- Email:
- tiwaters@indiana.edu
- Phone:
- (812) 856-2748
- Location:
- Baier Hall 272
Education
- UCLA B.A. 1989
- Columbia University M.I.A 1998
- Harvard Law School (cum laude) J.D. 1999
Background
- Humboldt Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute (2012-13)
- Visiting Fellow and Visiting Scholar, Harvard Law School (2002-2005)
- International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (1999-2000)
- Peace Corps Volunteer, Hungary (1991-1994)
Biography
Timothy William Waters writes and teaches on the laws of war, international criminal law, secession, and changes in states’ borders.
He is the author of Boxing Pandora: Rethinking Borders, States, and Secession in a Democratic World (Yale 2020) and editor of The Milosevic Trial: An Autopsy (Oxford 2013). He is a frequent contributor to policy debate on international law and politics. He has published extensively in leading journals of international law and international relations, including at Yale, Harvard, NYU, Virginia, Duke, Stanford, and George Washington. His op-eds on Iraq, Ukraine, the Balkans, and international justice, as well as gun rights and public discourse in America, have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Völkerrechtsblog, Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy.
A graduate of UCLA, Columbia, and Harvard, he has held fellowships at Harvard Law School, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and visited at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. Beside teaching at Indiana, he has visited at Boston University, the University of Mississippi, Bard College, and Central European University in Budapest.
Prior to becoming an academic, Waters worked as a consultant on legal system reform for the Open Society Institute, and on ethnic discrimination for Human Rights Watch; as a researcher at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia; as a human rights officer in Bosnia for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe; and as a Peace Corps volunteer in Hungary where he helped open a high school for Roma/Gypsies and founded a nationwide English-language drama festival.
In The Media
- Wrote "How to Move Borders Without a War," The Atlantic ( 10-20-2022 )
- Wrote "We wanted to play Bunny Kingdom. Gen Con wanted to talk about abortion.," Washington Post ( 08-21-2022 )
- Wrote an op-ed "Why not try a different path to defend Ukraine?," The Hill ( 02-10-2022 )
- Interviewed in "Timothy William Waters: 'La independència és la solució, no el problema'," VilaWeb ( 01-16-2022 )
- Wrote an op-ed titled "To support Hong Kong's freedom, remember America's revolution," The Hill ( 07-02-2020 )
Selected Works
- BOXING PANDORA: RETHINKING BORDERS, STATES, AND SECESSION IN A DEMOCRATIC WORLD New Haven: Yale U. Press, 2020.
- The Persecution of Stones: War Crimes, Law's Autonomy and the Co-optation of Cultural Heritage, 20 CHICAGO JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 62 (2019).
- Constructing Citizenship through War in the Human Rights Era, 11 HUMAN RIGHTS 85 (2017).
- Hidden Legitimacy: Crafting Judicial Narratives in the Shadow of Secrecy at a War Crimes Tribunal: A Speculation.in THE LEGITIMACY OF INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL TRIBUNALS (N. Hayashi and C.M. Baillet, Eds.). New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
- For Freedom Alone: Secession after the Scottish Referendum,44 NATIONALITIES PAPERS 124 (2016)
- The Spear Point and the Ground Beneath: Territorial Constraints on the Logic of Responsibility to Protect, 30 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 314 (2016).
- THE MILOŠEVIĆ TRIAL: AN AUTOPSY(Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
- Discursive Democracy and the Challenge of State Building in Divided Societies: Reckoning with Symbolic Capital in Bosnia and Herzegovina (with Robert L. Ivie), 38 NATIONALITIES PAPERS 449 (2010).
- A Kind of Judgment: Searching for Judicial Narratives after Death 42 GEORGE WASHINGTON INTERNATIONAL LAW REVIEW 279 (2010).
- "The Momentous Gravity of the State of Things Now Obtaining": Annoying Westphalian Objections to the Idea of Global Governance, 16 INDIANA JOURNAL OF GLOBAL LEGAL STUDIES 25 (2009).
- Assuming Bosnia: Taking the Polity Seriously in Ethnically Divided Societies, in DECONSTRUCTING THE RECONSTRUCTION: HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE RULE OF LAW IN POSTWAR BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA (Dina Francesca Haynes, Ed.). Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008.
Areas of Expertise
- International law