Carina Bury is a public international law scholar whose work spans international environmental law, federal governance, and the theory of international legal subjects. She is currently Visiting Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Heidelberg) and Chargée d'enseignement at the Université Paris Nanterre.

Her doctoral research — completed under a cotutelle between the University of Hamburg and the Australian National University, and awarded summa cum laude — offered a forensic and comparative analysis of how international biodiversity treaty law challenges and reshapes the self-governing autonomy of federal states. Supported by a grant from the German Federal Environmental Foundation (DBU), the thesis examined Germany's and Australia's federal challenges in implementing the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of 1971, developing the concept of the "State Organisational Vacuum" to capture structural gaps in federal implementation frameworks. 

Her postdoctoral project, INTERSUBJECTS, addresses one of the most pressing theoretical challenges in contemporary international law: the need to move beyond the state-centric model of international legal personality. The project develops a new legal theory that systematises the international legal status of a range of non-state actors — including Indigenous Peoples, deliberative democracy initiatives, and non-governmental organisations — and investigates how recognition and participation rights can be grounded in a coherent theoretical framework. 

Carina has published in Archiv des Völkerrechts, the Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy, and the Australian Year Book of International Law Online. She coordinated the HeiParisMax franco-German academic programme.