Ken Watkin served for 33 years in the Canadian Forces, including four years as the Judge Advocate General. In 2002 he was appointed to the Order of Military Merit, in 2006 a Queen’s Counsel, and in 2010 he received the Canadian Bar Association President’s Award. Ken was responsible for providing operational law advice regarding Canada’s military operations post-9/11, and worked as government counsel for various inquiries arising from the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Since his retirement in 2010, he has served as a foreign observer to the Israeli Independent Commission investigating the 2010 Gaza blockade incident, and as the Charles H. Stockton Professor of International Law at the United States Naval War College (2011-12). Ken has also worked as a counterinsurgency/counterterrorism consultant for the United Nations and the Government of Canada. In addition to writing over 50 scholarly articles, commentaries and book reviews he is the author of Fighting at the Legal Boundaries: Controlling the Use of Force in Contemporary Conflict (Oxford University Press, 2016), which was awarded the 2017 Francis Lieber Prize by the American Society of International Law.
