13 Nov 6th Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Closing Remarks
[Alessia Corti holds an MSc in Human Rights from LSE and currently works in the NGO sector and as a research assistant at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’.]
Five days, nine posts and some sharks with a laser beam attached to their heads later, the 6th Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law comes to an end.
We opened the symposium on Monday by saying that we hoped it could show that international law can be (forgive us one last time for saying it out loud) cool. Having read this year’s contributions, we can say that international law can also be honest about what it does not know yet (which makes it even cooler, if you ask me)
Who Counts in International Law?
Christine Bianco opened the week in the Hogwarts World. She showed how the International Statute of Secrecy, a rule written to protect a persecuted minority, ends up casting non-magical people as objects of the law rather than its subjects. Her reminder that international law is “a product and a weapon of power” echoed through the week. Mia Colliard asked: what status would Dr. Evil’s sharks have in international humanitarian law? She found a gap: while IHL protects animals indirectly as objects, it does not recognise them as full subjects in armed conflicts. Laurence Atkin-Teillet examined what is consider real and worthy of legal protection in international law by asking whether the painted people of Lumière could be victims of genocide. Her conclusion is that international law “does not currently provide a clear affirmative answer,” but that the videogame invites us to ask if it should. Nivedita S. closed the week by analysing Monstress to argue that legal subjecthood and extractability are mutually constituted, rather than sequential: dehumanisation enables extraction, and extraction sustains dehumanisation. Until the law sees this loop it will continue to punish only one half of the mechanism, or to regulate the other, while the mechanism itself continues.
Who Speaks, for Whom, When, and With What Consequences?
Through Attack on Titan, Himani Jha and Garima Tiwari showed that law says little about when and to whom a confession must come to make a deception lawful. With no court to test the difference, the line between a clever ruse and the war crime of perfidy is left to the storytellers. Shaoxuan Xu, writing on The Three-Body Problem, distinguishes having control over communication from having the authority to speak for more than oneself. What if safeguards are established after one has already spoken for all? Shaoxuan tells us that this is not sufficient: “later disclosure can support accountability but cannot retrieve a signal.” Lu Yaoyao’s article showed how Once Upon a Time in the Middle East turns a foreign war into a Chinese story. Through the film, Lu asked: whose experiences and perspectives shape the understanding of a conflict?
What Can International Law Hold?
Through the destruction of Ohara in One Piece, and the later recovery of its books, Estéfany Rocha Monteiro showed that rescuing a library’s books does not settle the scope of the harm: the records and scholarly practices through which its content could be interpret may be lost too, and require their own legal and evidentiary assessment. Lakshmidevi Somanath found a similar pattern in Ghibli-style AI trend. Lakshmidevi explained that copyright covers an expression, not an idea: it can judge whether a particular image copies protected work, but a visual style is beyond its reach. Even if the terms of copyright were extended to fill this gap, since copyright is territorials, the answer would likely change from country to country. The contradiction is inevitable: “a borderless tool will have to live with bordered answers”:
What do these three questions have in common? All of these are open questions, many have no case law, and some may never get any. Pop culture doesn’t just give us a creative and accessible way to understand the international law that we already have, it also expands our imagination on what law we don’t have yet, and we might need. Our hope for after the Symposium is for it to push these questions beyond legal arenas and academia.
That’s why if any post made you think, we kindly ask you to share it, so the conversations can continue beyond this platform.
Our warmest thank you to all this year’s contributors for their creativity and rigor, to the organising team at Opinio Juris for making the Symposium happen, and to all of you for reading.
See you next year!