Symposia

Sarah Zarmsky is a PhD Candidate and Assistant Lecturer at the University of Essex Human Rights Centre with a focus on international law and new and emerging technologies. In 2023, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. As an understatement, online harms have been rampant in the contexts of the ongoing conflicts in...

[Dr Natalie Hodgson is an Assistant Professor in the School of Law at the University of Nottingham.] On 5 March 2024, news emerged that Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, had been named in an Article 15 communication to the International Criminal Court (ICC) alleging that he was ‘an accessory to genocide in Gaza’. The communication, prepared by Australian law firm Birchgrove Legal, argued that ‘members of the...

[Michelle Burgis-Kasthala is Professor of International Law and Governance at the University of Edinburg and Adjunct Professor at IE Law School. Barrie Sander (@Barrie_Sander) is Assistant Professor of International Justice at Leiden University – Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs.] As contemporary international criminal law (ICL) enters its fourth decade, carceral internationalism has become normalised within the international community to a degree few thought imaginable. Such...

[Mark A. Drumbl is Class of 1975 Alumni Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University. Barbora Holá is Professor in Empirical Legal Studies of International Criminal Justice at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.] Even the journey can be the destination…Mňága a Žďorp, Czech rock band Writing this book, as we note in its opening pages, lifted us to many places and spaces, physically...

[Dr. Mia Swart is Visiting Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand Law School] Informers Up Close focuses almost exclusively on informers in the context of Communist Czechoslovakia. Drumbl and Holá state explicitly that, but for a sideways glance here and there, the book is not comparative in nature. It zooms in on individuals that informed to the secret police or...

[Nesam McMillan is an Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and author of Imagining the International: Crime, Justice and the Promise of Community (2020)] In their new book, Drumbl and Holá offer a meditative scholarly inquiry into the practice, motivations and social significance of informing. They invite the reader to better appreciate the everydayness of informing (p....

[Saira Mohamed is Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley] Mark Drumbl and Barbora Holá’s fascinating Informers Up Close: Stories from Communist Prague offers a rigorous and engrossing account of the lives of informers in Czechoslovakia and the reckoning that comes for them after the fall of Communism. The book gives the reader so much to grapple with and...

[Sergey Vasiliev is Professor of International Law at the Open University in the Netherlands] Why bring a new book about the secret police (StB) collaborators in Communist Czechoslovakia, of all topics, into the burning, drowning, and splintered world of 2024? Can it serve purposes other than indulging one’s historical curiosity or wanderlust – an unaffordable distraction? I certainly thought so, if...

[Sanjana Ragu is an Bachelor of Laws graduate from Strathmore University and currrenly works as a trainee lawyer at Anjarwalla & Khanna] Be it Palestine in the East, or Sudan in the South, in the chessboard of global politics and economy, the suffering of the Global South is often a pawn, sacrificed for strategic advantage. This wretched reality becomes apparent once...

[Lazola Nomkala holds Bachelor of Commerce and Bachelor of Laws degrees from the University of the Western Cape (UWC)] On 19 July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the Israeli occupation in Palestine was illegal. Despite the disputed nature of Israel’s origins, the occupation formally began in 1967. What followed was the violent dispossession of Palestinians achieved via...

[Madhav Mallya is an independent legal researcher based in Toronto. He is a former associate professor at the Jindal Global Law School.] In Van Pezold v Zimbabwe, an investor-state arbitration tribunal ruled that Zimbabwe’s compulsory land redistribution scheme—intended to acquire land from white settlers without compensation and redistribute amongst the native population—violated the international law on the prohibition of racial discrimination,...