An international law scholar, Dr Ioana Cismas teaches, researches and provides legal and policy advice in public international law, human rights law, international humanitarian law, law and religion, and transitional justice. Ioana is the Co-Director of the Centre for Applied Human Rights and a Professor at the York Law School. 

 

Ioana’s research is applied, interdisciplinary, co-produced with practitioners and persons with lived experience of conflict and neglected diseases, and geared towards impact generation. Her work has attracted substantial research grants from the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Swiss Network of International Studies, and several non-governmental organisations and charities. 

 

One strand of Ioana’s research focuses on norms compliance generation in armed conflict. She leads the FCDO-funded Beyond Compliance Consortium. This programme of work seeks to develop the empirical evidence base and a contextualisable theoretical framework on how compliance + restraint by armed actors can prevent, reduce and respond to need + harm caused by war and contribute to a protective environment. She has set up the Generating Respect Hub,a knowledge exchange platform that brings together academic researchers, humanitarian and human rights practitioners, and civilian groups engaged in self-protection to co-produce creative strategies for generating respect in armed conflict. One such strategy is the humanitarian engagement with religious leaders, explored in depth in the ESRC-funded Generating Respect Project.

 

A second strand of Ioana’s research and impact work concerns noma. Involved in the framing of noma as a human rights issue and neglected disease since 2009, Ioana co-led the SNIS-funded project Noma, The Neglected Disease. An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Its Realities, Burden, and Framing (the Noma Project) and The Politics of Disease Framing: Overcoming and Surviving Neglect.

 

Prior to joining York, Ioana lectured at Stirling Law School (2015-2017), was a scholar-in-residence at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law (2014), and a research fellow at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights (2009-2013). At the Geneva Academy, she set up and coordinated the Law Clinic on Transitional Justice. In 2023, she was a Distinguished Fellow at Georgetown Law’s Human Rights Institute.

Ioana consults for international, non - and governmental organisations. In 2013, she served as consultant to the UN Special Rapporteur on transitional justice at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. From 2009-2012, she was legal advisor to a member of the Advisory Committee of the UN Human Rights Council.

Ioana holds a PhD in International Law (summa cum laude) from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.