Mark Drumbl to Deliver Distinguished British Academy Lecture The lecture series features the most outstanding academics from the United Kingdom and beyond.

By Law Communications
April 17, 2026

Mark Drumbl, the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor of Law and Director of the Transnational Law Institute at Washington and Lee University, will deliver the 2026 British Academy Maccabaean Lecture in Jurisprudence this month at Queen’s University in Belfast. The event is the British Academy’s flagship lecture series and features the most outstanding academics from the United Kingdom and beyond. Past speakers include such luminaries as Cass Sunstein, William Twining, Guido Calabresi, and Ronald Dworkin.

The title of Drumbl’s lecture is “Child Soldiers: Coming of Age in Atrocity.” International law defines children as persons under 18 and affirms their entitlement to special protection. Yet significant numbers of young people around the world continue to be drawn into armed conflict and are designated as child soldiers, a term shaped by the prevalent assumption that they are solely passive victims.

“Despite sustained international attention, efforts to end the recruitment and use of children in hostilities have struggled to achieve lasting success, and in some settings the practice is even intensifying,” says Drumbl. “This persistence highlights the need for reimagined approaches that are more nuanced, empirically grounded, and contextual.”

In his lecture, Drumbl investigates how dominant portrayals may obscure the complex pressures, coercive environments, and constrained choices that shape children’s trajectories into armed groups and considers how a more refined understanding might strengthen prevention, reintegration, and justice processes for the harms child soldiers endure and at times bring upon others. The lecture further examines how children become implicated in other forms of collective violence, including criminal and violent extremist organizations, and how contemporary conflict also unfolds in digital domains and in the context of climate disruption and public health crises.

Professor Drumbl is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor and Director of the Transnational Law Institute at W&L. His research and teaching interests include public international law, global environmental governance, international criminal law, post-conflict justice, and transnational legal process. His work has been relied upon by national and international courts; he has served as a defense lawyer in Rwandan genocide trials; co-authored an amicus brief to the International Criminal Court in the Ongwen case; and has been an expert in litigation including on international terrorism, with the UN in matters involving child soldiers, and with the UN Human Rights Council in the drafting of a global convention to criminalize racist hate speech.

His books include Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law (Cambridge 2007), Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy (Oxford 2012), and Informers Up Close: Stories from Communist Prague (Oxford 2024, with Barbora Holá); and co-edited volumes Research Handbook of Child Soldiers (Elgar 2019, with Jastine Barrett),  Sights, Sounds, and Sensibilities of Atrocity Prosecutions (Brill 2024, with Caroline Fournet), Children and Violence (Routledge 2024, with Christelle Molima and Mohamed Kamara et al), and The Character of International Law (Bloomsbury, 2025, with Emma Breeze and Gerry Simpson).

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