Welcome: Lars Janssen

Lars Janssen MA

PhD-Candidate at Utrecht University

SHN welcomes a new PhD candidate, Lars Janssen. In this article he introduces himself and talks about the research he is working on.

Hello everyone! I am delighted to join the SHN as a member. At the moment, I stand at the start of my four-year PhD research project. My project looks at the legal practices that emerged between Latin America and Europe throughout the nineteenth century. During this period, there were a lot of questions about what to do when international property in Latin America was lost or damaged due to wars or revolutions. This led to the practice of setting up Mixed Claims Commissions – ad hoc bodies to adjudicate private claims by foreign nationals to states. For European states, the commissions became a primary tool to deal with their insecurities in Latin America. My research will focus on the European imperial legal visions and cooperation that shaped this nineteenth century legal order in Latin America.

Regarding my academic background, I started doing a Bachelor in International Relations at Leiden University. Back then, I still had the idea of one day becoming a musician, and studying was more of a side project. Only towards the end of the programme did I find something that truly interested me, historical IR. I started reading about international order, Bull, Keene, and many others. The historical complexities, the abstract theories, it confused me, and I loved it. It led me to continue with the master programme International Relations in Historical Perspective at Utrecht University.

Around this point, I also started working as a guide at the Peace Palace, and here I found the inspiration that would send me down the road towards my current research. Walking through this place of peace and law, with its halls of marble and artworks, I often found myself in front of one particular bust, that of the Brazilian lawyer Rui Barbosa. The story behind his work as a delegate at the Second Hague Peace Conference of 1907 is wild, and became the topic of my Master thesis. But more importantly, it introduced me to the main themes of my current research: legal order, and nineteenth century Latin America.

In the Security History Network, Latin America has been a bit of a blind spot. While I understand that not everyone might share my enthusiasm for Brazilian samba or Argentinian mate, the region also offers valuable insights into nineteenth century security efforts, especially in terms of the legal dimension. So I hope to draw a bit more attention to the Latin American region.