Dr Mateja Peter joined the School of International Relations in September 2015. She is the Co-Director of the Centre for Global Law and Governance (with Dr Muireann O'Dwyer) and is a member of the Steering Committee of the Institute for Legal and Constitutional Research at St Andrews.

Dr Peter previously worked as a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI). She has also held post-doctoral fellowships at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), and the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies (IFS). She received her PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge in 2013.

Dr Peter researches global governance and international organisations, peace operations, peacemaking and peacebuilding, and the politics of international law. Theoretically, she works primarily within a constructivist IR tradition, but her work is interdisciplinary, drawing on international political theory, legal scholarship, and sociology. Her work employs archival research and fieldwork.

Dr Peter is currently working on a book on international authority in statebuilding. She is interested in how international missions tasked to administer states emerging out of civil wars establish their authority not just vis-à-vis the host state, but also their international underwriters. The book project focuses on the statebuilding mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1995-2015), with her previous publications exploring missions in Kosovo, Timor-Leste, and South Sudan.

She has also been examining how the changing global order and the rise of new actors (rising powers, regional organisations, and non-state actors) have been impacting conflict management practices and norms. This work intersects with Dr Peter’s policy engagement. She currently acts as a research lead on a multi-partner Global Fragmentation project, conducted by the PeaceRep consortium and funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). She previously provided research support for the work of the UN High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations. As a result, she is writing both academic (here and here) and policy publications (here, here and here).

Dr Peter also researches on the ethics of doing fieldwork in areas of international intervention.

Dr Peter welcomes inquiries from potential PhD students with research interests in the above areas.

Dr Peter convenes and teaches IR3022 International Relations and International Law.

She convenes and teaches IR4571 Conflict and Intervention in World Politics.

She also convenes and teaches LC5022 Aspects of International Law, a core module on an interdisciplinary MLitt in Legal and Constitutional Studies.

In addition to supervising undergraduate and MLitt dissertations, she also supervises individual directed readings for LC5026 Legal and Constitutional Studies students.