Gus Waschefort is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Law and Co-Director of Post-Graduate Tuition at the Human Rights Centre of the University of Essex. Prior to joining the University of Essex, he held academic appointments at the University of Pretoria, as lecturer, and the University of South Africa, as Associate Professor. Between 2011 and 2013 Gus was appointed as legal advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Professor Christof Heyns. Gus has also been a visiting researcher to the International Law Centre of the Swedish National Defence University, as well as the Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice, at New York University.

Gus’s primary research interests relate to contemporary challenges in the context of armed conflict in Africa, including working towards enhancing the level of participation from within Africa in the global discourse on the Law of Armed Conflict. With a background in photojournalism, Gus has extensive experience working within active conflict zones in Africa, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, South Sudan and Angola. Gus's key recent publications include:

International Law and Child Soldiers, Hart Publishing: Oxford (2015) (blind peer reviewed monograph, 254 pages);

‘Child Soldiers and Human Trafficking’ in Rijken, CRJJ. Piotrowicz, R. & Uhl, B. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Human Trafficking, Routledge (forthcoming, 2017);

‘Implications of Children’s Rights for Military Justice in the Context of Members of the Armed Forces Younger than the Age of Eighteen’ Journal of International Peacekeeping 21(5) (2016);

‘Africa and International Humanitarian Law: The more things change, the more they stay the same’ International Review of the Red Cross 902 (2017).