CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Analysing the Iranian Uprising: Costas Douzinas interviews Leila Faghfouri Azar
This interview, conducted by Professor Costas Douzains for the Greek weekly newspaper Epohi, features Dr. Leila Faghfouri Azar and was originally published in Epohi’s special supplement on the Iranian uprising (24–25 January 2026). In the conversation, Faghfouri Azar discusses the dynamics of protest in Iran, patterns of social stratification, the state’s response, and the prospects of U.S. military intervention. Costas Douzinas (CD): Can inflation and repression create an opposition alliance beyond the dominant forces of Iranian society? Leila Faghfouri Azar (LFA): The recent protests, which began in late December 2025 in response to rising inflation and the unprecedented collapse of the national currency, have been both geographically widespread and socially diverse. Within days, they brought together groups with different grievances into a more unified oppositional voice, even as participants faced extreme and deadly repression. In this way, the protests reveal what might be...
ARTICLES
Hashtag Panelwatch: Accumulation by Discrediting
A common occurrence when organizing academic events these days is the inevitable encounter with a trigger-happy deployment of queries and condemnation regarding representation. In the age of immediate self-publication in social media, this “calling out” usually takes...
The TTIP: Back to the future?
In 1954 the ordo-liberal economist W. Roepke was invited in the Hague to deliver...
Legal infrastructure, differentiated space and the spectacle of ‘lawful protest’: The Australian G20 (Safety and Security) Act 2013
Queensland is this year host to various G20 meetings, most prominently the Finance Ministers’ Meeting that was held in Cairns on 20 & 21 September and next month’s Leaders’ Summit in Brisbane on 15 & 16 November. At a cost of over $450 million, a massive...
A Taste for the Secret: Interview with Mark Neocleous
This interview was originally conducted in March 2014 for Kampfplatz (a journal of philosophy, published in Turkish in Ankara, Turkey) and its Turkish translation was first published in the 6th issue of the Kampfplatz in May 2014. More information about Kampfplatz can...
Demanding the Future: The Right2Water and Another Ireland
The American abolitionist Frederick Douglass once observed that if you find out ‘just what any people will quietly submit to … you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them’ and that such injustices ‘will continue till...
Whose ideas are they anyway?
The academic world is a strange one. Sometimes, it seems like a place of tremendous sharing, generosity and trust. Other times, one of huge paranoia as competitive individuals scramble to protect ideas and work from the scavenging gaze of others. Attending an American...
Why Neoliberalism’s Unregulated Global Debt System is for the Birds (and Vultures)
An eerie sense of calm pervaded the bustling streets of Buenos Aires as local Porteños calmly went about their daily business. It was 31st July 2014 and the clock had just run out on the deadline for Argentina’s government to make a $539 million interest payment to...
Three Questions for Hamas
There is no doubt that Hamas has exhibited extraordinary resilience under the most difficult of conditions that have bedeviled its period of political leadership in the Gaza Strip that started in 2007. It also seems clear as persuasively argued by Sandy Tolan in a...
Finding the Hidden Constitution: Explaining Ireland’s Abortion Law
On Saturday, we heard of the Irish state's latest efforts to police its abortion law. The story has emerged from a series of High Court hearings. Reporting on the case is restricted by court order, and so facts have emerged drip by drip. On Tuesday, we heard a...
An Island of Saints and Sadists: Abortion in Ireland
People often ask me why I write such dark books. You’re such a sunny person, they say. I say: Look around you, what kind of a country do you think you’re living in? Here is a tale of the island of Saints and Sadists. A young woman came to our country for help, for a...
International Law 1914/2014
Looking back to mid-1914 from mid-2014, it is hard to see beyond the piles of bodies. History barely seems up to the task of grappling with this tumultuous interstice. Perhaps, rather than approaching this interval as a sequence of historical contexts, we might...
Civilians, Combatants, and Histories of International Law
In the media coverage of war, whether reports on individual incidents or the numbing tallies of casualties, the distinction between civilians and combatants is central and frequently contested. The killing of the four boys who had been playing soccer on a Gaza beach...
Repetition and Death in the Colony: On the Israeli Attacks on Gaza
At the moment of writing these lines, the BBC reports 100 deaths thus far in Gaza in the recent Israeli onslaught. As we have seen these scenes before, the invocation of repetition comes naturally. “Once again” is a commonly used word when it comes to death and...
Should we value academic fashions?
Fashions come and go, but what about academic or intellectual fashions? Are they like any other, with the same pleasures and limitations? Or should ideas be protected from the vagaries and currencies of what is current? Googling the phrase “academic fashion” produces...
The Infinity of the Silent Strike
We know from Burke that it is the noise of the crowd or throng which leads to the experience of the sublime. The cacophony of the many, gathered in their discharged state, draws us like a magnet. But the crowd in strike has a number of very different...
Civilisation & the Savage Crowd
Anyone familiar with ‘crowd theory’ will have been told repeatedly that Gustave Le Bon is an origin. This assertion is quickly masked by obfuscation. He is not a first, of course, preceded by the historian Taine and the early criminologists Lombroso...
The Open Crowd & The Kettle
Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power provides a useful starting point for this project. In it, he identifies a wide number of different crowds. They are determined by the temporality of their aims, the space in which they manifest themselves, the...
About ‘Crowded Sovereignty’
The crowd is not a technology or a subject of sovereignty. It is neither the ‘agent’ who could take, create or destroy sovereignty; nor a ‘means’ for others to become sovereign. The crowd is remarkable because of its prevalence and excision. It is often there in those...
The Prospect of Harmony and the Decolonial View of the World: Weihua He Interviews Walter Mignolo
Knowledge is always situated. As a young scholar from China working on western theories, I always felt frustrated with the eurocentrism embedded within them. The frustration comes first because they are not addressing the problems lingering in my mind; and second at...
Politics in Times of Anxiety
Politics in Times of Anxiety springs from the 9/11 attacks, when public safety and security turned into a central concern across the globe. The subsequent economic crisis that broke out in 2008 in the USA and its gradual spread across Europe initiated a protracted...
The Past and Future of the Legal Left: Celebrating Duncan Kennedy’s Scholarship
Below you can watch the conference on 'The Past and Future of the Legal Left: Celebrating Duncan Kennedy's Scholarship' which was held at SOAS, University of London on 22 May 2014. This conference honoured Professor Duncan Kennedy, one of the most influential legal...
KEY CONCEPTS
No Results Found
The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.
SERIES / SYMPOSIA
No Results Found
The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.