protests, Völkerrechtsblog, (2021)
  • Have You Met Dan Gertler?, Social Europe, (2021)
  • Die Diplomatie und das deutsche Volk, taz blogs, (2020)

Podcasts

  • The Pathology of Plenty hosted by Raghavi Viswanath, New Books Network (2026)
  • with Or Barak Oil / Coal hosted by Marie Petersmann and Dimitri Van Den Meerssche, Underworlds - Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering (2024).
  • UN-Behindertenrechtskonvention: Ableismus und Recht(-swissenschaft) hosted by Erik Tuchtfeld, Isabel Lischewski and Jan-Henrik Hinselmann, Völkerrechtsblog (2023)
  • with Peer Schouten, Godefroid Muzalia Kihangu, and Bienvenu Mukungilwa The logics of conflict in the DRC: from the mineral to the checkpoint economy hosted by Luke Cooper and Azaria Morgan, LSE Conflict Zones (2021)

 

Selected (Co-)Organised conferences and lecture series

 

Selection of Third-Party Funded Research Projects

  • Lands for the Taking: The Neo-Imperial State and the Public Private Divide from a Legal Perspective, Swiss National Science Foundation, Scientific Exchanges, Grant No. 238234
  • The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law, Swiss National Science Foundation, Open Access Book, Grant No. 232566
  • Law by Colour Code: Locating Race and Racism in International Law, Swiss National Science Foundation, Ambizione, Grant No. 216005
  • Depleted Fortunes: Law in a World of Exhaustible Natural Resources, Swiss National Science Foundation, Early-Post-Doc Mobility, Grant No. 181535

 

Teaching

  • The Political Economy of Natural Resources and International Law, post-graduate course, (6 ECTS), syllabus available here
  • Re-imagining International Law: From Critique to Praxis, post-graduate course, (6 ECTS)