Maxwin Paul Rayen is a PhD researcher in War Studies
His scholarship brings genocide studies into conversation with strategic studies and public international law. Alongside his doctoral research at King’s College London, he teaches international law and works with non-profit organisations on questions of international accountability.
He completed a five-year BA LL.B. (Hons.) at National Law University Odisha, where he studied law alongside political science, sociology, and economics. He later earned an LL.M. in International Human Rights Law from Lund University through a programme offered in partnership with the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law.
Research
Maxwin Paul Rayen’s research lies at the intersection of genocide studies, strategic studies, and public international law. It examines how counterinsurgency, often justified in the language of civilian protection and state restoration, can expand beyond the suppression of insurgent organisations and turn toward the governance, degradation, and, at times, destruction of civilian populations. With a primary focus on Sri Lanka and comparative interests in other sites of mass violence, his work traces how coercive focus shifts from insurgent capabilities to the wider social world in which insurgency is embedded, and how targeting moves from selective violence to area-based and categorical forms. More broadly, he is concerned with how genocide is organised, justified, and denied.
Publications & Writing
Military Governance in Post-War Sri Lanka: Revisiting the Logic of Downsizing
E-International Relations, 2025The Politics of Naming and the Costs of Denial: Genocide in Sri Lanka
PKI Global Justice Journal, 2025Collective Genocidal Intent in Sri Lanka
SSRN preprint, 2025. Based on LL.M. thesis, Lund University, 2023.