CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
In the Crack, a Method: Hope, Utopia, and the Critique of International Law
The rhetoric around the complete erosion of international law has recently proliferated mainstream political discourse and scholarship. But, surprisingly the current state of the international legal order or its lack thereof is not unprecedented. Trump’s dismissal, Israel’s impunity and Russia-Ukraine war are some of the more dominant manifestations of the failure of international law. International law fails every day, and its effects are not always macrocosmic. These everyday failures manifest themselves in the ordinary, quotidian structure of the international, foregrounded by its operation in the Third world. TWAIL scholars like B.S. Chimini, Sandhya Pahuja, Antony Anghie have all written about how international law operates and violates the mundane and everyday plane of the Global South, through sites and objects that might at first glance appear unrelated to what is “international.” TWAIL has established how international law is a working...
ARTICLES
The Unjust City: Mapping Exclusion through Aesthetics
Imre Azem's documentary ‘Ecumenopolis: City Without Limits’ and the research of Manis K. Jha and Pushpendra Kumar help us to explore on the project of neoliberalism, offering a scathing critique of the exclusion and inaccessibility that accompanies its political...
The Plague was Already Present (Critique in Times of Coronavirus)
No philosopher took as brave a stand against the political approach of the Coronavirus than the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Although his thoughts were for the most part rejected by both the academic world as public opinion, he stood his ground. What a...
A Violence Which Must Be Named (Critique in Times of Coronavirus)
Across the UK two narratives currently dominate and frame much of the critique of the British government’s current response to the Coronavirus pandemic. The first is that of incompetence. The story so far unfolding is that of a government which has ignored both the...
Prisoners of State (Critique in Times of Coronavirus)
We have all become prisoners of the State. Wherever we are across the whole planet. It's a time like no other time in human history or natural history. Is it a force of Nature as virus Covid-19 that has brought this about; or is it something to do with the nature of...
Two Problems with Democratic Biopolitics (Critique in times of Coronavirus)
COVID-19 has led to renewed interest in Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, but it has also revealed that this concept is widely misunderstood. Too many commentators have relied upon an overly broad definition of biopolitics as a ‘politics of health’ or a...
Responding to gender critical feminism: On gender, sex and a generous feminist politics in anxious times
Can feminism develop and grow if the room for reasonable divergence between us becomes ever narrower? We need spaces where we can discuss feminist politics to improve all our feminisms. The cheerleading, backslapping and feuding of twitter is not a good substitute....
Law & Critique: Chile’s ‘Constituent Moment’
Few documents speak more clearly of the alliance between market thinking and authoritarian constitutionalism than a letter written by Margaret Thatcher in February 1982 in response to a letter sent to her by Hayek and, more likely, to a conversation that took place...
Humanity’s Catastrophe: Following Sylvia Wynter in the Age of Coronavirus
The news of Kayla Williams, a black woman from Peckham, dying of suspected Covid-19 after being rendered “not a priority” by paramedics on the scene has sat like a stone within me. Apart from being further proof that communities sitting at the intersection of racial...
‘The King is Naked’: Bolsonaro & the Pandemic (Critique in times of Coronavirus)
The current president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, has been relentlessly downplaying the dangers of the COVID-19 pandemic comparing it with a simple flue. He has claimed that the lowest social categories of the Brazilian population would be immune to diseases (“the...
Begin from the Beginning: Revisiting Agamben (Critique in times of Corona)
The overcharged attacks on Agamben don't come as a surprise. Since we are amidst a pandemic, there is an urgency palpable in people’s writings. For a reader of Agamben, it should be clear not to place an unfair burden on a philosopher who primarily deals with...
Anthropocene Authoritarianism (Critique in Times of Corona)
There has been much discussion of the biopolitics of the global response to the Coronavirus onCritical Legal Thinking and elsewhere. Many of the pieces have engaged critically with Giorgio Agamben’s interventions, polarising debate.[1]Thus, Karsten Schubert and...
Critique in times of Corona
Over the last few weeks we have received a large number of pieces on the pandemic, so we have decided to publish a small selection of them over the next few days, and then to continue to publish them as they arrive. In the past we would have called this intense blog...
Let’s not be fooled: There’s nothing external & symmetrical in the global economic downturn
On January 23rd, the lockdown of 60 million people in the Hubei province, where CBNC calculated that almost 80% of the Chinese Gross Domestic Product is realized, had already dealt a severe blow to the global offer of goods. For the whole month of February, global...
The Tragic Transparency of the Virus
Today’s cultural, political and ideological debates are imbued with a strange opacity, the result of their remove from the concrete day-to-day experience of the vast majority of people — ordinary citizens, or la gente de a pie, as they say in Latin America. That is...
Crying for Repression: Populist and Democratic Biopolitics in Times of COVID-19.
We live in very Foucauldian times, as the many think-pieces published on biopolitics and COVID-19 show. Yet what is remarkable—biopolitically—about the current situation has gone largely unnoticed: We are witnessing a new form of biopolitics today that could be termed...
International Economic Law & COVID-19
International economic law (IEL), broadly defined, refers to the rules governing the cross-border movement of goods, people, technology and finance capital, as well as the institutions created to design and enforce such rules. IEL has, over the past three decades,...
Must Society be Defended from Agamben?
Many European countries have by now been in lockdown for more than a week. This has given everyone ample time to reflect on our current condition. Many of the world’s leading critical thinkers have shared their thoughts with us through op-eds, blog posts, and so on....
A Corona Utopia in Three Parts
“This episode of Black Mirror sucks!” The slogan that briefly went viral in the United States after the election of Trump has now acquired an even more infectious, irresistible irony for many in coronavirus-stricken Europe. The fear of loved ones and ourselves getting...
Covid-19 and the Continuity of the Familiar
The outbreak of Covid-19 is billed as a ‘once in a century event’. It has appeared as the prophesised rupture in our social, economic and political fabric of the world, with the recognition that what follows may not resemble what humanity has become used to. It is...
Never Waste a Crisis: A Practical Guide?
It is too early to predict how the COVID-19 pandemic will unfold and over what period of time. But we should expect that, much like September 11, the world afterwards will be very different to the world before. We know we should never waste a crisis, but the right...
Virus: All That Is Solid Melts into Air
There is a debate within the social sciences about whether it is easier to ascertain the truthfulness and quality of a society’s institutions under normal daily circumstances or in exceptional situations, during times of crisis. One can probably learn from both types...
