Alicja Polakiewicz

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Alicja Polakiewicz is a doctoral candidate and research associate at the Institute of Political Science (professorship of Prof Dr Katrin Kinzelbach). She researches the politics of national-level international criminal law enforcement, primarily via the universality principle, in Germany. She is an editor for the Völkerrechtsblog and a non-resident fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi). Her PhD research is funded by the Heinrich-Böll foundation.

In the course of her PhD, Alicja spent a semester at the University of California Berkeley as a visiting student researcher. In 2022, her essay “Tech gegen Taten” won the Sylke Tempel Essay Prize. Previously, she studied social sciences with a focus on European and international law at Sciences Po Paris and, as part of her bachelor’s degree, spent a year at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. There, Alicja focussed on the politics and cultures of Southeast Asia. She graduated with an LLM in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice (with distinction) from the University of Edinburgh, where she was awarded the T.B Smith prize for most distinguished scholar. She was editor-in-chief of Contemporary Challenges: The Global Crime, Justice and Security Journal. Earlier, Alicja was a student director for STAND: the Student-Led Movement to End Mass Atrocities and completed a European voluntary service with Aegis Trust, an international non-governmental organisation in the field of genocide prevention. Her undergraduate and postgraduate studies as well as her pre-doc were funded by the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes.