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 research priority area 'Decolonial Futures'. Her research explores the interrelation of political ecology, political economy and violence in the theory and practice of international law. She is the author of The Ecology of War and Peace: Marginalising Slow and Structural Violence in International Law published with Cambridge University Press. Eliana teaches in different LLM courses, including international environmental law and international responsibility.

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 and of the Asian Journal of International Law. 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.

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.