The Raoul Wallenberg Visiting Chair

The purpose of the project is to dynamically further develop, the guest professorship, the Raoul Wallenberg Visiting Chair of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law.

The Faculty of Law at Lund University and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, RWI, share the hosting of the guest professorship, which can be applied for by excellent and leading international researchers in international law, human rights and humanitarian law in line with Raoul Wallenberg's ethos and work.

The guest professorship - and the research environment, the early career researchers and the diversity of activities associated with it - aims to illuminate, research and secure a future for human rights in innovative ways. The aim is also to contribute to the development of a new generation of knowledgeable and innovative researchers, advocates and policy-makers in human rights.

The future of human rights is highlighted in three different research areas:

• Authoritarian trends and populism on the rise
• Challenges related to technological change, digitization and AI
• State of emergency and erosion of the rule of law

The project also aims at continued international visibility for, and societal impact on, the guest professorship, the research environment in international law, human rights and humanitarian law at the Law Faculty and RWI in Lund as well as Swedish research in this area.

The visiting professors are expected to develop a fruitful collaboration with colleagues at the Faculty of Law and RWI and act as mentors for a number of promising early career researchers.

The visiting professors will stimulate the development of new research projects on human rights in the future. Current research issues will be discussed at workshops and seminars in Lund, research results will be presented at international conferences and published in internationally leading journals and publishers.

The visiting professors will also – together with colleagues in Lund and international universities and organizations – organize a Lund Summer School on the Future of Human Rights for doctoral students, initiate an international network for early career researchers in international law, human rights and humanitarian law and participate in teaching in the master's program in international law and human rights and in postgraduate education.

Taken together, this offers unique opportunities to develop innovative research on human rights of the highest quality in an international and interdisciplinary context, as well as to create valuable synergies between research, policy development and capacity building for human rights.