THE HIGHER LENS : 20

It was a pleasure to speak with Roxanne A. Schnyder, an LL.M. candidate at Harvard Law School and a Research Assistant at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School. She holds an MPhil in Criminology from the University of Cambridge and an LLB from King’s College London. Her work focuses on international criminal law, governance, and the intersection of law, philosophy, and emerging technologies, this conversation explores how legal systems attempt -often imperfectly-to impose structure on realities that resist simplification.

Your research explores the ethics and philosophy of punishment in international jurisprudence. In your view, what are the central moral tensions that international criminal law faces when attempting to deliver justice for mass atrocities?

International criminal law was built on a core tension it's never really fully resolved: it seeks to individualize guilt in contexts that are fundamentally collective, structural, and very often historical. Atrocity crimes very often don't emerge from isolated acts of deviance but rather from political systems, social narratives, and institutional failures. Yet law typically insists on identifying and punishing discrete individuals, often at the highest levels of leadership.

This produces what I have argued as a series of moral fractures. First, there is the inherent tension between individual culpability and collective responsibility - between what one person did and what a collective system made possible. Second, there is the tension between legal universality and geopolitical selectivity: the aspiration to apply the law equally sits uneasily alongside patterns of enforcement that are shaped by power, cooperation, and international politics. And third, there is a deeper philosophical tension between retribution and legitimacy - in short, whether punishment in these contexts meaningfully expresses moral condemnation, or whether it risks becoming treated as symbolic, detached from the lived realities of victims and affected communities.

Ultimately, international criminal law operates in the space between what is justice and narrative: it does not merely punish, it constructs an account of history. The question is whether that account is morally adequate to the scale, complexity, and context of the crimes it seeks to address.

During your internship with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in the Pacific, you examined the regional methamphetamine crisis and its links to corruption and governance vulnerabilities. What did this experience reveal about the relationship between transnational crime and institutional fragility?

What became clear during my brief work in the Pacific is that transnational crime does not simply exploit weak institutions - it actively reshapes them. Methamphetamine trafficking, in particular, operates through adaptive, networked structures that move far more quickly than state systems designed to regulate them.

In contexts where governance capacity is limited, this often creates a feedback loop: institutional fragility enables criminal penetration, and criminal penetration deepens institutional fragility. Corruption is not merely incidental; it becomes infrastructural- embedded in law enforcement, border control, and even at times political processes.

What is often missing from external analyses is an appreciation of how legally robust frameworks can coexist with weak enforcement ecosystems. Many Pacific states have formal compliance with international conventions, but lack the data systems, inter-agency coordination, forensic facilities, and financial oversight mechanisms required to make those laws effective.

The lesson, I think, is that transnational crime should not be understood purely as a criminal justice issue. It is a governance problem- one that requires international investment and cooperation as well as a rethinking of how institutions are designed, resourced, and monitored in an increasingly networked global environment.

You are currently researching AI regulation and governance at the Mossavar-Rahmani Centre for Business and Government. How do you see emerging technologies reshaping legal frameworks and global governance structures in the coming decade?

Emerging technologies, particularly AI, are beginning to challenge some of the core assumptions underlying legal and governance systems. Law traditionally regulates actors: states, corporations, individuals. But, as argued in recent work, AI introduces a different kind of societal 'actor'- one that does not fit neatly into existing categories, yet increasingly shapes decision-making across all of them.

What we are seeing is a shift toward what I would describe as “infrastructural power”: systems that do not merely execute decisions, but structure the conditions under which decisions are made. This has profound implications for accountability. If an AI system influences outcomes in areas like finance, security, defense, or public policy, the question becomes: who is responsible, and on what basis?

Over the coming decade, I expect three major developments. First, a move toward hybrid governance frameworks, combining public regulation with private technical standards. Second, increased attention to procedural integrity - ensuring that systems are auditable, explainable, and subject to oversight. And third, a growing recognition that AI is not just a regulatory challenge, but a geopolitical one, shaping power asymmetries between states, individuals, and institutions.

The broader challenge is that our legal frameworks are typically reactive, while technological change is iterative and continuous. Bridging that gap will require not just new rules, but new ways of thinking about the framework of governance itself.

Your academic path spans King’s College London, Cambridge, and now Harvard. Looking back, what intellectual questions have most consistently driven your work across law, philosophy, and criminology?

Across my academic work, I think the central question has been: how does law construct artificial legitimacy in contexts where moral clarity is actually contested? 

Whether in international criminal law, governance, or in thinking about AI, I’ve been drawn to situations where legal systems are asked to operate at their absolute limits - where they are forced to translate complex, often ambiguous realities into structured judgments. 

At King’s, my favourite course was Jurisprudence. Studying both philosophy and law allowed me to think through questions (particularly surrounding authorship and copyright) in a completely novel way. At Cambridge, it developed into a deeper engagement with penal philosophy and the ethics of international punishment. At Harvard, that translated into work that focused on questions re: AI governance, institutional design, and technological power.

What connects these areas is a fundamental interest in the relationship between formal legal structures and the underlying realities they seek to regulate - and, more specifically, where that relationship begins to break down.

For students interested in international law or global justice, what intellectual habits or areas of study do you think are most important to cultivate today?

For students interested in international law and global justice I think I'd emphasize four things.

First, intellectual range. The most consequential problems in this field usually don't sit neatly within doctrinal boundaries - they emerge at the intersection of law, politics, economics, philosophy, and increasingly, technology. A purely legalistic approach is rarely sufficient. The ability to think across disciplines not only deepens understanding, but allows for more creative and structurally aware responses to complex problems.

Second, analytical discipline. International law invites strong normative commitments, but the real challenge lies in justifying them. Developing the capacity to move rigorously between theory, empirical reality, and institutional practice is essential. A grounding in jurisprudence and moral philosophy is not ornamental - it is what enables one to test arguments, expose assumptions, and build positions that can withstand scrutiny.

Third, an attention to power. Legal frameworks do not operate in abstraction. They are shaped- and often constrained - by political incentives, economic interests, and institutional structures. To understand how international law functions in practice, one must be attentive to these dynamics and willing to confront the ways in which law both reflects and reinforces underlying distributions of power.

Finally, a tolerance for complexity. Many of the most important questions in this field resist usually neat resolution. There is a temptation to simplify - to force clarity where ambiguity persists - but doing so often obscures more than it reveals. The ability to remain intellectually honest in the face of complexity, and to work within it rather than against it, is itself a critical skill.

IN CONVERSATION WITH ROXANNE A. SCHNYDER | VLERA GARA