Fourth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Introduction

[Alonso Gurmendi is a Fellow in Human Rights and Politics at the London School of Economics & Political Science. He is also a contributing editor at Opinio Juris.]

[Sarah Zarmsky is a Lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast School of Law. She is also Deputy Managing Editor of Opinio Juris.]

It’s the last week of October and that means that the Pop Culture and International Law Symposium is BACK! We are extremely pleased to continue this time-honoured tradition of bringing together international law and movies, comic books, music, poetry, tv shows, and the like. 

This year, we are bringing you sixteen amazing contributions from all over the world. The Symposium will run three or four articles per day throughout this entire week. Today, Zuzanna Wojciak opens with an analysis of Godzilla as an environmental disaster – what can we learn about international environmental law from a giant radioactive lizard? Next, Matthew Parish studies the discourse of “precision strikes” in Apple TV’s Masters of the Air. Ernesto Hernández López wraps up the day by looking into TWAIL approaches to jurisdiction in Andor. 

On Tuesday, Paul P. Stewens analyses claims of genocide in The 100, Tracy Jerop Kimutai discusses the effect of anti-abortion songs on women’s rights in Africa, and Jack Provan explores Dune’s ‘Great Convention’ as an allegory of international law. 

Wednesday will begin with Carla Riera González’s analysis of The Hunger Games through the lens of international criminal law. Shannon Zimmerman continues by interrogating the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect in the context of Dr. Who’s attempts to fix injustices through time. Following this, Fatima Ahdash and Safaa Jaber engage with Rabea Eghbariah’s compelling arguments for conceiving Nakba as a distinct international crime through the perspective of Arab TV dramas. Wednesday ends with Laurence Teillet’s analysis of international humanitarian and criminal law in the context of EPIC: The Musical. 

On Thursday, Ilaria Infante explores reparations for gross human rights violations in allegory to the principle of Equivalent Exchange in the Japanese manga Fullmetal Alchemist. Then, in what is perhaps a first for international law analysis, Luis Mauricio Bulnes uses Charli XCX’s brat as an inspiration to explore Chilean Antarctic territorial claims. The day ends with Ramón Barreto Pirela looking into the right to a life project in the context of the film The Swimmers. 

The symposium will conclude onFriday, starting with Michael Randall’s analysis of the ethics and morals of drone warfare in the films Good Kill and Eye in the Sky, followed by Maria Pilar Llorens’ and Silvina Sánchez Mera’s exploration of the Argentinean icon Mafalda’s TWAILer worldview. 

The grand finale, though, is something special. Avid OJ readers may remember that back in 2021, during our first symposium, friend of the blog Nicolás Carrillo wrote a piece on how the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons could be used as a pedagogical tool to teach law students in fun, innovative ways. Role-playing games, Nicolás said back then, allow us to “explore and think about the law in terms of alternatives and thinking about our positive legal realities, and also to consider their everyday or possible impacts in empathetic ways and in dynamics of sensitization”. We always liked Nicolás’ idea, so when he came back to us proposing to put it to the test, we were delighted to say yes. 

This year’s closing act, therefore, will be our first ever Dungeons & Dragons playthrough. To pull this off, we gathered Academic Twitter’s bravest adventurers – Tamsin Paige, Alex Green, and Juliana de Carvalho – and, alongside Dungeon Master Nicolás Carrillo, set them off on a quest to investigate a tense border dispute, where trade caravans are mysteriously disappearing. We want to avoid spoilers, so for now this is all we will say. But we are very excited about it!

So, without further ado, we declare this year’s Pop Culture Symposium officially OPEN!