In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Symposium on Rewriting Histories of the Use of Force: What Narratives Do

16 Feb

[Ingo Venzke is a Professor at the University of Amsterdam.] ‘This workshop where ideals are fabricated—it seems to me just to stink of lies.’Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (2007 [1887]), §I.14 It is a common belief that international law had little to say on the legality of the use of force before the First World War. A ‘narrative of indifference’ holds that...

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16 Feb

[Miriam Bak McKenna is Associate Professor of Law and Global Governance at Roskilde University, School of Social Science and Business. Her book Reckoning with Empire: Self-Determination in International Law (Brill) was released in December 2022.] By now it is perhaps axiomatic to assert that the historical narratives surrounding international law are rather murky at best. As the canon of texts revisiting and critiquing...

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13 Feb

[Dr Tibisay Morgandi is Assistant Professor of International Energy Law at Queen Mary University of London and the author of State Energy Agreements (CUP, forthcoming 2023). The views expressed in this paper are the author’s alone.] Introduction Energy - in the form of gas, nuclear and electricity - has in several different ways played a significant role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Energy...

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12 Feb

[Natasa Mavronicola is Professor of Human Rights Law at Birmingham Law School.] ‘it is the position of the State Party that, the acts complained of have neither the required level of intensity or cruelty nor the impermissible purpose to permit them to be defined as torture. Further, the acts complained of do not meet the standard so as to fall within...

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08 Feb

[Kate Pundyk is the former Open Source Investigation Lead at the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab and previously worked at the Berkeley Human Rights Center. She is currently studying at the Oxford Internet Institute on a Rhodes Scholarship.] Author’s note: I am grateful to Adriano Belisario and Jorge Ruiz Reyes for their conversations conceptualizing this article, as well as those who agreed...

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30 Jan

To close this symposium on the life and work of Judge Cançado Trindade, the editors of Afronomicslaw, Opinio Juris and Agenda Estado de Derecho had the opportunity to interview the recently appointed and also Latin American Judge Leonardo Nemer Caldeira Brant in December 2022. The conversation focuses on the impact of Cançado Trindade's scholarship, case law, individual opinions, and his...

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18 Jan

[Psymhe Wadud is a Lecturer in Law at the Bangladesh University of Professionals and currently pursuing her Bachelor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford.] Introduction The year 2022 has been marred by systemic discrimination, violence, and endemic oppression against women all across the world. The latter half of the year in particular witnessed outrageous manifestations and images of such discrimination...

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20 Dec

[Elisabetta Baldassini, PhD is a researcher on international law and international relations, currently working as policy advisor for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)] Class and classism affect international legal scholarship in a number of manners, sometimes imperceptible ones, and create a wide array of inequalities entrenched in international legal professions. The...

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19 Dec

[Radhika Kapoor (Twitter: @Radhikaaah) is a Fellow at the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict.] This piece has been written in the author's personal capacity and does not reflect the views of the author's institution. The author thanks Professor Naz Modirzadeh, Sapan Parekh, and Ashrutha Rai for helpful comments, and Shashankaa Tewari for research assistance. The terrain of...

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19 Dec

[Chris Carpenter is a lawyer practicing international arbitration and cross-border litigation. Dimitrios A. Kourtis has a PhD from Aristotle University and is an Adjunct Lecturer at the Hellenic Police Academy]. In his famous Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx described the basic premises of historical materialism by reference to the social production of human existence. Throughout their lives,...

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13 Dec

On December 7th, then-President of Peru, Pedro Castillo, announced the start of a “government of exception”, the “dissolution of Congress” and the drafting of a new constitution. Less than two hours later, Congress declared the Presidency vacant, the Attorney General’s Office indicted Castillo for violating the Constitution and Castillo was detained by his own personal guard. In Peru, most sources...

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