CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Beyond The Godfather: Italy, the Mafia, the People and the State
The Godfather, The Sopranos, The Irishman, Scarface, Goodfellas, Casino, Donnie Brasco, Gomorrah, A Tale, Once Upon a Time in America, and, closer to home, Legend, taught many of us how to imagine organised crime before we ever read a court judgment. They have given us dark restaurants, family dinners, long funerals, whispered betrayals, patriarchs in expensive suits, disturbing scenes of violence, some funny moments and a world where power moves through blood, loyalty, revenge, fear and money. This is the mafia: cinematic, brutal, seductive and frightening. We think we know its rules, its families, its codes, its hand gestures and its silences. We also think we know something else: that the mafia is Italian. Just as Dante, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Galileo, Machiavelli, Caravaggio, Vivaldi, Christopher Columbus, Marco Polo, Amerigo Vespucci are all “Italians”. Yet many of these figures were not. They were born, and lived, before Italy existed. They belonged to…
ARTICLES
Iran’s Uprising: Between Clerical Violence and Neo-colonial Aggression
The beginning of 2026 marked yet another human tragedy for Iranian society. In January, hundreds of thousands of Iranian protesters took to the streets in over 100 cities in response to political repression and growing socio-economic hardships. This new wave of…
Greenland and the Spectre of Dispossession
When it came to grabbing territory, the British had effective techniques by the 1960s. Morning-tea at Downing Street could accomplish what a U.S President’s incontinent media posts have been threatening to do with much froth and fury since 2019. The creation of the…
Greenland between a Rock and a Hard Place
Amid US President Trump’s looming take-over of Greenland and attempted coercion of Western allies to agree to this, Western liberal international lawyers and commentators are busy reaffirming Danish sovereignty over the territory. However, an anti-colonial…
Militant Democracy as Neurosis
Walter Benjamin invites us to think language in a radically different way: not as a neutral medium of communication, but as something living, something creative. For him, language is not exclusively human: everything that exists speaks. It may do so through gesture…
Cadaverous Tranquillity: Proscription, Anticipatory Repression and Coleridge
In December 1795, William Pitt’s government introduced the Treasonable Practices Bill and the Seditious Meetings Bill—the “Gagging Acts” as their opponents called them. They were designed to suppress the radical democratic societies that had flourished in the wake of…
Gaza, Venezuela and International Law
1. After the genocide in Gaza, we did not expect 2026 to be a year of peace. The biggest desire of Trump, "the great peacemaker," was to win the Nobel Peace Prize. But his first statements after the attack on Venezuela and Maduro's abduction show that the peacemaker…
Rage Against the End of International Law: From Venezuela to the Global
In a recent piece published at Opinio Juris, Nikolas M. Rajkovic calls on international lawyers to recalibrate their “ways of seeing” to account for the multi-scalar, relational, and interconnected nature of contemporary authority and power. His article invites a…
Why Human Rights fail Global Southern Women
Following a tumultuous start to her role as first lady of the United States of America, wherein she was accused of destroying ‘family values’ and promoting ‘militant feminism’, Hillary Clinton delivered a much-lauded speech condemning Chinese abuses of human rights…
Rap vs. The State (in a time of genocide)
We know the genocide in Gaza is a collective work, a sort of F35 genocide whose parts come from an imperial collective, a collective of old colonial states now led by the USA. So the denial of genocide, at least of its naming, is also shared by these states across…
A Preliminary Report on the Academic Office of Principal and Vice Chancellor
On 26 June 2025, Prof Iain Gillespie publicly accepted that he was ‘incompetent’ in his execution of the office of Principal and Vice Chancellor of the University of Dundee. The surprise revelation of a roughly £30 million deficit at the Scottish university in…
Discretionary Symbolism: An Analysis of Trump’s Policies for Latin America and Beyond
The international policies of the second Trump administration have caused quite an upheaval. From raising trading tariffs to (supposedly) ending wars efforts – while at the same time bombing small boast and sanctioning judges, it has not been easy to understand it.…
The Gaza Tribunal: A Simulacrum of Justice
The contemporary discourse on genocide is dominated by international criminal law, designed to punish individuals after the fact. Yet the framework derived from Public International Law and the Genocide Convention’s founding purpose was not punishment but prevention.…
Blog Carnival: Discussing the Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Law
In her review of Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice, Isobel Roele mentions the use of ‘reverse-engineering’ as a method of counter-aesthetics. Sofia Stolk’s contribution to Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice, the first…
Blog Carnival: Sounding Justice
The sound of the spoken word rising, pausing, the rhythms of the lines, of the stanzas, of the silences, the poem verbalised. The images etched on the walls in black and white, comics, graphic novels, stretching across wall after wall, winding around the room. The…
Blog Carnival: Victims, aesthetics and counter-aesthetics of international justice
Narratives of international criminal justice often depart from the horrors of World War II and the legal process of the Nuremberg Trials to set the scene for how the International Criminal Court addresses contemporary violence. These narratives can be found in…
Blog Carnival: Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice
The politics of aesthetics are at the heart of Rob Knox and Christine Schwöbel-Patel’s energetic edited collection Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice brings together a diverse group of scholars, practitioners, and artists. The editors approach…
Dream-walker in the Academy: Self, Time, and the Borders of Critique
I have returned to the classroom. After years inside bureaucracy – the slow gravity of minutes, clearances, and protocols – I am again among students, texts, and the low hum of ideas. The air is lighter; my wings that carry my creativity remember their work. It has…
The UK’s recognition of the State of Palestine is meaningless without the proper recognition of international law on the aid flotillas
Israel has boarded the Global Sumud flotilla, representing a further escalation of their response to flotillas seeking to deliver aid to Gaza. The boarding of the flotillas in international waters and the taking of people by force into Israeli territory violates…
The Culpable Liberal, The Latte Legalist and the End of the Settler Siege at Sea
**We are delighted to say that this post has been translated into Japanese by Yota Negishi, available here** It is the early hours of the morning on the 8th September 2025 and I am in Tunis at Sidi Bou Said Port listening to the sounds of stress, solidarity, and the…
CONOR GEARTY
With greatness sadness we heard of the untimely and sudden death of Conor Gearty at the age of 67. Conor was the professor of human rights law at the LSE. He was born in Ireland and this led to his lifelong interest in terrorism, state crimes, violations of human…
From Hyper-Chaos to the Irreversible
My philosophical project of radical democracy stands on two foundational intertwined discoveries that offer a firm ontological grounding of power. 1. The world is radically contingent but is simulated by a world that presents itself as necessary through potestas…
