Lara Montesinos Coleman

Lara Montesinos Coleman is Professor of International Law, Ethics and Political Economy in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex, where she has been a faculty member since 2012 after previously holding a lectureship at Durham University. She served as Director of the Centre for Global Political Economy from 2021-2024 and is currently Director of Equality Diversity and Inclusion for the School of Global Studies. She is also a founding member of the Lark and Blume Library collective in Brighton.

Her educational background includes:

• BA (Hons) Philosophy and Theology, University of Oxford (2001)
• MSc International Relations, University of Bristol (2003)
• MRes Research Methods, University of Bristol (2005)
• PhD in Politics, University of Bristol (2011)

Coleman's research spans political philosophy, critical legal studies, and international relations with a transdisciplinary approach that crosses philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and political economy. Her work focuses on human rights, anti-colonial struggles, and corporate accountability, particularly examining how human rights frameworks interact with corporate power and colonial legacies. Her ethnographically-infused scholarship draws on long-term engagement with peasant, worker, Indigenous, and Black movements in Colombia, analyzing concepts of 'the human' at the intersection of capitalism and colonialism. She has developed the concept of 'insurgent humanism' as a critical framework for understanding rights struggles.

Her publications reveal a consistent trajectory examining the relationship between law, ethics, and resistance, with increasing focus on extractive industries, genocide reparations, and energy transition. Her 2024 book 'Struggles for the Human: Violent Legality and the Politics of Rights' (Duke University Press), shortlisted for the 2025 Susan Strange Best Book Prize, represents a significant theoretical contribution that reorients human rights debates as vocabularies of opposition to violences rooted in capitalism and colonialism.

Her scholarly recognition includes:

• Shortlisted for the 2025 Susan Strange Best Book Prize
• Independent Social Research Foundation Early Career Fellowship (2014-2016)

Coleman actively supervises PhD students across human rights and international relations, with current supervisees including Paul Reiman (Human Rights), Guy Edwards (International Relations), and Samuel Rogers (Human Rights). She has secured significant research funding, including an ISRF grant for 'Discipline, Dissent and Dispossession.' Her teaching focuses on the MA in Human Rights program, where she convenes 'Human Rights in International Relations,' emphasizing engagement with real-life struggles and theoretical debates. She is also developing a collaborative project rethinking reparation for genocide linked to energy supply chains and working on a new book 'Insurgent Humanism: Radical Ethics for an Inhuman World.'

Through the Lark and Blume Library collective and collaborations with the Centre for Global Political Economy and Centre for Rights, Reparations and Anti-Colonial Justice, she has created spaces for community engagement around structural racism, climate breakdown, energy transition, and political protest.