Eliana Cusato is an Assistant Professor at the Amsterdam Law School and a member of the Amsterdam Center for International Law (ACIL). She is also one of the coordinators of the UvA Decolonial Futures Research Priority Area. Her research examines how the discipline and practice of international law deal with the interrelation of global political economy, violence, and ecological destruction. She is the author of The Ecology of War and Peace: Marginalising Slow and Structural Violence in International Law published with Cambridge University Press. She is currently working on two larger research projects: the first explores how temporal notions are encoded in/through legal norms relevant to address the unfolding climate crisis; the second investigates the transformative potentials of claims for reparations for intersecting injustices emanating from the world's periphery.

She holds academic qualifications from the National University of  Singapore (Ph.D.), where she was a recipient of the NUS Doctoral Research Scholarship, and Catholic University of Milan (LL.B and LL.M). She has been a visiting fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge, and the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, Leiden University. She is a member of the editorial board of the Leiden Journal of International Law (International Legal Theory section). In 2021 she was awarded the young scholar prize of the European Society of International Law for her paper on the securitisation of climate change in international law.

Eliana is the academic coordinator of the LLM in Public International Law and teaches in different courses, including international environmental law and international responsibility.

From 2020 to 2022, Eliana was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at ACIL, where she worked on the ERC-funded research project 'Resource Wars in an Unequal World' (REWA).

Prior to joining UvA, Eliana was a lecturer at Essex Law School (UK), where she taught public international law and human rights law. Before entering academia, she practiced as a lawyer in Milan specialising in white collar and environmental crimes and interned at the International Criminal Court.