CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
No Hearing, No Harm? Rethinking Jurisdiction and Protection in UAE v Sudan
On 5 May 2025, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) removed the case of UAE v Sudan from its docket, declaring it “manifest” that it lacked jurisdiction under Article IX of the Genocide Convention (Order, para 14). Sudan alleged that the United Arab Emirates materially supported the Rapid Support Forces in Darfur, facilitating genocidal violence. It sought urgent provisional measures, its first application to the Court under the Convention. The Court’s response broke from its recent procedural posture in genocide litigation. In The Gambia v Myanmar and Ukraine v Russia, the ICJ held oral hearings and considered provisional measures despite unresolved jurisdictional objections. In UAE v Sudan, by contrast, the Court relied on the UAE’s reservation to Article IX to conclude that jurisdiction was excluded, and struck the case from the General List without hearing argument, testing Sudan’s legal reasoning, or...
ARTICLES
Democratic Biopolitics Revisited: A Response to a Critique
In his recent intervention on CLT, Bryan Doniger offered a critique of my short intervention ‘Against Agamben: Is a Democratic Biopolitics Possible?’. The main points of this critique are (a) that I do not pay enough attention to the notion of biopolitics as it is...
Zoomism and Discipline for Productive Immobility
The virus lurks on car door handles, on doorknobs and the floor, on the breath of others or in a friend's hug, on onions in the supermarket, and on the hands of the valet who parks your car. If you venture outside, everything and everyone is a threat. So, it is better...
A Foucauldian enquiry in the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic management (Critique in Times of Coronavirus)
Arnold Böcklin, Plague, 1898, Kunstmuseum Basel Is the substantially global management of the coronavirus pandemic a novelty or would it be possible to trace its origin in an earlier order of things? Could the specific model selected for the governance of the ongoing...
Crisis and Resistance at the Periphery: Bosnian responses to Covid-19
My mother tells me that it’s lucky that this time around we have electricity. She was two years older than I am now when the siege of Sarajevo began. I was born during the first summer of the siege and so she had found herself caring for a premature infant in the...
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....
