Simon Chesterman is Vice Dean and Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore, and Global Professor and Director of the New York University School of Law Singapore program. He is a recognized authority on international law, whose work has opened up new areas of research on conceptions of public authority, including the rules and institutions of global governance, state-building and post-conflict reconstruction, and the changing role of intelligence agencies.
Chesterman is the author or editor of twelve books. His doctoral thesis, which he completed at Magdalen College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, won the 2000 Dasturzada Dr Jal Pavry Memorial Prize for the best thesis in international relations and was later published by Oxford University Press as Just War or Just Peace? Humanitarian Intervention and International Law. It was awarded an American Society of International Law Certificate of Merit.
His second major book was You, The People: The United Nations, Transitional Administration, and State-Building (Oxford University Press, 2004), which was praised by Brian Urquhart in the New York Review of Books as being "an original study of how new institutions can be created in such war-damaged countries as Bosnia, Cambodia, and East Timor. [T]he weight of the subject and the depth of the research are supported by wit, candor, brevity, and analytical writing of a very high order. Although the occupation of Iraq is just one of many cases that Chesterman considers, his book provides, among other things, a guide to the problems of transitional occupation that is extraordinarily relevant to America's current difficulties." Human Rights Quarterly stated that "This single authored work speaks with the authority of a major global commission study and offers analyses and prescriptions with important implications for human rights scholars and practitioners."
recently, Chesterman has focused his writing on the regulation and oversight of intelligence services, including a monograph published by Australia’s Lowy Institute for International Policy. In an opinion piece published in the global edition of the New York Times in November 2009, he argued for limits to the outsourcing of intelligence activities to private contractors - a problem most prominent in the U.S. reliance on Xe Services, the corporate reincarnation of Blackwater.
Oxford University Press has announced that Chesterman’s next book is entitled One Nation Under Surveillance: A New Social Contract to Defend Freedom Without Sacrificing Liberty. To be published in February 2011, it examines what links ... if any ... should be placed on a government's efforts to spy on its citizens in the name of national security. Advance praise includes a quote from former CIA Inspector-General Frederick Hitz: "This book squarely faces the taboo subject of domestic privacy in an era of Islamist terrorism. Our enemies are not nation-states, so the targets of the intelligence services seeking to pre-empt terrorist attacks must be individuals. The casualty will be individual privacy. People will struggle against heightened surveillance, Chesterman notes, 'but the war will be lost.'"
Other publications have focused on the United Nations, particularly the role of its Secretary-General, and the rise and regulation of private military and security companies.
Chesterman is an editor of the Asian Journal of International Law, published from 2011 by Cambridge University Press and a co-editor of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding. He is on the editorial boards of various other leading journals, such as Global Governance, Security Dialogue, and The Hague Journal on the Rule of Law.
Chesterman has been author or co-author of various reports for the United Nations, governments, and private bodies. Notable examples include:
“The UN Security Council and the Rule of Law”, arguing for greater accountability and circulated as a document of the United Nations in all UN languages;
“Assessment of Implementation of Articles 3 and 4 of the Ethical Guidelines for the Government Pension Fund - Global”, reviewing the ethical investment strategy of Norway's sovereign wealth fund and co-authored with the Albright Group founded by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright;
“Asia’s Role in Global Governance”, a report of the World Economic Forum's Global Redesign Initiative co-authored with Kishore Mahbubani.
Chesterman’s other awards include the Supreme Court Prize (for the study of law in the Australian state of Victoria), a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center, and a 2010 Young Researcher Award at the National University of Singapore.
