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Afonso Seixas-Nunes, SJ

Afonso Seixas-Nunes, SJ

Senior Fellow

Afonso was born in Porto, Portugal, in 1973. He joined the Portuguese Province of the Society of (Jesuits) in 1998, after he graduated in Law by the Portuguese Catholic University (Porto), and was ordained priest in 2010. Afonso, as a Jesuit, did his degree in Philosophy by the Portuguese Catholic University (Braga) for which he was awarded the Prize Pe Vitorio de Sousa Alves, and he has a degree in Theology by the Pontificia Universita Gregoriana, Italy). After his theological studies, Afonso went to London and has a Master’s in International Law and Human Rights by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE -UK). In early 2019, Afonso completed his doctoral thesis in International Humanitarian Law at the School of Law of the University of Essex (UK), entitled The Legitimacy and Accountability for the Deployment of Autonomous Weapon System under International Humanitarian Law, published by CUP (2022).

In September 2018, Afonso became a post-doc research fellow of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC – University of Oxford) directed by Professor Dapo Akande at the Blavatnik School of Government. In August 2021, Afonso joined Saint Louis University School of Law as an Associate Professor Public International Law and Laws of Armed Conflict.

Research Interests and Publications

Afonso’s research has focused problems of compatibility between emerging technologies and International Law and International Humanitarian Law in particular. After the publication of his book Legitimacy and Accountability for the Deployment of Autonomous Weapon System under International Humanitarian Law, CUP (2022), Afonso has been developing, researching and publishing on new forms of individual accountability for the deployment of AWS. For that matter he has been invited by the Department of Defense of States (2025: Portuguese Ministry of Defense; Advisor for establishing the new Center for Security and Humanitarian Law (CSHL) at Aarhus University, Denmark; 2024 invited by the Dutch Ministry of Defense for the Conference of Experts on AWS; 2023 invited by Israel to the IDF MAG 4thLOAC Conference.

Due to his multidisciplinary approach, Afonso has been invited by ERCIM - European Research Consortium for Information and Mathematics – being the keynote speaker of the 2025 Conference at the University of Rennes (France). In 2022 and 2024, respectively, he was responsible for organizing the two symposia at the University of Saint Louis School of Law (The Legitimacy and Legality of War: From Philosophical Foundations to Emerging Problems; and Contemporary Challenges in International Humanitarian Law: Is there hope for the International order?) gathering at Saint Louis University world renowned scholars for different areas, publishing in the SLU Law Journal.

In 2024, Afonso was one of the speakers at ASIL – The Geneva Conventions at 75 & the Future of International Humanitarian Law -  and since 2023 has been a guest speaker at the Schools of Law at the University of Reading; University of Westminster; University of Coimbra; University of Lisbon; University of Seville (Loyola); University of Texas-Tec and University of Indiana (Bloomington School of Law).