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
The Strange Lightness of History
Some people are just too small to be human, and maybe that has always been the case. But ever since Western modernity grew to span the world thanks to colonialism and capitalism, the contradiction between equal dignity for all human beings and the inhuman treatment of...
Deterrence unto Death: Running fast into a neighbour’s knife
Once gunships have driven them back to their shores, boats need to be confiscated and burned on a huge bonfire.” Katie Hopkins, UK Conservative Pundit (2015) We understand that by withdrawing this rescue cover we will be leaving innocent children, women and men to...
Ferries not Frontex! 10 points to really end the deaths of migrants at sea
On April 20, the Joint Foreign and Home Affairs Council of the EU released a ten-point action plan outlining their response to the recent deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. Many other proposals have also been made over the last few days. We are activists who...
The Atmosphere of Revolution?
I want to follow up on a post from last year about the general strike, using the idea of silence as that which binds it together in its negativity (or catastrophe as Sorel would say). As I reread that piece for a book that I’m trying to write about crowds, I realised...
Teaching: Notes on the Thought of Luce Irigaray
One of the major concerns for Irigaray regarding education, and in my view perhaps the most important one, involves the absence of horizontal relations in the classroom. Indeed, Irigaray writes: Education is still based on the characteristics of the male subject, and...
The Germanwings Disaster: A ‘Muslim-Australian’ Perspective
The intentional downing of the Germanwings aircraft on 24 March 2015 triggered an urgent media inquiry into the identity and motivations of co-pilot Andreas Lubitz. Armed with not much more than a grainy photograph of an unassuming man posing in front of the Golden...
Six Books: International Law, Human Rights and the Politics of the Turn to History
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 the history of international law, contextualising...
JHRE Editorial: The Discourse of ‘Biocultural’ Rights
There can be little doubt of the multiple complexities facing law in the twenty-first century. Climate change alone presents a challenge of unprecedented global complexity for legal systems – a complexity arising, moreover, directly from the ‘complexity of the climate...
Australians overseas are calling for international protests against mandatory detention of asylum seekers
For decades Australia has been the subject of international institutional condemnation that has focused on Australia's policies of mandatory detention and off-shore processing of asylum seekers. In 2002 in the aftermath of Tampa, SIEV X, the spurious ‘children...
Being Social: Ontology, Law, Politics
We are pleased to announce that Being Social: Ontology, Law, Politics, edited by Tara Mulqueen and Daniel Matthews, and published by COUNTERPRESS, is now available. Being Social brings together leading and emerging scholars on the question of sociality in...
Live blog: Warwick Summit on Protest
We'll be liveblogging the Warwick Summit on Protest today from 16:00 UK time. The Summit was proposed by Warwick Law School's Centre for Human Rights in response to events on campus last term which saw the University summoning the police to a Free Education...
Law’s Catastrophe and the Greatness of Syriza
Two narratives compete for the truth of today’s global political stage. On the one hand, there’s the narrative of leftist irresponsibility and incorrectness. On the other, an austere narrative of correctness based on the general notion that there’re certain...
For fragments, and not debts, we are
It may be the case that one could note the peculiar appearance of the thinking minister. A thinking minister is not suddenly a liberated or a good minister, but at least a minister who thinks and does not just administer or govern; thus maintaining for a number of...
The Greek Debt ‘Confidence Trick’
As William Shakespeare said in Much Ado About Nothing, “Let every eye negotiate for itself And trust no agent.” As so it seems appropriate to cast our ‘eye’ upon the discourses that have defined the current Greek financial crisis from both the left and the...
To Question Law, Without Condition
Take your time but be quick about it, because you do not know what awaits you (Jacques Derrida). The heady days of Occupy Central have passed. The 79 day occupation of the...
Why we should worry about the theoretical foundations of human rights law and practice
Ivor Crewe, the former Essex Vice-Chancellor, and a political scientist, used to compare contemporary human rights activists to 19th century Christian missionaries, spreading the gospel to less enlightened peoples. There is more than a grain of truth to this ironical...
Syriza’s new contract between Greece and Europe
On Sunday 8 February 2015, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras explained the government’s policy commitments. Thanks to AnalyzeGreece and GreekReporter, we are happy to publish excerpts from his statement. The new contract between Greece and Europe which will be...
Syriza: The Greek Spring
According to an oft-repeated cliché, the recent Syriza victory has historic significance. Its place in history books as the first elected left government in Europe is assured. But its importance goes further. The Syriza victory is an important marker in three...
‘We are not with the State, We are with the Community’
All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream. — E. A. Poe In an interview that Alexis Tsipras gave to the...
SYRIZA Wins: Reflections While the Tide is Turning
There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn’t. ∼ Leonard Cohen It is probably uncontroversial to argue that the Greek elections of the 25th January will be remembered as one of the most important in the history of Greece, of...
A Right to Breathe
The air is taken away from us; “we cannot breathe”. This is a commentary which draws inspiration from an evocative piece of writing by Jerome Roos which appeared earlier in Reflections on a Revolution. The title of his text, “From New York to Greece, we revolt ‘cus we...
KEY CONCEPTS
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