CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
The Diapausal Life of International Law: Gaza and Beyond
Few contemporary conflicts have been as saturated with legal language as Gaza. Provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice, arrest warrants sought by the International Criminal Court, findings by United Nations commissions of inquiry, emergency sessions of the General Assembly, and a near-continuous flow of legal argument in diplomatic, journalistic, and activist forums all testify to the intensity with which law has been invoked. And yet, this same conflict appears to confirm a familiar sceptical verdict: international law lacks enforcement where it matters most. This juxtaposition — legal proliferation alongside material impotence — has often been read in one of two ways. On the one hand, Gaza is taken as proof that international law remains an axial moral grammar: a vocabulary of universal obligation that persists even when it cannot command obedience. On the other, it is read as evidence that law is little more than rhetoric: a repertoire of justificatory...
ARTICLES
Space, Assemblages, and the Hostile Border
Last year, I went to an art exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bonn by the Swedish duo Lundahl & Seitl. After trailing around the gallery led by text messages from an unknown sender called "the Collector", we were asked to don headphones and sightless goggles before we...
The New Thesis Eleven
Domination rests to such a degree on the society/nature duality that no liberation struggle will ever succeed unless that duality is overcome. Descartes Remix (CC) In 1845, shortly after he published the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx wrote...
Safe Spaces for Colonial Apologists
The recent controversies about Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar’s “Ethics and Empire” project and UK Universities Minister Jo Johnson’s attack on “safe space culture” have both been defended on freedom of speech grounds. However, they are better understood as retrenching...
Trials Begin in Turkey for Academics for Peace
International solidarity is crucial at this time when our colleagues are facing criminal trials. On December 5, 2017, the trials began for those who signed the Academics for Peace petition in January 2016. Conducted by High Criminal Courts in Istanbul, these trials...
Martti Koskenniemi: Indeterminacy
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...
Trump’s Upside Down
We have not lately – not until Trump's election – seen or heard the dog whistle politics of racism, sexism, Nativism, and homophobia so eagerly thrust aside by a Presidential candidate and, with such glee: traded for openly racist invective, division, misogyny,...
Is Fascism Making a Comeback? (Part II)
Continuing the reposted series from State of Nature, the question is whether Fascism is making a comeback? Laurence Davis Seventy-two years after the end of World War II, the spectre of fascism is again haunting the globe. The important questions we should be asking...
Is Fascism Making a Comeback? (Part I)
Each month, the wonderful State of Nature blog asks leading critical thinkers a question. This month that question is Fascism. Chiara Bottici In fact, fascism has never gone away. If by fascism, we mean the historical regime that created the name and embraced the...
The Politics of Recognition and the Limits of Emancipation through Law
There is much to celebrate about the BVerfG gender recognition decision. The court held the sole availability of M/F gender markers, combined with the obligation to register a gender, to be unconstitutional as it violates the right to ‘positive recognition’ of the...
Statement by Legal Scholars and International Lawyers Against Holding ESIL Forum at the Hebrew University in East Jerusalem
To add your name, please email: palpetition17@gmail.com. The statement is open to all law academics and international lawyers. You do not have to be a member of ESIL or based in Europe to sign. The European Society of International Law (ESIL) is holding its Research...
Welcome to the Molysmocene
As environmental law reveals, we now live in a new era: the Molysmocene, a geological era shaped by human waste and its management. The climate talks of 6–17 November 2017 in Bonn are now over. This 23rd Convention of the Parties of the United Nations Climate Change...
Michel Foucault: Discourse
Key Concept The idea of discourse constitutes a central element of Michel Foucault’s oeuvre, and one of the most readily appropriated Foucaultian terms, such that 'Foucaultian discourse analysis' now constitutes an academic field in its own right. This post therefore...
Private Security: Twin Indignities
The privatisation of criminal justice practices is an affront to human dignity. When we are acted upon for profit as well as for justified ends, the proper link between coercion, rights, and authority is lost. Ministry of Justice proposals could mean that all...
Britain: The Empire that Never Was
Why Brexit is the culmination of a British national project which weaponises imperial amnesia and nostalgia. Brexit sold the country a dream; ostensibly a project built on anti-migrant sentiment, it also invoked delusions of grandeur, rooted in reanimating the...
Radicalizing Women’s Rights Internationally
The recent "burqa bans" in Austria and Quebec appear to be troubling legal manifestations of the rising tide of Islamaphobia in Europe and North America. The news coverage of the bans coincided for me with a bout of reflexive angst regarding the recent publication of...
Sustaining neoliberal capital through socio-economic rights
In a 2013 contribution aimed at influencing the post-2015 development agenda, seventeen UN Special Rapporteurs recommended that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) should include a goal on the provision of social protection floors. In April 2015 the UN Committee...
The Fallacies of Neoliberal Protest
This post is an amended version of remarks read at a rally organized by Cornell University’s Black Students United (BSU) on September 23, 2016. Students gathered to protest the recent police shootings of Tyree King, Terence Crutcher, and Keith Lamont Scott. It is...
The Left and Catalonia
How a Left position regarding the Catalonia referendum on 1 Oct 2017 could present itself juridically and politically The Catalonia referendum this Sunday will become part of the history of Europe, possibly for the worst of reasons. I will not discuss here the...
On Marx’s Philosophical Methodology in the Grundrisse
There is a considerable debate about the value of Marx’s earlier philosophical works relative to his mature period writing the three volumes of Capital. Some believe that they are of great importance for understanding Marx, while others such as Althusser[1] famously...
Letter to the Editors of the Journal of the History of International Law
[This letter was sent to the editors of the Journal of the History of International Law on 29 August 2017 and published at Opinio Juris. It is republished here with permission.] Dear Editors, We are writing to express our grave concern about the publication of an...
Tenses of Violence: Antifascist Action & Legal Critique in Charlottesville’s Wake
[M]any Trump supporters said they welcomed [Trump’s] visit as an opportunity to express their views.Tim Foley, an Army veteran who leads his own citizens’ border patrol in Arizona, showed his Glock handgun to a reporter, saying he and his comrades had come to Phoenix...
KEY CONCEPTS
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