Arts@work profile — professor nehal bhuta

Professor Nehal Bhuta had a vibrant and varied education that took him from Melbourne to New York.

Prof Bhuta never started out intending an academic career as his initial interest was in human rights but was later inspired by incomplete accounts of law and policy and wanted to fill the gaps by contributing to academia.

He is currently working as a Professor of Public International Law at Edinburgh Law School at the University of Edinburgh.

Read more about Prof Bhuta’s career journey below.

What did you study and what inspired you to pursue this path?

At the University of Melbourne, I studied a Bachelor of Law and a Bachelor of Arts, and I was always interested in International Law and the kinds of careers that went with that. I took subjects in Japanese language, modern history, philosophy, social theory and international politics. All of those in many ways helped shape my own interests. One of the really influential courses for me was a course on classical social theory run by a social theorist who had studied with quite a famous philosopher called Agnes Heller. This was a course about modern society – so we looked at classical texts: Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Nietzsche, which are in many ways the foundation of modern social scientific thought. That particular course left a strong impression on me because it combined philosophical methods with historical knowledge to try to understand something about the present in society.

I ended up doing my postgraduate studies at the New School for Social Research in New York, which is a social science graduate faculty that has a strong historical connection with these forms of critical social thought. It’s a place you can go to continue these sorts of studies. There I studied with a range of really interesting scholars working in political thought, social theory. That was a natural extension of the work I had done and that inspired me when I was studying in Melbourne.

What is your current occupation?

I am a Professor of Public International Law at the University of Edinburgh, having previously been a law professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and before that in New York and Toronto. I teach international law generally but also specialized courses in the theory of international law, in human rights law, and in the history of ideas.

I had a relatively accidental path into academia. When I left Australia, I had done two years in different kinds of legal practice: one with a federal judge in Melbourne and one at a commercial form for my articles. At that point, I was interested in being a particular kind of lawyer, working in international law in the human rights field.

After 3-4 years working on questions of transitional justice and human rights, it was clear to me as an actor in these worlds of law and policy that all practise is shaped by a lot of incomplete accounts of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. The success of a given idea doesn’t reflect necessarily its coherence or its accuracy. There always has to be room for critical self-understanding and critical reflection on what we do and how we do it and the kinds of deeper theories or systems of thought that shape what seems right or wrong or natural or inevitable to us. From that perspective, even as an actor, it was clear that there was more scope for thinking and more critical reflection.

One of the unfortunate dimensions of the pressure on the humanities is the sense that somehow the humanities have to have immediate outputs that we can apply right now in the world. We lose sight of what makes them significant, which is that they maintain this certain possibility of thought, which, if we lost, would leave us less able to learn from our experiences. As Immanuel Kant said there’s nothing as practical as a good theory.

What aspects of your role do you enjoy the most?

The role that I have now is partly pursuing my own research, partly trying to teach [students] what it means to be a competent legal thinker – whether that’s as a practising lawyer or something else. And hopefully providing them with some basis on which to understand different perspectives on the role of law and lawyers. That’s very enjoyable to me – it’s challenging and sometimes frustrating but it’s also rewarding to see undergraduate students perhaps begin to understand the significance and the power of the kind of knowledge that they can develop.

Were there any co-curricular activities you found particularly valuable?

I came to my academic interests through an engagement with contemporary political problems. My interest in transitional justice and human rights came from my involvement as an activist in relation to the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which ended around 1999 - when I was finishing my law degree. That also brought me into contact with a range of other legal issues such as asylum seeker and refugee determination, which I then ended up doing quite a lot of work on as an activist. [It] was a really important part of my life outside of class. I was politically active and made many friends and connections through that.

How do you think your humanities education has shaped you personally and professionally?

All of these things you read do shape you – they shape your idea of who you are, where you come from, how to situate your place within a wider structure of forces and influences. Particular philosophers were always inspiring and interesting. When you engage in this sort of humanistic study seriously, it’s always motivated by some sort of relationship between you and the world.

What career advice would you give to current students or recent graduates?

It’s a challenging time to be both an undergraduate and a postgraduate student in humanities, but first and foremost people need to appreciate the value of learning in a way in which you can have an enormous impact either in the short term or long term. To understand themselves as participating in a conversation that is a pretty long one in human history. That in itself is important.

I think pursuing an academic career in the humanities is a valuable one.

For those who don’t see themselves as academics, I think it’s important to remember that a very high-quality training and an education in the humanities can allow you to be inspired by the work other people do. It can help you shape the direction you want to go in. In some ways, there’s an element of adventurism that you have to embrace if you’re going to follow ideas in the hope that they lead you to a career and a life project that you want to keep pursuing – but it’s really hard to know where they will take you.

In some sense, you have to be practical and look for real opportunities and chase them. But also, not to be completely rigid about where things will take you.

Keep an eye out for the kinds of places where your skills are useful, even if people don’t necessarily see them. Often even something as commercial as business consulting can value the kind of skills that someone trained in philosophy or even history can bring in terms of analysis, diagnosis, critical reflection.

Finally, what book have you recently read that truly captured your attention?