The latest issue of the European Journal of International Law opens with the third instalment of Martti Koskenniemi’s The Politics of International Law series. This post offers some reflections on Koskenniemi’s article, although it is not intended as a full response to it. First, a disclaimer in the style of Liliana Obregón1 and many others…
In the wake of the most recent USA airstrike in Syria, Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former president of the American Society of International Law and U.S. State Department Director of Policy Planning between 2009 and 2011, took to Twitter to think through some of the legal and moral arguments justifying the use of force: I believe…
Key Concept In From Apology to Utopia (1989), the Finnish jurist and former diplomat Martti Koskenniemi presents his thesis on international law’s fundamental indeterminacy. This would come to epitomize a critical moment in international law. Rather than repeat the classical legal view concerning “relative indeterminacy” (where, in some difficult but marginal cases there might not…
Over recent years there have been significant advances in scholarship on the history of international law. Critical histories, including feminist, Marxist and most productively Third World perspectives, shed fresh light on the history of the discipline and its political frame illuminating contemporary international law in important ways. Amongst the small pond of critical international lawyers,…
Sacrificing nuance, sensitivity and specificity for the sake of a ‘catchy’ title is not a neutral choice, but reiterates dominant narratives and is violently short sighted. Scrolling through my social media feed one evening last week, I came across an announcement advertising an event at the T.M.C. Asser Instituut in The Hague titled “Can Africa…
Imagine living day after day unsure of when your home will be demolished. That will most likely mean having to quickly move elsewhere out of necessity, not out of choice. Will you be able to salvage some of your belongings, comfort your traumatised children as a bulldozer tears apart the memories of happier times laughing…
“The law is here to protect YOU” — Legal adviser of the UK military, Eye in the Sky Eye in the Sky is (unintentionally) a film about law’s profound inhumanity. (*Moderate spoilers to follow, proceed with caution.) Colonel Katherine Powell (Hellen Mirren) commands from the UK a mission to capture a number of high-ranking Al-Shabaab…
In September 1922, the city of Izmir served as the site of one of the most brutal episodes of forced migration of the early twentieth century. The event occurred toward the end of the 1919–22 Greek-Turkish War, a bloody and protracted struggle over western Anatolia that marked the culmination of the Ottoman Empire’s violent disintegration.…
On the debate between Third World Approaches to International Law and Eurocentric Visions of International Law. What do we mean by the turn to history in international law? We are speaking about a growing body of scholarship that is engaged in the task of bringing history to international law in a number of ways: telling…
Pursuing Assata Shakur is not about Assata Shakur at all. It is about holding on to the fiction of an inherently fair justice system, denying the continuity of institutionalised racism over the life of a young country, and affirming an investment in carceral forms of social control. My skin is black/ My arms are…
ANZAC in Egypt: Myths, Memories and Movement in the Monumental Imagining of the First World War Charlotte Peevers* The original Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (‘ANZAC’) Memorial at Port Said, Egypt (destroyed during the Suez Crisis of 1956 and replicated in Albany, WA in 1964 and at ANZAC Parade in Canberra in 1968) embodies…
Separated from us by the barrier of a century. Inaugurator of a fully mechanised modernity. Eye-opener for the birth of a new, horrified, global society. Premonition of a future to come. This is the Great War. As one supremely tragic bookend to the ‘long’ nineteenth century, the ‘Great War’ is offered to international lawyers as a…
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and its comrades, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) demonstrate an unwillingness amongst the traditional economic powers to deal with both emergent economic powers and the Global South on an equal basis within the fora already established for such purposes. An oft…
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a stark example of how the proliferation of international economic law during the past three decades is an essential part of the neoliberal agenda and therefore ‘part of the problem’.In 1954 the ordo-liberal economist1 W. Roepke was invited in the Hague to deliver a paper on the…
There is no doubt that Hamas has exhibited extraordinary resilience under the most difficult of conditions that have bedeviled its period of political leadership in the Gaza Strip that started in 2007. It also seems clear as persuasively argued by Sandy Tolan in a valuable Common Dreams article [Tolan, “Blown Chances in Gaza: Israel &…
Given the growing memorialisation of the beginning of the First World War, Prof. Fleur Johns charts a number of the continuities and ruptures between our understanding then and now of International Law and the international environment.Looking back to mid-1914 from mid-2014, it is hard to see beyond the piles of bodies. History barely seems up…
In Gaza and elsewhere, those who politically support anti-occupation politics are easily cast as un-civilian.In the media coverage of war, whether reports on individual incidents or the numbing tallies of casualties, the distinction between civilians and combatants is central and frequently contested. The killing of the four boys who had been playing soccer on a…
Repetition is merely the sign for the oppressed to surrender to fate. Either you accept your suffering or you unleash more suffering. Only eventual freedom will give meaning to the deaths of Gazans. At the moment of writing these lines, the BBC reports 100 deaths thus far in Gaza in the recent Israeli onslaught. As…
The European Lawyers for Democracy and Human Rights statement on Syria, London/ Düsseldorf, 30 August 2013 The European Lawyers for Democracy and Human Rights (ELDH), with members in 18 European countries, is absolutely opposed to the proposed use of illegal force by Western powers against the Syrian regime. The US government is leading a call…
Once again the bombs are falling on the Gaza Strip, a stretch of territory excised from Palestine proper as a result of continuing illegal and illegitimate actions by Israel. In fact, Gaza has become a closed ghetto, first cut off from Palestine in violation of the partition plans and political programs and then turned into…