Vicky Kapogianni

Dr. Kapogianni's research investigates how international legal frameworks — in trade, environmental governance, the law of the sea, and refugee protection — reproduce colonial structures of power through ostensibly neutral doctrinal and technical mechanisms, and how these structures can be contested and reimagined from postcolonial perspectives. Her work traces how historical injustices shape contemporary legal architectures and foregrounds the Global South — particularly the Caribbean and ocean spaces — as sites of legal innovation.

She has recently been awarded a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant SRG 2024 Round for her project titled ‘Reconceptualising the Marginalised Nexus between Genocide, the Ocean, and the Existing International Legal Mechanisms: The Case of the Caribbean,’ which explores how a reparatory justice framework, incorporating climate considerations, can provide decolonised nations with equal access to sustainable development opportunities.

Her monograph, Reimagining Refugee Law for the Climate-Stranded: Climate Change, Small Island Developing States, and the International Law of (Im)Mobility, is under contract with Brill, and she was awarded a University of Reading Research Fellowship in recognition of its significance. Her latest co-edited volume, Genocide and the Ocean: Law, History and Genocidal Realities Beyond Borders and Beneath Waves (Routledge, 2026), breaks new ground by examining the overlooked intersections of mass violence and maritime spaces across themes of colonialism, warfare, migration, and environmental destruction.

Her latest co-edited work, Genocide and the Ocean: Law, History and Genocidal Realities Beyond Borders and Beneath Waves, (Routledge, 2026), is an interdisciplinary volume that breaks new ground by examining the overlooked intersections of mass violence and maritime spaces across themes of colonialism, warfare, migration, and environmental destruction.

Dr. Kapogianni is co-author of ‘China’s Maritime Militias, Human Rights, and the Law of the Sea: Contested Norms in a Shifting International Legal Order,’ winner of the Aldo Leucci and Ortensio Degli Atti Award (4th edition, 2025), recognised by the Award Board for the depth of its legal analysis, methodological rigour, and original contribution to the evolving discourse on the Law of the Sea.