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Professor Kubo Mačák

Professor of International Law

5607

01392 725607

Amory 104F

Kubo Mačák is Professor of International Law at the Law School and a member of the Exeter Centre for International Law. He was appointed as a Lecturer in 2013, Senior Lecturer in 2016, Associate Professor in 2019, and Professor in 2023. He also led the mooting programme at Exeter Law School from 2013 to 2016. Between 2019 and 2023, he served as Legal Adviser at the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva.

Kubo’s research interests span general international law, international humanitarian law, and the law of cyber security. He is the author of Internationalized Armed Conflicts in International Law (Oxford University Press 2018). His work has been published in journals including the International Review of the Red Cross, the Journal of Conflict and Security Law, the Leiden Journal of International Law, and the Chinese Journal of International Law.

Kubo holds the degrees of DPhil, MPhil, and MJur from the University of Oxford (Somerville College), and an undergraduate degree in law from Charles University in Prague. In 2012, he was awarded the Diploma of the Hague Academy of International Law.

Kubo has been a Europaeum visiting researcher at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies and the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva; a Research Fellow of the Minerva Center for the Rule of Law under Extreme Conditions at the University of Haifa, Israel; a Gastwissenschaftler (visiting scholar) at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany; and a Visiting Fellow of The Hague Program for Cyber Norms at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands.

He has worked at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague and at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania. He has also served as a law clerk to the President of the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic. He is currently acting as the General Editor of the Cyber Law Toolkit.

For more information and to access the full text of Kubo's publications, please visit his personal website: www.kubomacak.org.

Research group links

Research interests

My research interests fall into three broad areas: 

  1. General international law. My focus is on the law of State responsibility, interactions between general international law and specialized regimes, and international civil procedure. I have recently completed a detailed commentary on the core procedural provision (Article 43) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice for the commentary edited by Professors Christian Tams and Andreas Zimmermann (Oxford University Press 2019). I am also conducting research into the law of State responsibility in military space operations within the ongoing Woomera Manual on the International Law of Military Space Operations project.
  2. Law of armed conflict. My focus is on questions of conflict qualification, lethal targeting, provision of humanitarian assistance in time of armed conflict, and the overlap between the law of armed conflict and other areas of international law. My recent monograph on Internationalized Armed Conflicts in International Law (published by OUP in 2018) provides the first comprehensive analysis of factors that transform a non-international armed conflict into an international armed conflict. I have also recently co-edited a special issue for the Journal of Conflict and Security Law with Prof. Lawrence Hill-Cawthorne on The Relationship between International Humanitarian Law and General International Law.
  3. International cyber law. My focus is on questions of cyber warfare, legal aspects of attribution of cyber operations, and cyberspace governance. I am currently acting as the General Editor of the Cyber Law Toolkit, which is the product of a multistakeholder ESRC-funded project on International Cyber Law in Practice run in collaboration with the NATO Co-operative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence and the Czech National Cyber and Information Security Agency. Together with Prof. Zhixiong Huang, I am also exploring the differences and overlaps between Chinese and Western approaches to the rule of law in cyberspace, with some of our findings having recently been published in the Chinese Journal of International Law.

I welcome doctoral proposals from qualified and motivated students within any of these three broad areas. Although any application will have to go through the formal university procedure, please feel free to approach me informally to discuss your idea prior to submitting the application.

Research supervision

I welcome approaches from prospective doctoral students concerning research projects in public international law. I am particularly interested in supervising projects on international humanitarian law, international cyber law, and the law of international responsibility, but I am happy to consider proposals on other topics, as well. Although any application will have to go through the formal university procedure, please feel free to approach me informally to discuss your idea prior to submitting the application.

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