Events and Announcements: March 8, 2015

Events

• The Conference of the African Association of International Law will take place in Libreville, Gabon from 29 – 31 August 2015. Deadline for submissions of abstracts: 15 March 2015. The African Association of International Law (AAIL) is pleased to announce its 2015 conference entitled: International Economic Law and Development in Africa: Challenges and Opportunities. The working languages of the Conference are English and French. Submissions are welcome in either language. Only one submission per author will be considered. Submissions from women are strongly encouraged. Kindly send an abstract (300 – 500 words) of your paper including your curriculum vitae as well as contact details and institutional affiliation. These materials should be sent to: conference2015@aail-aadi.org before 15 March 2015. Successful applicants will be notified by 31 March 2015. The deadline for submission of final papers is 30 June 2015. Conference fees will be waived for all selected panelists. An award will be given to the author(s) of the best paper of the conference. Selected papers will be published in the African Yearbook of International Law. Should you have any questions about the conference or the call for papers, kindly contact Adejoké Babington-Ashaye, AAIL Director of Programmes at conference2015@aail-aadi.org.
• The University of Iceland Human Rights Institute and iCourts, the Danish National Research Foundation´s Centre of Excellence for International Courts at Copenhagen University, invite all PhD students to attend a high-level seminar entitled Methods of Human Rights Law Research 26-27 May 2015

Announcements

• The 4th Munich Advanced Course in International Law (MACIL), organised by the Chair of Public International Law of University of Munich (Germany), will take place in August 2015. The 2015 session is entitled ‘International Law Beyond the State: Towards a New Role for Individuals and other Non-State Actors’. Classes are going to discuss the role of individuals and other non-state actors in international law both from a general international law perspective and with reference to specific case studies. Students of international law, young academics and practitioners of international law or related fields are warmly invited to apply. Deadline for application is 30 April 2015. Further information regarding the programme and the 2015 faculty can be found here.
• PluriCourts, a Centre for the Study of the Legitimate Roles of the Judiciary in the Global Order in the fields of human rights, trade, investment, international criminal courts and the environment, are offering up to five 3-year postdoctoral fellowships. For more information, click here.

Calls for Papers

• AJIL Unbound has called for submissions for a Special Issue on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). Third World Approaches to International Law constitute a distinctive voice in international law. These approaches have emphasized the centrality of colonialism and imperialism to the field. TWAIL has challenged the manner in which first world scholarship monopolized the production of knowledge about international law and, in so doing, has brought to the fore questions of race, culture, power relations, and class. While some TWAIL approaches have critically evaluated the continuities of colonialism and imperialism in post-cold war neo-liberal policies through a variety of lenses including Marxism, others have emphasized international law’s philosophic and theoretical features including its contingency, particularism, and indeterminacy. TWAIL scholars acknowledge that they are engaged in simultaneously critiquing and exposing the limits and the biases, blind spots and unanticipated bad consequences of international law, on the one hand, and embracing possibilities embodied in the guarantees of individual rights and self-determination, on the other. For these and other reasons TWAIL has been criticized for relying on the same underlying assumptions as the system it sought to transcend, for under-emphasizing the continuing marginalization of many women and of indigenous peoples, and for offering no positive agenda for the reform or transformation of international law. AJIL Unbound invites essays of no more than 3000 words reflecting on Third World Approaches to International Law along the foregoing non-exhaustive list of themes. The deadline for submission is April 30, 2015. Submissions should be sent to ajiltwail7@gmail.com.

Our previous events and announcements post can be found here. If you would like to post an announcement on Opinio Juris, please contact us with a one-paragraph description of your announcement along with hyperlinks to more information.