Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response
29 Sep Protest Repression in Indonesia as Torture under International Law
raising the legal and political stakes in advocacy, litigation, and engagement with UN mechanisms. Indonesia’s Response as a form of Torture When evaluated against the CAT’s four-prong criterion, Indonesia’s response to the August 2025 protests undeniably meets the threshold for it to be considered torture. First, the severity of suffering is unmistakable. The death of 21-year-old Affan Kurniawan, at least eight other confirmed fatalities, and hundreds of reported injuries, including beatings, tear-gassing of university campuses, and the hospitalization of students, demonstrate the grave physical and psychological harm inflicted. Second, the...16 Apr Have we always been diagonal? A response to Osofsky’s “Is Climate Change ‘International’?”
[Nathan Sayre is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley] I join J.B. Ruhl in applauding Hari Osofsky’s effort to bring geographical and legal scholarship into a constructive dialogue to address climate change. Her analysis draws important empirical and theoretical lessons from two case studies by illuminating the complex role of litigation in driving processes of regulatory rescaling—a critical role given the unprecedented and urgent challenges that global warming poses to existing legal and institutional frameworks. To meet these challenges, society—at...06 Dec A Response to Anastasia Telesetsky by Karen Scott
Professor Telesetsky, in her generous comments on my article in volume 12(1) of the Melbourne Journal of International Law, raises two pertinent questions. First, why has there been a profusion of cooperative efforts across treaty bodies and second, what are the linkages that are most effective in compelling compliance with treaty regimes? In relation to the first question, Professor Telesetsky disagrees with my observation that MEAs are ‘increasingly regarded as international actors who are “capable of driving a normative agenda’”. She goes on to note that the ultimate...14 Nov MJIL Symposium: A Response to Spencer Zifcak by Thomas Weiss
[Thomas G Weiss is a Presidential Professor of Political Science at The CUNY Graduate Center and Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies] This post is part of the MJIL 13(1) Symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Professor Spencer Zifcak’s article on the international reactions to Libya and Syria is thorough and thoughtful, and well worth reading for the treasure trove of documentation. But I was frankly surprised by his unsurprising conclusion that ‘judgments as to whether and when to...07 Feb A Response to Pierre-Hugues Verdier by Eric Pan
...result in a lowering of regulatory standards, exposing the host jurisdiction to little additional threat of systemic risk, fraud or other regulatory failures. The problem is that developing metrics of comparability is difficult, and efforts to date have been ad hoc. Such determinations require an analysis that go beyond examining what rules are “on the books” to the effectiveness of the regulator in promoting compliance with such rules (see, e.g., the literature on enforcement intensity) and the relative sophistication of affected market participants. Until we develop a better understanding of...12 May Guest Post: Strong Words, Weak Arguments – A Response to the Open Letter to the UN on Humanitarian Access to Syria (Part 2)
[Naz Modirzadeh is a Senior Fellow at Counterterrorism and Humanitarian Engagement Project at Harvard Law School. This post is written in her personal capacity and does not represent the views of the CHE Project] Part 1 can be found here. Humanitarian Concerns Perhaps as significant as the legal errors in the letter, the authors seem to take no account of the security implications of their recommendation. Given its actions thus far, including its attacks on its own population and many medical humanitarians, it would not be at all...