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
Home & Apart: Spatial Justice in ‘Women of Cyprus’
On the 16th of June 2011, the Westminster International Law & Theory Centre hosted the London premiere of Women of Cyprus, a documentary directed by Vassiliki Katrivanou and Bushra Azzouz, followed by a discussion with the first director. The film tries to capture...
Greek Politics from Below
Few people would want to be in the shoes of Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou these days. Faced with an ostensible mutiny in the ruling social-democrat PASOK party, his worries have been exacerbated by the appearance of an unprecedented, continuous wave of...
Zones of Rage & The Vancouver Riots
The Vancouver riots were a moment of rupture of the sanitized image that our local elites cultivate about Vancouver The Beautiful as a global brand. The corporate media lost control of the huge collective energies it contributed to releasing on the streets by...
Don’t shop? Then you must be undead
We record for posterity the views of Stephen Roach, non-executive chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and faculty member of Yale University. According to Mr. Roach (paywall): The global economy is being hobbled by a new generation of zombies – the economic walking dead....
In Greece, we see democracy in action
When Stéphane Hessel wrote in Time for Outrage! that indignation with injustice should turn to "a peaceful insurrection" perhaps he did not expect that the movement of indignados in Spain and aganaktismenoi (outraged) in Greece would take his advice to heart so soon...
Charging Protestors
Last Thursday and Friday saw around forty-two people in the dock at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on charges relating to the protests before and after Christmas (10th, 24th and 30th November, 9th December 2010 and 26th March 2011). The court were clearly in a rush to...
Libyan War and Revolution – Unity & Multiplicity
The war that has been escalated in Libya over the last week is not the same as the revolt that gripped the country months ago. Even today in Benghazi there are two orders – war and revolt – at work, but the logic of war is destroying the multiplicity of a revolution....
To Dis or not to Dis? Disobedience and the Case of the Naughty in Relation to Law
This piece was originally written for and presented at the Disobedience Workshop (20–21 May 2011) at the School of Law, Birkbeck College. Since putting together my abstract a few months ago, there have been some alterations and additions and analogies that have...
The New School for Privatised Inquiry
In 1919, John Dewey and others founded The New School for Social Research, intended to offer a democratic and general education for those excluded by existing structures. On the faculty side, this meant a staunch defence of academic freedom in the face of increasing...
Generation OS13: The new culture of resistance
Mass Political Defiance: A Conversation with Gene Sharp
Gene Sharp, the most important theorist on non violent struggle, accepted to answer various questions about his work for the blog cosmopolita and the printed edition of El Espectador (20th of May 2011). In this interview Sharp speaks about his theory and also about...
War Crimes after the War Ended
The history of war crimes is one of the sites of the politics of memory par excellence. The arrangements of world politics today still seat on the consequences of the Second World War -the permanent members of the UN Security Council being one of the more visible. The...
Egypt’s Orderly Transition? International Aid and the Rush to Structural Adjustment
Although press coverage of events in Egypt may have dropped off the front pages, discussion of the post-Mubarak period continues to dominate the financial news. Over the past few weeks, the economic direction of the interim Egyptian government has been the object of...
Reanimating Human Rights
It seems that the discussion over intervention in Libya and revolutions in Arab countries is over. In the midst of discussion over legality or righteousness of the intervention in Libya, the problem of the victims of the situation that lead to the intervention (and...
The Suppression of the Arab Spring in Syria
Syria video released by Amnesty International “Images of unarmed civilians shot in the head help explain why there have been so many fatalities. Together with footage of soldiers celebrating deaths, they document what appears to be a ‘shoot to kill’ policy,” said...
Indignants at Syntagma – Greece
Following the Spanish los Indignados protests, a number of days ago a facebook page suggested a similar protest in Syntagma Square in Athens on the 25th of May, at 6pm. Similar events are occuring in Thessaloniki, Patras and Heraklion. The live feed (click the...
Class and Gender in Super-Injunctions
For the past three weeks, the media has been swamped with tales of superinjunctions. The press claim superinjunctions curtail freedom of speech, while celebrities and their lawyers argue that they are necessary to protect individual privacy. In my view, the claim to...
Ghost Manifesto – Spain’s Real Democracy Now
Items of agreement for the plural manifesto prepared during the morning of the 18th of May in Puerta del Sol. Those assembled in Puerta del Sol, aware that this is an action in progress and of resistance, have agreed to declare the following: After many years of...
Debtocracy
For the first time in Greece a documentary produced by the audience. “Debtocracy” seeks the causes of the debt crisis and proposes solutions, hidden by the government and the dominant media. www.debtocracy.gr
In Athens, austerity puts revolution back on the menu
What were the finance ministers of Germany, France and Greece thinking when they met each other at a Luxembourg castle for ‘top-secret’ dinner talks on the resurging Greek debt crisis last weekend? As their five-star banquet was being served, did they discuss the...
The Queen’s Irish Visit
The British Queen is visiting the Republic of Ireland, one hundred years since the last British monarch set foot on the shores. In this context, our friends at Irish Left Review have posted James Connolly's letter to the Irish Workers' movement, which is well worth...
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.