Simon Chesterman PPA(P) is an Australian legal academic and writer who is currently a vice provost at the National University of Singapore and dean of the NUS College.

He obtained a Rhodes Scholarship and completed his doctorate in international law at the University of Oxford under the supervision of the late Sir Ian Brownlie.

[25] Before publication as a book, the work had originally won a 2000 Dasturzada Dr Jal Pavry Memorial Prize for "best thesis in international relations".

Noting Chesterman's position, Krisch writes, "law loses much of its weight if its deviation from moral standards is openly admitted and other ways of justification are recognised."

[28] In Just War or Just Peace, Chesterman rejects the idea that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY)'s repression of the Kosovars represented a "supreme humanitarian emergency".

Instead, as Nicholas Wheeler notes, Chesterman is "sympathetic" to Russia's historical argument before the Security Council (SC) "that the crisis did not merit an armed response".

[29] Nevertheless, writing in the journal International Affairs, Wheeler concluded that "Chesterman has written a tour de force that exposes the weaknesses of the arguments supporting a doctrine of unilateral humanitarian intervention in international society ... Chesterman rejects the claim that states have a legal right to act as vigilantes in support of Council resolutions, even if they believe that this is the only means to stop a genocide.

"[30] As a Modern Law Review article noted, Chesterman condemned NATO's intervention in the Kosovo War as being "completely outside the United Nations system of security and a threat to global stability".

[32] Chesterman's book You, The People: The United Nations, Transitional Administration, and State-Building (Oxford University Press, 2004),[33] studies the foundation of new institutions in war-torn regions such as the former Yugoslavia and southeast Asia.

"[36] Chesterman has written on the regulation and oversight of intelligence services, including a monograph published by Australia's Lowy Institute for International Policy in 2016.

[37] In an opinion piece published in the global edition of The New York Times in November 2009, he argued for limits to the outsourcing of intelligence activities to private contractors such as Blackwater.

[39][40] Writing in the New York Review of Books, David D. Cole said that Chesterman "argues convincingly that the specter of catastrophic terrorist attacks creates extraordinary pressure for intrusive monitoring; that technological advances have made the collection and analysis of vast amounts of previously private information entirely feasible; and that in a culture transformed by social media, in which citizens are increasingly willing to broadcast their innermost thoughts and acts, privacy may already be as outmoded as chivalry.

Examples include: Other publications have focused on the United Nations, particularly the role of its Secretary-General,[47] and the rise and regulation of private military and security companies.