In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Critical Approaches

07 Oct

[Mohsen al Attar is Associate Dean of Learning & Teaching at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University as well as a Contributing Editor to Opinio Juris] Israel’s latest bombardment of Gaza—a fifth since its false disengagement in 2006—has once again exposed the catastrophic failures of international law in protecting the world’s most vulnerable from militarism and settler-colonialism. While purportedly targeting resistance, a dubious goal...

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03 Oct

In Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said paints a portrait of the public intellectual. Part description and part aspiration (and maybe a little autobiography as well), he represents the intellectual as an outsider, a subversive whose role is to challenge the status quo by “speaking truth to power.” While this statement was probably never intended as more than a catchy...

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09 May

[Swati Singh Parmar is an Assistant Professor (International Law) at Dharmashastra National Law University, India. She has an interest in international legal theory and Critical International Law.] “Let Us All Agree to Die a Little”: TWAIL’s Unfulfilled Promise, published in the Harvard Journal of International Law on 11 April 2024 by Professor Naz Khatoon Modirzadeh, is bound to have the readers...

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06 May

[Ọláolúwa (Laolu) Òní is in the PhD program at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto and holds other law degrees from the University of Lagos and NYU School of Law.] [Disclaimer: This essay is excerpted from a longer research paper, still in progress, titled international Law, Language, and More, More, More Borders, which applies law and language methodology to comment on transit visa restrictions.] Introduction On...

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19 Apr

[Chief Charles A. Taku is great grandson of Asunganyi, King of the Bangwa, Counsel before International Courts and Tribunals, and Former President of the International Criminal Court Bar Association]  ‘To validate one’s heritage, to explore one’s culture, to examine thoroughly those institutions which have persisted through centuries, is perhaps the first step in a peoples’ search for independence and in their...

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19 Apr

[Sasha Merigot is a Master's Student in Political Science at Sciences Po Paris and a graduate from Leiden University College The Hague, winning the Thesis of Merit award with the thesis on Reproducing and Re-Constructing National Identity at the Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac] A key theme of Confronting Colonial Objects is the complicity of collectors, museums and racial science...

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19 Apr

[Dr Emery Patrick Effiboley is Museologist and Art Historian, and Head of the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Abomey-Calavi (Republic of Benin). He was Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for the Creative Arts of Africa at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.] Confronting Colonial Objects argues that ‘distancing, discursive silencing and erasure are common...

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18 Apr

[Raghavi Viswanath and Jessica Wiseman are PhD candidates at the European University Institute (EUI)] In the opening chapter of his book ‘Confronting Colonial Objects: Histories, Legalities, and Access to Culture’, Carsten Stahn promises to “present both the different facets of colonial violence and their enduring effects, and possible avenues to renew relations” (page 8). In the first six chapters of his...

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18 Apr

[João Figueiredo is a research associate at the Käte Hamburger kolleg “Legal Unity and Pluralism” of the University of Münster, Germany. He researches Portuguese colonialism in Angola, using historical anthropology and legal history to shed new light on aspects of the history of the slave trade, abolitionism, and the origins of systemic racism.] Individual examples prove nothing. Still, a single case...

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18 Apr

[Gracia Lwanzo Kasongo is a PhD researcher at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain) in Belgium and a member of the Institute of Political Science Louvain-Europe (ISPOLE). She is a legal scholar and political scientist and former fellow of the American Bar Association (ABA)] 1. Introduction  In the colonialist moves to collect human remains, and the desire to demonstrate grandeur and strength,...

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17 Apr

[Marie-Sophie de Clippele is Assistant Professor in Law at UC Louvain Saint-Louis – Bruxelles] The centrality of the human body as site of colonial violence, and its implication for contemporary restitution policies, are discussed in Chapter 5 of Confronting Colonial Objects. The book shows that human remains and natural history objects are more than objects or human biological material. It draws on the interplay between human...

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17 Apr

[Alessandro Chechi is Senior lecturer at the University of Geneva, the Catholic University of Lille, and the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights] The question of returning colonial objects that were displaced during the colonial era by European invaders is by no means a new one. Already in 1978, the then UNESCO Director-General, Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, issued a ‘Plea for the Return of an Irreplaceable...

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