CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Alt-McWorld: Tommy Robinson’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ Rally, May 2026
Unite the Kingdom was a day for wearing St Georges flags that combined with the saturation demonising of Muslims and migrants. This from one of the keynote speakers, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, leader of the anti-transgender Party of Women: “It's not too late to get Islam out of our classrooms. It's not too late to get Islam out of that building [pointing at the Houses of Parliament]. And it's not too late to get Islam out of …..” and so on. To imagine the word Islam replaced above by another religious minority is to also get an insight into an order of the presently permissible. The Far Right displaced the mid-May Nakba day commemoration from Parliament Square and Whitehall, a decision by Sir Mark Rowley, head of the MET police. The streets around Whitehall are littered with cans of Stella. The McDonald's at Charing Cross is rammed, every seat has someone draped with a George Cross. The staff are all visibly migrants, or the children of migrants,...
ARTICLES
The (Dis)Entanglement of Method, Methodology and Epistemology
Sandra Harding (1987) did not believe feminists should focus too much of their discussion on methodology, but instead focus on the ‘good’ research that was being done. Harding’s position does not stem from any coyness towards the methodological ‘achievements’ made by...
The ‘Joy’ of Methodology
The soul-crushing mind-numbing gut-wrenching heart-breaking “joy” of methodology. I was never taught me-tho-do-lo-gy. Whatever that is. Isn’t the method just 1. Idea, 2. Struggle, 3. Word vomit? That’s how I do it. I wonder, what if? What if I want to be inspired by...
The Joy of Methodology: A Blog Carnival
For many researchers, methodology and joy don’t belong in the same sentence. Legal researchers in particular often seem to place methods-talk somewhere between irritating impediment and unbridgeable chasm. Some of these anxieties are well founded: law school legal...
Brazil: Warning to Democratic Navigation
On the 8th of this month, a week after the inauguration of President Lula da Silva, an event took place in Brasília that only took by surprise those who did not want to know, or had no way of knowing, about its widely disseminated preparation on social networks. The...
Open letter to President Lula da Silva
Dear President Lula da Silva, When I visited you in prison on August 30, 2018, in the brief time that the visit lasted I experienced a whirlwind of ideas and emotions that remain as vivid today as they were then. A short time before, we had been together at the World...
The Revolutionary Potential of Transnational Social Security Law: Lessons from Rosa Luxemburg
‘It cannot be denied that the direct cause leading the popular masses into the socialist movement is precisely the “unjust” mode of distribution characteristic of capitalism’ (Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution) ‘While they're standing in the welfare...
The Luxemburgian Trial of Rupture
‘Militarismus auf der Anklagebank’ © akg-images ‘Darling, imagine, how wonderful! Charges have been brought against me by the war minister von Falkenhayn… Imagine, what kinds of evidence one can bring forward, and make reparations for what the donkeys in the Reichstag...
‘Pushed into the Burning Desert’: German ‘Reparations’ to the Herero Through a Luxemburgian Lens
It is a sign of Rosa Luxemburg’s prescience and far-sightedness as a scholar and intellectual that a genocide that was ignored by most of the world, the German genocide of 80% of the Herero population of South-West Africa (now Namibia) of the early 20th century, did...
Rosa Luxemburg’s Self-Determination & Feminist Legal Thought
"As such so long as imperialistic world policies determine and regulate the inner and other outer life of the nation, there can be no ‘national self-determination’ either in war or peace. "(Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of German Social Democracy (1915)) Rosa...
Domination is More than Conquest: Rosa Luxemburg’s View from Partitioned Poland
In remarking upon the international legal status of lands acquired by the British Empire, John Westlake, in many ways the quintessential Victorian jurist, declared India to be ‘a peculiar case of conquest, operating by assumption and acquiescence’.[1] He...
The New Form of Capitalist Militarism: The Permanent State of Exception
Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration – a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that...
Accumulation and Jurisdiction
One of Rosa Luxemburg’s great contributions was her insistence that capitalism, even beyond its prehistory, remains far from the realm of peaceful competition. In fact she famously argued the contrary; that violence only grows with the development of global...
‘A few not too troublesome restrictions’: Humanitarianism, Solidarity, Anti-militarism, Peace
What might Rosa Luxemburg’s thinking help us see about humanitarian efforts? What might it reveal for our understanding of the work of international law in both restraining and allowing organised violence, as well as responding to its humanitarian consequences? Within...
Emptying the bottom of the sea: Capital accumulation in the cavities of international law
Birutė Nomeda Stankūnienė, “Emptiness” (courtesy of the artist) Back in September, when the United Kingdom was getting used to a new Prime Minister, a seemingly minor piece of news went unnoticed by the public at large. ‘An obscure UN agency okayed the first...
Foreclosed Temporalities: Imperialism and International Criminal Law
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has been widely denounced for its prosecution of exclusively African defendants as an instrument of imperialism and neo-colonialism. The conception of imperialism even in the critical accounts, however, remains imprecise and...
Rosa Luxemburg and the Imperialism of Money
International monetary and currency relations are among the most glaring manifestations of imperial power in contemporary society. Money is necessarily a crucial attribute of state sovereignty and yet power over money is not equally shared. As one moves from...
Introduction: Rosa Luxemburg and International Law
By Christine Schwöbel-Patel and Serena Natile[1] 2021 marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Rosa Luxemburg: a revolutionary theorist and political activist, whose work has provided important political economy critiques of imperialism, capitalism,...
Traditions of Critique: Gramsci, Buttigieg and James Joyce
Translator’s Introduction It is, I believe necessary to rescue Joyce from the industry he created. I don’t know of any other writer who who has given employment to so many scholars with the possible exception of Shakespeare, who has had a longer run at it. Joyce...
COP27: Planet Ransom
‘No State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of the protection of fossil fuel capital, or any claim for losses incurred due to decarbonisation; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.’ Prospects for this...
On the Vanishing of Ecologies: Latour and Global Destinies Imagined from Brazil
This article was written prior to the results of the elections in Brazil. Be not the one who debunks but the one who assembles, not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naive believers but the one who offers arenas in which to gather. Bruno Latour...
Brazil: Between Democracy and an Ongoing Coup
Last Sunday (October, 30) it became clear that a coup d'état is underway in Brazil. It is a coup of a new kind whose course is not substantially affected by the outcome of the elections. Only its pace may be. It is a coup that began to be set in motion in 2014 with...
