INTERNATIONAL LAW AND POLITICS Collaborative Research Network
LSA NEW ORLEANS
THEME 2016: THE GLOBAL LEGAL ORDER AND ITS ANTHROPOLOGIES
PROGRAMME
SPONSORS
SUMMARY
THU. 2/6: 8:15AM - 10:00AM
1) 'Law As…': Law, Method, History
2) International Environmental Law and the Global South
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3
Thu. 2/6: 10:15AM - 12:00PM
3) 'Law and Disorder in the Postcolony': Celebrating Ten Years in Print and Practice
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Thu. 2/6: 12:45PM - 2:30PM
4) Cold War Histories of International Law
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Thu. 2/6: 2:45PM - 4:30PM
5) International Law and Environmental Justice: The Intersections of Race, Gender, Poverty, and
Indigeneity
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Thu. 2/6: 4:45PM - 6:30PM
6) CRN Multiple Book Launch! Critical Engagements and Visions in International Law
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Fri. 3/6: 8:15AM - 10:00AM
7) Authority and Inspiration: Investigating Liminal Practices of International Law
8) Movements, Mobilities and the Law
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Fri. 3/6: 10:15AM - 12:00PM
9) Objects of International Law
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Fri. 3/6: 12:45PM - 2:30PM
10) International Law in Interaction: Actors, Orders, and Tactics Influencing International Law’s
Emancipatory Potential
11) Transnational Natural Resource Governance, Sovereignty and Human Rights
12) Outlaws of International Law
13) Foucault and the Politics of Rights
14) Law and Time
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11
Fri. 3/6: 2:45PM - 4:30PM
15) Vocabularies of Environmental Justice
16) International Law and Global Orders: Contested Practices and Identities
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Fri. 3/6: 4:45PM - 6:30PM
17) New Challenges in International Criminal Law and Transitional Justice
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13
Sat. 4/6: 8:15AM - 10:00AM
18) Praxis and the Global South
19) Rule of Law Ethnographies
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Sat. 4/6: 2:45PM - 4:30PM
20) Speaking Law’s Home: Law, Language and Anthropology
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15
Sat. 4/6: 4:45PM - 6:30PM
21) Street Bureaucracies and the Everyday of the Global (Dis)Order
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Sat. 4/6: 4:45PM - 6:30
22) The Legal Regulation of Structural Violence
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EVENTS
Thu. 2/6: 8:15AM - 10:00AM
1) 'Law As…': Law, Method, History
Session type: CRN Keynote Roundtable
Room: Galerie 2 (2nd floor)
Chair: Rose Parfitt (Melbourne/Kent)
Abstract: ‘Law As …’ is the umbrella title for a biennial symposium initiated by Professor
Christopher Tomlins in 2010. Over the past five years, its participants have worked to assemble
original configurations of historical, social scientific, literary, and legal scholarship in the service
of conceptual innovation in the analysis of law and the history of law. As its title suggests, this
project is of particular interest to socio-legal scholars. ‘Law As…’ positions itself as a challenge to
the particular mode of legal interdisciplinarity ('Law and…Development / Economics /
Literature…’ etc.) which seeks to understand more about "law" by juxtaposing it against a context
perceived as external, more in touch with "reality", and therefore potentially enlightening. "Law
and Society" is, of course, one of the most important and productive example of this approach.
As Tomlins and John Comaroff put it in their Afterword to the project's collection of essays,
published in the UC Irvine Law Review (2011), ‘“Law As…” identifies the early twentieth-century
… as the moment of invention of “law and…,” first mooted in Roscoe Pound's turn-of-thecentury distinction between “law in the books” and “law in action,” nurtured subsequently in the
bosom of realism, and thoroughly popularized by the law and society movement’.
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The project's particular concern is with legal history and with the ‘postmodernist’ turn to
historicism as contingency -- an approach that surveys ‘a past composed of an infinity of utterly
contextualized, utterly discrete phenomena – that is, an entirely indeterminate past’. Against this
insistence on ‘amputating’ the past from the present, allowing any posited causal relationship
between one and the other to be undone by the simple (‘critical’) mechanism of ever-more radical
contextualization, ‘Law As…’ draws on a variety of alternative counter-disciplinary
historiographies which all, in different ways, adopt an overtly materialist and more politicised
approach to the relationship between ‘past’ and ‘present’. As Tomlins and Comaroff put it,
quoting Walter Benjamin's Critique of Violence, ‘“Law As…” attempts to unearth “the moment
…when the origins of the present 'jut manifestly and fearsomely into existence”.’
This roundtable brings together a group ‘Law As…’ participants past, present and future to
discuss the objectives and scope of the project's methodological intervention, and is one of two
keynote sessions organised by the ‘International Law and Politics’ CRN. The CRN includes more
than 160 junior and senior scholars, teachers, researchers and practitioners working on issues
related to the politics of international legal thought, practice, method and history in institutions
across the Global North and South. Its aim is to create a space within which ongoing research
and collaboration in the broad area of international law and politics can be pursued, drawing
upon the widest possible variety of theoretical and empirical approaches including anthropology,
political science, history, political economy, sociology, international relations and cultural studies
in order to examine the current global (dis)order and its normative underpinnings. The CRN's
organisers and participants are therefore delighted to be presenting this roundtable as part of the
network's activities this year.
Participants: Kirsten Anker (McGill), John Comaroff (Harvard); Marianne Constable (UC, Berkeley),
Luis Eslava (Kent), Kunal Parker (Miami), Genevieve Painter (UC, Berkeley), Christopher Tomlins (UC,
Berkeley)
2) International Environmental Law and the Global South
Session type: Author Meets Reader (AMR) Salon Session
Room: Carondelet, Table 3
Authors: Sumudu Atapattu (Wisconsin) and Carmen Gonzalez (Seattle)
Chair: Sara Seck (Western)
Abstract: A decade after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, conflicts between rich and
poor nations (the North-South divide) continue to compromise efforts to protect the global
environment, leading to deadlocks in environmental treaty negotiations and non-compliance with
existing agreements. International Environmental Law and the Global South examines both the
historical origins of the North-South divide in European colonialism as well as its contemporary
manifestations in a range of issues, including food justice, energy justice, indigenous rights, trade,
investment, extractive industries, human rights, land grabs, natural disasters, hazardous waste, and
climate change. Born out of the recognition that global inequality and profligate consumerism
present threats to a sustainable planet, this book makes a unique contribution to international
environmental law by emphasizing the priorities and concerns of the states and peoples of the
global South. The readers for this book will address its contributions to several distinct areas of
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law, including environmental law, human rights law, environmental justice, international
economic law, and Third World and post-colonial approaches to international law.
Participants (readers): Rebecca Bratspies (CUNY), Sheila Foster (Fordham), Erika George (Utah),
Usha Natarajan (AUC), Stephanie Tai (Wisconsin)
Thu. 2/6: 10:15AM - 12:00PM
3) 'Law and Disorder in the Postcolony': Celebrating Ten Years in Print and Practice
Session type: CRN Keynote Roundtable
Room: Galerie 2 (2nd floor)
Chairs: Luis Eslava (Kent) and Rose Parfitt (Kent/Melbourne)
Abstract: Published in 2006 by University of Chicago Press, and edited by Jean Comaroff and
John Comaroff, Law and Disorder in the Postcolony began with a problem, a presumption and a
paradox. Its problem concerned the ubiquitous use of law in the postcolonies of Africa, Asia,
Europe, and Latin America all said then to be increasingly ‘disordered’. Its presumption was that
‘something [new] may be at issue’ in the effervescence of their different deployments of, and
challenges to, the law – something residing at the core of these ‘hypen-nated’ nations that
signalled a [new] conjuncture of ‘violence, sovereignty, il/legality [and] modernity’. That these
postcolonies seemed to be making ‘a fetish of the rule of law, of its languages and its practices, its
ways and means’ even as they continually mocked, mimicked, suspended, and sequestered the law
was the paradox at the core of the book. Today, ten years on, all three -- problem, presumption
and paradox -- appear more acute than ever. A celebration of this collection's anniversary, then, is
not only well deserved but also urgently needed.
The Global Financial Crisis, the increasingly internationalised civil war in Syria, the intervention in
Libya, the emergence of Islamic State, the frightening acceleration of global warming, the
European refugee crisis, the proliferation of piracy, the deadlock in Afghanistan, urban terrorist
attacks across the world, sharply escalating global inequalities within and between states, the
phenomenon of Western structural adjustment, the conflict in Ukraine – these are all new (or
dramatically more problematic) to the intervening decade since Law and Disorder in the Postcolony's
publication. All of them have been accompanied, at the same time, by legal responses which are
increasingly remapping geographies, making the postcolonial condition endemic to the world as a
whole. As this edited collection announced from the start, thinking to and from the postcolony is
crucial if we are to figure out what to make of these events. The analysis must begin from (rather
than simply ending with) postcolonies because, as Comaroff and Comaroff point out, ‘many of
the great tsunamis of the twenty-first century appear to be breaking first on their shores – or, if
not first, then in their most palpable, most hyperextended form – thence to reverberate around
the Northern Hemispheric cosmopoles’.
This roundtable brings together a group of the original contributors to Law and Disorder in the
Postcolony and some of the project's closest external collaborators to discuss and commemorate the
continuing relevance of this tremendous collection. The session will begin with a close
conversation between Eve Darian-Smith and John Comaroff, before broadening out to include
their other comrades.
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Participants: John Comaroff (Harvard), Sally Engle Merry (NYU), Rosalind C. Morris (Columbia), Lisa
Wedeen (Chicago)
Thu. 2/6: 12:45PM - 2:30PM
4) Cold War Histories of International Law
Session type: CRN Keynote Roundtable
Room: Galerie 2 (2nd floor)
Chair: Sundhya Pahuja (Melbourne)
Abstract: The Cold War is the most invoked, least theorised of international law’s historical
foundations and intellectual obsessions. The Cold War and ‘Cold War thinking’ have bequeathed
the conditions in which we live, yet in most international law literature, the Cold War appears as a
marker whose provenance or nature is rarely examined. This Roundtable will stage a conversation
based on a project being led by Pahuja, Simpson and Craven aiming to correct this gap in our
understandings of the history and nature of international law. Drawing together a range of
scholars, they are crafting a new research agenda in the field which outlines a coherent history and
conceptualisation of the relationship between international law and the Cold War. Their
hypothesis is that international law and the Cold War were ‘co-produced’ such that the 'Cold War'
was key to the formation of international law, and international law was central to ‘actualising' the
CW as a juridical object.
Participants: Ruth Buchanan (Osgoode Hall), Matt Craven (SOAS), Ben Golder (UNSW), Richard
Joyce (Monash), Boris Mamlyuk (Memphis), Charlotte Peevers (UTS), Gerry Simpson (LSE)
Thu. 2/6: 2:45PM - 4:30PM
5) International Law and Environmental Justice: The Intersections of Race, Gender, Poverty, and
Indigeneity
Session type: Panel
Room: Galerie 2 (2nd floor)
Chair: Sheila Foster (Fordham)
Abstract: Environmental justice has become the rallying cry of subordinated communities all
over the world who are disparately burdened by environmental degradation. Emerging in
response to the concentration of environmental hazards in low-income communities of color in
the United States, the discourse of environmental justice has been deployed in a variety of
environmental social justice struggles, including transnational mobilizations for climate justice,
water justice, food justice, and energy justice. Some scholars refer to these grassroots
environmental movements as 'the environmentalism of the poor.' While the language of
environmental justice is morally compelling and has given voice to marginalized communities,
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critics charge that the emphasis on poverty obscures environmental injustice based on the
intersections among poverty, gender, race, and indigeneity. Furthermore, grassroots struggles for
climate justice, water justice, food justice, and energy justice have sometimes operated in isolation
from one another despite their many synergies. This panel seeks to break new ground by
emphasizing the multi-dimensional, intersectional nature of environmental injustice and the crosscutting forms of oppression that unite these struggles. The goal is to develop a more robust
conception of environmental justice through consideration of innovative domestic and
international laws that bring to the fore previously under-theorized dimensions of environmental
injustice.
Participants: Dayna Nadine Scott (Osgoode Hall), Carmen Gonzalez (Seattle), Sara Seck (Western),
Sumudu Atapattu (Wisconsin)
Paper Titles:
*Atapattu, International Law, Environmental Justice, and the Rights of Women and Girls in
Mining; Climate Justice and Vulnerable Groups: Synergies, Strategies and Challenges;
*Gonzalez, Environmental Racism, American Exceptionalism, and International Law;
*Scott, 'Sacrifice Zones' in the Green Energy Economy;
* Seck, International Law, Environmental Justice, and the Rights of Women and Girls in Mining
Thu. 2/6: 4:45PM - 6:30PM
6) CRN Multiple Book Launch! Critical Engagements and Visions in International Law
Session type: CRN Book Introduction Session
Room: Galerie 2 (2nd floor)
Chair: Sundhya Pahuja (Melbourne)
Participants: Sumudu Attapatu, Olivia Barr, Nick Cheesman, Luis Eslava, Ben Golder, Carmen
G. Gonzales, Markus Gunneflo, Vanja Hamzić, James Parker
Books and Authors:
*Attapatu, Human Rights Approaches to Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities (Routledge, 2015)
*Barr, A Jurisprudence of Movement: Common Law, Walking, Unsettling Place (Routledge, 2016)
*Cheesman, Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar's Courts Make Law and Order (CUP, 2015)
*Eslava, Local Space, Global Life: The Everyday Operation of International Law and Development (CUP,
2015)
*Golder, Foucault and the Politics of Rights (Stanford University Press, 2015)
*Gonzales et al (eds), International Environmental Law and the Global South (CUP, 2015)
*Gunneflo, Targeted Killing: A Legal and Political History (CUP, 2016)
*Hamzić, Sexual and Gender Diversity in the Muslim World: History, Law and Vernacular Knowledge (I. B.
Tauris, 2015)
*Parker, Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi (OUP, 2015)
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Fri. 3/6: 8:15AM - 10:00AM
7) Authority and Inspiration: Investigating Liminal Practices of International Law
Session type: Panel
Room: Studio 4 (2nd floor)
Chair: Geoffrey Gordon (T.M.C. Asser Instituut)
Discussant: Geoffrey Gordon (T.M.C. Asser Instituut)
Abstract: The inspirational here represents ends presented as obtaining outside of international
legal authority, unattainable within its bounds, mobilizing recourse beyond systemic-dogmatic
limits of IL. We investigate the historical context of cases that include appeals to images such as
common heritages and global consensus, and others such as romanticized localities and technical
distinctions. In some, inspiration looks like an instrumental device, an aggrandizing maneuver for
other purposes. In others, it appears a deeply held conviction. We investigate how these
arguments have been made and evidence of how they have worked, raising questions about
audience and field, material contingencies that enable or constrain inspirational appeals, and what
policy makers communicate by them. To do so, we look at supporting performances,
technologies, knowledge practices and codes. Observing these practices at the disciplinary limits
of international law, we explore the politics of these maneuvers.
Participants: Surabhi Ranganathan (Cambridge), Lianne Boer (VU Amsterdam), Amin Parsa (Lund),
Sofia Stolk (VU Amsterdam), Renske Vos (Edinburgh), Marieke de Hoon (VU Amsterdam)
Paper Titles:
*Ranganthan, ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ and ‘Common Heritage of Mankind’: Global Commons,
Seminal Interventions, and the Fascinations of Interdisciplinarity;
*Boer, The Auto-Construction of Authority in Academic Presentations and Lectures: Taking a
Closer Look at the Cyberwar Debate;
*Parsa, The Principle of Distinction as Visuality: Targeting in Counterinsurgency;
*Stolk, Imagining Scenes of Mass Atrocity from Afar: The (Re)construction of Place and Space in
the Opening Statements at the International Criminal Court;
*Vos, The Authority to Inspire: EU Crisis Management at the Limits of Discipline;
*de Hoon, Inspired by Destruction: The Construction of International Criminal Justice
8) Movements, Mobilities and the Law
Session type: Panel
Room: Salon D (3rd floor)
Chairs: Olivia Barr (Melbourne), Rose Parfitt (Melbourne)
Abstract: A 'mobility turn' is spreading and gaining traction in the social sciences. Animated by
metaphors, such as flow and liquidity, the 'new mobilities' paradigm explores the spatial, temporal
and material movements of people, objects, and bodies in order to confront a world that is
constantly in motion. This salon session explores law's various responses to a world that is no
longer frozen in fixed, static and bounded ways. Working through specific case studies, papers in
this session examine how law is connected to mobility. How does law respond to actual or
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imagined movement, especially if movement only makes sense when it is embedded in particular
societies, cultures, politics and histories? How does law provide 'moorings' to slow down, regulate
or 'make sticky' particular kinds of movement?
Participants: Anita Lam (York), Sarah Marusek (Hawaii)
Paper Titles:
*Lam, Blowing winds, flowing waters: Feng shui, mobilities and the law;
*Marusek, The Dynamic Landscape: Fluid Materiality of Law and Place
Fri. 3/6: 10:15AM - 12:00PM
9) Objects of International Law
Session Type: Panel
Room: Studio 7 (2nd floor)
Chairs: Rose Parfitt (Melbourne/Kent), Luis Eslava (Kent)
Abstract: We take law's own account of itself too seriously: that it is organised jurisdictionally,
according to the rigors of doctrine, evidence and other specifically legal techniques. This panel
looks past this orthodoxy to some of the many objects that cut across jurisdictions to animate
legal thought, practice and experience globally. Some of these objects are familiar, but their
significance under-appreciated. The Typewriter, The Signature and The Gavel: in different ways
each of these has played a key role in organising law's conduct internationally. But the panel also
explores less familiar objects of legal thought and practice - The Walker, The Ghost - which are
far more important to the contemporary experience and dissemination of law than we
acknowledge. If this panel reads law's ‘objectivity’ broadly, that is quite deliberate. Our
experiences of and attachments to law are the product of all these objects and more. The question
is: how?
Participants: Tanja Aalberts (VU Amsterdam), Olivia Barr (Melbourne), Jessie Hohmann (Queen
Mary), James Parker (Melbourne), Natasha Wheatley (Sydney)
Paper Titles:
*Aalberts, Sovereignty Marks: Indigenous Signatures as Legal Technology;
*Barr, The Walker;
*Hohmann, The 'Treaty 8' Typewriter and the Objects of International Legal Authority;
*Parker, The Gavel;
*Wheatley, The Ghost and Other Half-Persons
Fri. 3/6: 12:45PM - 2:30PM
…
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Fri. 3/6: 12:45PM - 2:30PM
10) International Law in Interaction: Actors, Orders, and Tactics Influencing International Law’s
Emancipatory Potential
Session type: Panel
Room: Studio 3 (2nd floor)
Chair: Jason Beckett (AUC)
Abstract: This panel explores the impact of international law's relationships with other systems
of ordering and avenues of change on the emancipatory potential of international law. Discussion
of international law's emancipatory potential typically examines international law as a fixed entity
in isolation from, or in competition with, alternative systems of ordering and avenues of social
change. In contrast, these papers investigate ways in which international law continuously
interacts with, and is influenced by, these alternative systems and avenues. The papers explore
examples of outside influences on conceptions of criminal responsibility in international law;
networks of actors and artefacts that determine the legitimacy of international criminal claims;
international private lawyers pursuing mechanisms abandoned by NGOs; and social movements
combining international law with street tactics.
Participants: Gilat Bachar (Stanford), Honor Brabazon (Toronto), Paul Clark (Garden Court
Chambers), Heidi Matthews (SOAS)
Paper Titles:
*Clark, Neither Feared Nor Loved: In Search of International Criminal Law’s Constituency;
*Brabazon, Riots and Human Rights: Black Lives Matter and New Approaches to International
Law;
*Matthews, Theorising Collective Responsibility in International Law;
*Bachar, When Lawyers Go to War: A Study of the Role of Lawyers in Palestinians’ Civil
Litigation against Israel
11) Transnational Natural Resource Governance, Sovereignty and Human Rights
Session type: Panel, cross-listed with the International Research Collaborative (IRC) on Natural
Resource Governance, Inequality and Human Rights.
Room: Studio 4 (2nd floor)
Chair and Discussant: Carmen Gonzalez (Seattle)
Abstract: This panel explores the increasingly transnational nature of resource governance. It
addresses the tensions that arise as 'global' norms manifest in 'local' sites and the global legal
connections that organize the world-wide circulation and production of resources. The papers in
this panel highlight the ways such transnational governance structures both reflect and reproduce
global inequalities. They also investigate where different possibilities for resistance and the
promotion of environmental and social justice might lie. This panel also addresses the contested
contours of sovereignty over natural resources, from both a theoretical and more concrete
perspective, highlighting the pertinent domestic governance struggles over resources in the Third
World. The paper by Amaya Alvez tackles the current Chilean constitutional process from the
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perspective of the political participation of indigenous peoples, looking at the limits imposed by
international norms such as ILO 169 Covenant and how it has been co-opted by private
transnational interests. Julia Dehm examines how the ways in which we understand nature as a
'resource' is already the product of a specific epistemological paradigm and of particular modes of
authority and of law. She suggests that in order to develop just and decolonial frameworks for
'natural resource governance' socio-legal scholars need to pay more attention to the role of law in
making 'nature' legible as a 'resource' and push towards more radical, pluralist, transnational ways
of thinking about the legal organization of nature. Matias Guiloff's paper examines the Chilean
water market case and offers theoretical observations about property rights over natural
resources. He argues that the very existence and subsistence of such rights is grounded on
property's social function, namely what is convenient for society at any given time.Michael
Riegner examines the confluence and collision of local and global norms in discourses on
forestry, climate change, and property rights through a socio-legal study of the internationally
supported 'Terra Legal' program in Brazil. He shows how this project's effects differed from its
intentions and uses this project to argue for the need to see development projects as sites of the
'everyday operation' of international law and as sites of global and local legal pluralism. In
conclusion, the paper by Bruce M Wilson, and co-authors Camila Gianella, and Lara Côrtes,
offers an analysis of water rights-related cases decided by Constitutional or Superior courts and
their impact on the ability of marginalized people to protect their access to clean water in Latin
America.
Participants: Amaya Alvez Marin (Concepción), Julia Dehm (Texas, Austin), Matias Guiloff (Diego
Portales), Michael Reigner Olivera (Humboldt), Bruce Wilson (UCF)
Paper Titles:
*Alvez, Sovereignty over Natural Resources in Chile: Indigenous Claims Neutralized through
Judicialization;
*Dehm, Pluralizing Transnational Resource Governance;
*Guiloff, The Rehabilitation of Aquatic Ecosystems in Chile and its Implications for the Right to
Private Property: Property as Social Function;
*Reigner, Can Law Save the Forest? Legal Traces in the Brazilian Amazon - Localizing Global
Norms in the 'Terra Legal' Reform Project;
*Wilson, Litigating Water as a Human Right: An Effective Strategy in Latin America? (co-authored
by Lara Cortes, CMI & Camila Gianella, Bergen)
12) Outlaws of International Law
Session type: Panel
Room: Studio 6 (2nd floor)
Chair: Rose Parfitt (Kent/Melbourne)
Discussant: Gerry Simpson (LSE)
Abstract: This session aims to consider a set of figures and actors at the margins of international
law. We call them outlaws, even though international law purports to include them, by
constituting them through its categories and regulating them accordingly. We look at pirates,
migrants, incorrigible states, and criminal rebel groups. What they have in common is their
elective affinities to the principles the international legal order holds dear. Indeed, they often exist
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at the borders of being recognised and protected, but then fall foul and are thus excluded and
targeted. Their relationship to the international legal order is accordingly complicated and their
inclusion serves the ultimate purpose of their exclusion.
Participants: Ioannis Kalpouzos (City), Itamar Mann (Georgetown Law), Sherally Munshi (Princeton)
Paper Titles:
*Kalpouzos, Criminal Rebel Groups: Labelling-Punishing-Targeting;
*Mann, The Universal Boatperson
*Munshi, Exclusion and Empire
13) Foucault and the Politics of Rights
Session type: Author Meets Reader (AMR)
Room: Salon E (3rd floor)
Author: Ben Golder (UNSW)
Chair: Jonathan Simon (UC Berkeley)
Abstract: "Foucault and the Politics of Rights" (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015)
focuses on Michel Foucault's late work on rights in order to address broader questions about the
politics of rights in the contemporary era. As several commentators have observed, something
quite remarkable happens in this late work. In his early career, Foucault had been a great critic of
the liberal discourse of rights. Suddenly, from about 1976 onward, he makes increasing appeals to
rights in his philosophical writings, political statements, interviews, and journalism. He not only
defends their importance; he argues for rights new and as-yet-unrecognized. Does Foucault
simply revise his former positions and endorse a liberal politics of rights? Ben Golder proposes
an answer to this puzzle, which is that Foucault approaches rights in a spirit of creative and
critical appropriation. He uses rights strategically for a range of political purposes that cannot be
reduced to a simple endorsement of political liberalism. Golder develops this interpretation of
Foucault's work while analyzing its shortcomings and relating it to the approaches taken by a
series of current critical thinkers also engaged in considering the place of rights in contemporary
politics, including Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Jacques Rancière, in the context of
discussions about human rights, 'relational rights', the right to die and the death penalty.
Participants (readers): Marianne Constable (UC Berkeley); Eve Darian-Smith (UC Santa Barbara);
Martin Krygier (UNSW); George Pavlich (Alberta)
14) Law and Time
Session type: Panel
Room: Balcony L (4th Floor)
Chair/Discussant: Renisa Mawani (UBC)
Abstract: Law and Time reflects on the various modes in which time--as history, as precedent, as
"development," to name just a few--presents itself as a feature of the legal landscape. As a point
of orientation, this feature is neither stable nor still, and for that reason it offers a compelling lens
through which to view the way in which law confronts its limits.
Participants: Jill Stauffer (Haverford College), Sara Kendall (Kent), Karl Shoemaker (Wisconsin)
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Paper Titles:
*Stauffer, How Time Passes in Law;
*Kendall, Humanitarian Complicity: Law, Time and the Politics of Rescue;
*Shoemaker, Law and Time
Fri. 3/6: 2:45PM - 4:30PM
15) Vocabularies of Environmental Justice
Session type: Panel, cross-listed with the International Research Collaborative (IRC) on Natural
Resource Governance, Inequality and Human Rights.
Room: Studio 4 (2nd floor)
Chair: Karen Engle (Texas, Austin)
Discussant: Sumudu Atapattu (Wisconsin)
Abstract: This panel analyzes international law's shaping of environmental justice claims. Papers
trace how legal discourse enables or constrains the ability of particular actors to articulate
grievance and demand redress, and authors participate in discourse contestation to enable
integration of heretofore silenced voices and worldviews. By considering the enclosure of the
biotic commons into enclaves of intellectual property, Chandra argues that a new ethics of
sustainable development and scientific innovation is reframing the commons , with a resultant
change in how law understands the moral economy of the commons. Kotsakis revisits the history
and political economy of the Biodiversity Convention, imagining the different legal and political
structures that could have materialized, and on this basis calls for a critical international
environmental law that abandons the veneration of rules and institutions and engages instead with
the political project of international environmental law. Natarajan considers the relationship
between the growth of rights-based discourse, ever-expanding fossil-fuel dependency, and the
systemic devaluation of the non-human, arguing that human rights is antithetical to
environmental justice and constitutes a barrier to such justice claims being meaningfully heard or
addressed by international law. Kukovec develops a conceptual understanding of law and
governance as a constant (hierarchical) struggle among people. He counterpoises this
understanding with ideas of ecological justice in order to develop new ways of thinking about the
distributional impacts of law and the role of law in social change.
Participants: Rajshree Chandra (Delhi), Andreas Kotsakis (Oxford Brookes), Damjan Kukovec
(Harvard), Usha Natarajan (AUC)
Paper Titles:
*Chandra, Old Tragedies, New Ethics: Reframing the Moral Economy of Commons;
*Kotsakis, Towards a Global Political Economy of Environmental Conflict: Some Remarks from
the History of Biodiversity
* Kukovec, Hierarchies as Law and Global Governance
*Natarajan, The Marriage of Human Rights and the Environment: From Mutual Convenience to
Irreconcilable Differences
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16) International Law and Global Orders: Contested Practices and Identities
Session type: Panel.
Room: Studio 6 (2nd floor)
Chair/discussant: Jothie Rajah (American Bar Foundation)
Abstract: What are the politics of invoking, asserting, evading, and challenging the rule of law in
specific places? The papers locate contestations about the rule of law in Egypt, Guantanamo Bay,
The Philippines, Qatar, and East Germany within distinct context. Drawing upon a diverse array
of approaches and sources, they allow us to reconsider the histories and politics behind claims
about the rule of law.
Participants: Barry Collins (East London), Safiyah Rochelle (Carleton), John Strawson (East London),
Christiane Wilke (Carleton)
Paper titles:
*Collins, Self-determination and the Colonial Legacy in International Law
*Rochelle, 13 Years of Solitude: (Re)Locating Law, Violence, and Resistance in Guantanamo Bay’s
Hunger Strikes;
*Wilke, East of the Rule of Law: Spatialized Invocations of the Rule of Law in post-unification
Germany;
*Strawson, Colonizing Jihad: A Dangerous Occupation
Fri. 3/6: 4:45PM - 6:30PM
17) New Challenges in International Criminal Law and Transitional Justice
Session type: Panel.
Room: Studio 6 (2nd floor)
Chair & Discussant: Sara Kendall (Kent)
Abstract: This panel will look at legal, social and political issues that remain overlooked in
scholarship on international criminal and transitional justice. Governments around the world
continue to create tribunals and truth commissions to redress mass violence and prosecute
perpetrators of abuse despite ample evidence of their limitations. There are growing concerns
about whether or to what extent these bodies fulfill their ambitious mandates to aid victims and
foster rule of law both domestically and internationally. The participants on this panel will address
several of these concerns, including which types of violence reach the international justice agenda,
how courts address the issue of incitement to violence, how victims of mass violence view
international criminal courts, and the politics of creating truth commissions to redress statesponsored violence.
Participants: Stephen Cody (UC, Berkeley), Alex Koening (UC, Berkeley), Zinaida Miller (McGill),
Jamie Rowen (UMass, Amherst), Richard Ashby Wilson (Connecticut)
Paper Titles:
*Miller, Economic Rights, Crimes, and Wrongs: Revisiting the Critique of Transitional Justice;
*Wilson, Propaganda On Trial: Expert Knowledge in the International Criminal Courtroom;
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*Koening & Cody, Rethinking Procedural Justice: Victim Participation in International Criminal
Trials;
*Dinsmore, Seeking Truth in Times of Conflict and Transition: Gross and Systematic Violations at
the American and European Human Rights Tribunals;
*Rowen, Searching for Truth in the Transnational Justice Movement
Sat. 4/6: 8:15AM - 10:00AM
18) Praxis and the Global South
Session type: Roundtable.
Room: Studio 4 (2nd floor)
Chairs: Usha Natarajan (AUC)
Abstract: The global South characterises a condition brought about by various forces of history
including colonialism, imperialism and capitalism. It describes a globalised relationship between
the colonised and coloniser. An important aspect of the term global South is the recognition that
there are multitudes of claims in various spaces. In particular, the possibility of a south in the
North and a north in the South is important. Our roundtable, while taking stock of this
complicated milieu, asks each participant to contemplate the significance of one or more of the
texts identified below on their respective scholarship, and explore the various new vistas and
opportunities for praxis in the global South.
Participants: Tyler McCreary (UBC), Vasuki Nesiah (NYU), John Reynolds (NUI Maynooth), Adrian
Smith (Carleton), Sujith Xavier (Windsor)
19) Rule of Law Ethnographies
Session type: Panel.
Room: Studio 6 (2nd floor)
Chair: Tamir Mustafa (Simon Fraser)
Abstract: Like other preeminent political ideals in the world today, the rule of law encounters a
tension between the overwhelmingly Euro-Atlantic histories, texts, and perspectives that inhere to
its dominant usages, and the striking fluidity of its meanings and relationships with other ideals as
it travels around the world. While rule-of-law orthodoxy insists upon fixity and certainty,
demanding that the term be treated as if it were relatively unambiguous and settled in its
meanings, attributes, and associations, wherever it goes, the rule of law seems to defy these
expectations, being reshaped, reinvented and reimagined for multitudinous purposes.
Ethnography offers rich resources with which to examine the problems and paradoxes of 'the
rule of law'. Through fine-grained studies of rule-of-law ideas and practices, we prise open the
rule of law to understand how it has succeeded in transcending time and borders not by
remaining impervious to contingency, but by attending to it; not by resisting encounters with
hostile ideas, but by embracing them. In so doing, Rule of Law Ethnographies yokes the deeply
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reflective inquiries of ethnography to the politically potent complexities of this compound
category: rule of law.
Participants: Nick Cheesman (ANU), Jinee Lokaneeta (Drew), Mark Fathi Massoud (UC, Santa Cruz),
Jothie Rajah (American Bar Foundation), Jeffrey Sachs (Simon Fraser)
Paper Titles:
*Cheesman, Thinking and talking about the rule of law in hostile places
*Lokaneeta, New Police Studies and the Art of Policing;
*Massoud, Building an Islamic Rule of Law: Divided Legal cultures in Somalia, 1884-2014;
*Rajah, Rule of Law Discourses: Abstractions and Silences in the WJP’s Rule of Law Index;
*Sachs, Technically Speaking: Law and Revolution in Contemporary Egypt
Sat. 4/6: 2:45PM - 4:30PM
20) Speaking Law’s Home: Law, Language and Anthropology
Panel type: Roundtable
Room: Studio 6 (2nd floor)
Chair: Genevieve Painter (UC, Berkeley) and Vanja Hamzić (SOAS)
Abstract: This roundtable hosts a meeting of home law, and language. We aim to put the familiar
and loquacious couples-law–language, law–place, language–home-into a three-way encounter. The
legal technicality of 'jurisdiction' invites this conversation, as the word for determining 'the home'
of a legal dispute emanates from the Latin ius dicere-to speak the law. Who or what speaks when
law speaks, and who or what remains silent? How does the speech of law make some 'at home',
'settled' or 'at rest' and some 'in exile', 'homeless' or 'restless'? Does the law speak in multiple
languages, and if so, are those languages mutually intelligible? Does translation across languages
permit the law to become 'at home' elsewhere, or is translation proof of the jurisdictional line
between the 'foreign' and the 'proper'? Who inhabits the law's language(s), and how and why?
How does this speech migrate across scale (from 'local' to 'global') and across space (from one
'jurisdiction' to another)? What stories do ethnographies of law tell, and how? And, whose laws
are speaking? What homes and habituations do such stories invoke, awake or revoke? Is it
possible that stories about place generate the law (rather than the law's first speech describing an
already known place of application)? What is happening when we hear stories about law, about
others and about ourselves from the archives?
This roundtable invites academic encounters on legal homes, embodiments and practices of
language that law can speak and understand. The roundtable attends to silences and mutisms that
such linguistic acts can impose on real and imagined 'subjects' and 'objects' of law. Our goal is,
also, to engage with both 'oral' and 'written' repositories of legal homecoming, in lives past and
present. In doing so, we question our sensibilities towards practices of research that involve such
repositories, especially with regards to the difference in semantics, syntax and semiotics
encountered in storytelling, courtrooms, classrooms, archives and other homes of legality.
Participants: Kirsten Anker (McGill), Jessica Hallenbeck (UBC), Justin Richland (Chicago)
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Sat. 4/6: 4:45PM - 6:30PM
21) Street Bureaucracies and the Everyday of the Global (Dis)Order
Session type: Panel.
Room: Studio 6 (2nd floor)
Chair: Lina Buchely (Icesi)
Discussant: Juan José Fernández (Icesi)
Abstract: This panel joins four legal ethnography studies that enquire about the collective and
transnational construction of symbols and legal narratives, as well as the realities that such
collective imaginaries materialize and their relationship with the street level bureaucracy. The role
of law is analyzed by the daily operation of street level bureaucrats that define, while operating the
law, the meaning of different public policies (indigenous rights, sexual and reproductive rights
provision, justice administration, transport system). By different paths we are going to construct
the meaning of the indeterminacy of law as a manifestation of the street level bureaucracies and
the everyday of the global (dis)order.
Participants: Lina Buchely (Icesi), Maria Victoria Castro (del Norte), Catalina del Pilar Mejia (Los
Andes/Libre), Maria Cecilia Riegner Oliveria (Catholic U Sao Paulo)
Paper Titles:
*Buchely & Castro, Legal Geographies in the Contexts in the Colombian Urban Contexts: On the
Reaction between Law, Space, and Power;
*Mejia, The Justice (Des)order before the Boom; Urban Ethnicity, Multicultural Policy, and City:
The case of the Uitoto Indigenous Council
*Oliveira, Visual Cartographies of Poverty in Brazil – Securitizing the Poor through Social Street
Level Bureaucracies
Sat. 4/6: 4:45PM - 6:30
22) The Legal Regulation of Structural Violence
Session type: Panel.
Room: Studio 4 (2nd floor)
Chair: Usha Natarajan (AUC)
Abstract: This session explores how structural tendencies that exist in law facilitate violence and
exploitation. Through different issues and angles, the papers look at how law is quietly – and
often unintentionally – framed and employed in ways that are conducive to various forms of
exploitation. This session examines how accusations of illegality in one area distract attention
from legalized plunder in others. Despite arguably good intentions, structural tendencies in law
forego real challenges to, for example, the flow of resources from developing to developed
countries and the continued privatization, financialization, and marketization of common goods.
The key objective of this session is to bring to light the more obscure, but powerful and resistant,
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ways in which law upholds and reinforces forms of exploitation and violence. It is to shed light
on the realm of functioning legality under the spectacular dysfunction of international law.
Participants: Jason Beckett (AUC), Anna Chadwick (EUI), Ali Malik (York)
Paper Titles:
*Beckett, Love and Loathing: Distorted Images in the European Mirror;
*Chadwick, Food and Financial Crisis and Speculative Excesses: Wither Regulation?;
*Malik, Between Structural Violence and Everyday Resistance: Towards a Global Socio-legal
Approach
*Saab, Anthropogenic Hunger: Climate-Ready Seeds and the Pyramid of Assumptions in
International Law.
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