LCIL International Law Centre Podcast

Lecture summary: In 2015, the United States military dropped a bomb on a hospital in Afghanistan run by Médecins Sans Frontières, killing forty-two staff and patients. Testifying afterwards before a Senate Committee, General John F. Campbell explained that “[t]he hospital was mistakenly struck.” In 2019, while providing air support to partner forces under attack by ISIS, the U.S. military killed dozens of women and children. Central Command concluded that any civilian deaths “were accidental.” In August 2021, during a rushed withdrawal from Afghanistan, the U.S. military executed a drone strike in Kabul that killed ten civilians, including an aid worker for a U.S. charity and seven children in his family. The Pentagon later admitted it was a “tragic mistake.” In these cases and others like them, no one set out to kill the civilians who died. Such events are usually chalked up as sad but inevitable consequences of war - as regrettable “mistakes.”In this lecture, based on a forthcoming co-authored article, Professor Oona Hathaway will examine the law on “mistakes” in war. She will consider whether and when the law holds individuals and states responsible for “mistakes.” To see how the law works, or fails to work, in practice, she will examine the US military’s own assessments of civilian casualties. She will show that “mistakes” are far more common than generally acknowledged. Some errors are, moreover, the predictable - and avoidable - result of a system that does too little to learn from its mistakes. She will focus her remarks on the United States, both because of its global military operations and because of the power of its example to shape global practices. The United States is far from alone, however. Thus, lessons learned from its failures can be instructive for other states as well.

Lecture summary: This lecture examines the treatment of marine genetic resources (MGR) in the negotiations and the text of the new Treaty on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ). The Treaty provides a coherent governance framework for MGR including an unexpected techno-fix to the most longstanding problem of biodiversity governance, some normative novelty on principles, and a trendsetting approach to valuation of aggregate usage of genetic resources. Yet, this painstakingly formed framework continues to be buffeted by self-interested attempts to redefine and relitigate the value of genetic resources; particularly around decoupling use from access to genetic resources, dematerialisation from physical resources and dis-enclosure under legal frameworks, all of which are now stable features in this and other Treaty-making contexts. How can we better characterise the success of the BBNJ Treaty in a way that helps resist de facto erosion following ratification?Relevant papers:S Thambisetty ‘The Unfree Commons: Freedom of Marine Scientific Research and the Status of Genetic Resources Beyond National Jurisdiction (Dec 4, 2023) LSE Legal Studies Working Paper No. 24/2023 87 Modern Law Review (2024) ForthcomingS Thambisetty, P Oldham, C Chiarolla, The Expert Briefing Document: A Developing Country Perspective on the Making of The BBNJ Treaty (September 21, 2023). LSE Legal Studies Working Paper No. 30/2023, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4580046 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4580046P Oldham, Paul C Chiarolla, S Thambisetty, Digital Sequence Information in the UN High Seas Treaty: Insights from the Global Biodiversity Framework-related Decisions (January 30, 2023). LSE Law - Policy Briefing Paper No. 53, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4343130 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4343130

Lecture summary: From European colonialism to the ‘post’colonial constellation, modern international law has developed in parallel with the changing legal forms of industrialised countries’ access to the natural resources of the global South. Following this development, we can see how imperial environmentalism was translated to the transnational law of natural resources. The historic perspective also highlights that the specific ambivalence of colonial and postcolonial environmental protection (exploitation vs. protection) is an ambivalence built into international law itself. In accordance with its colonial origins, international law has institutionalised a specific path to economic growth and development that presupposes and stabilises a world order supported by the industrialised countries of the North. At the same time, with the principle of equal sovereignty and self-determination, it recognises difference from the dominant economic and industrial culture as a political principle.Analysing international law’s approach to natural resources also directs our attention to changing ideas of nature and to the heart of international law's anthropocentrism, questioning its efficacy in tackling the ecological crisis. What we see here is an extractivist rationality that is intrinsically linked to the commodification of natural resources and green economy approaches in international environmental law. Last not least, a natural resource perspective highlights the fact that the legal concepts devised to determine how we share the world’s resources entail distributive processes among humans themselves.Sigrid Boysen is Professor of International Law at Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg and a Judge at the Hamburg State Constitutional Court. She serves as editor-in-chief of the international law review ‘Archiv des Völkerrechts’, has held positions as Visiting Research Fellow at Princeton University (2014), the Institute for Global Law & Policy at Harvard Law School (2021/22) and is currently Fernand Braudel Fellow at the Law Department of the European University Institute in Florence. Her research focuses on international law with a particular focus on the theory of international law, the law of natural resources, environmental justice, international environmental and economic law, and constitutional law. Recent publications include Die postkoloniale Konstellation. Natürliche Ressourcen und das Völkerrecht der Moderne, Mohr Siebeck 2021; ‘Postcolonial Global Constitutionalism’, in: Lang and Wiener (eds.), Handbook on Global Constitutionalism, 2nd ed. 2023, 166-184.

The Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lecture is an annual three-part lecture series given in Cambridge to commemorate the unique contribution to the development of international law of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht. These lectures are given annually by a person of eminence in the field of international law. This year's lecture was given by Prof Beth Simmons, University of Pennsylvania.Summary: The Golden Age of globalization has reached an end in the popular and political imagination. In its place has arisen growing anxiety about state borders. What is the evidence of such a shift? What are the causes and consequences? What answers does international law have for how international borders should be governed, especially as human mobility intensifies? Traditional international law defining and settling borders will not suffice to answer these questions. Instead, the lectures explore a different approach that views international borders as institutions that obligate states to manage the tensions that territorial governance implies in an interdependent world.6 pm Thursday 14 March 2024Lecture 3: Where Cooperative Border Governance (Should) Lead: Interstate Borders as Though People MatteredThe lecture culminates by addressing ways forward in the light of Lectures 1 and 2. First, it explores the ways that border unilateralism has had some results that are inconsistent with international human rights. Second, it suggests possibilities for addressing rights violations committed in the name of “border sovereignty.” While international law is not equipped to address all of the injustices and anxieties associated with international borders, it does offer cooperative levers and lenses that can help address and arrest some of its worst consequences.Chair: Eyal Benvenisti

The Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lecture is an annual three-part lecture series given in Cambridge to commemorate the unique contribution to the development of international law of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht. These lectures are given annually by a person of eminence in the field of international law. This year's lecture was given by Prof Beth Simmons, University of Pennsylvania.Summary: The Golden Age of globalization has reached an end in the popular and political imagination. In its place has arisen growing anxiety about state borders. What is the evidence of such a shift? What are the causes and consequences? What answers does international law have for how international borders should be governed, especially as human mobility intensifies? Traditional international law defining and settling borders will not suffice to answer these questions. Instead, the lectures explore a different approach that views international borders as institutions that obligate states to manage the tensions that territorial governance implies in an interdependent world.6 pm Wednesday 13 March 2024Lecture 2: Treaties and Neighbors: Recovering the Cooperative Roots of International BorderingTerritorializing political authority was a violent affair. Borders are implicated in that violence. But this lecture foregrounds their cooperative international legal roots as well. In theory, borders divide by agreement. That is their purpose. Any border worth its salt impacts relationships between states, communities and individuals. The obligation, then, is to address that impact. This lecture explores international legal resources for cooperative border management, which is subject, as always, to international legal obligations.Chair: Surabhi Ranganathan

The Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lecture is an annual three-part lecture series given in Cambridge to commemorate the unique contribution to the development of international law of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht. These lectures are given annually by a person of eminence in the field of international law. This year's lecture was given by Prof Beth Simmons, University of Pennsylvania.Summary: The Golden Age of globalization has reached an end in the popular and political imagination. In its place has arisen growing anxiety about state borders. What is the evidence of such a shift? What are the causes and consequences? What answers does international law have for how international borders should be governed, especially as human mobility intensifies? Traditional international law defining and settling borders will not suffice to answer these questions. Instead, the lectures explore a different approach that views international borders as institutions that obligate states to manage the tensions that territorial governance implies in an interdependent world.6 pm Tuesday 12 March 2024Lecture I: Setting the stage: Border Anxiety in an Interdependent WorldEven as interstate territorial aggrandizement has waned over the decades, border anxiety around the world is on the rise. A rich array of physical and rhetorical evidence from satellite imagery to discourse analysis supports this point. International borders have become a flashpoint for political demands and policies that insist on unilateralism. Yet “sovereign borders” misconstrue the very purposes – and consequences – of bordering. Can an International Law of borders move from its traditional focus on border fixity to border management? That will be the focus of Lecture 2.Chair: Sandesh Sivakumaran

Lecture summary: This lecture considers what Josef Kunz termed “swings of the pendulum” in international monetary and financial law and the formal and informal institutions in these related fields. International monetary law exploded in importance after the Second World War with the creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a global system of managed exchange rates. With the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and a decline in capital controls, the IMF evolved from a dominant institution into a peer of central banks and private markets, providing surveillance of the “non-system” of floating exchange rates and assisting in responses to financial crises.By contrast, international financial law, which was of limited importance during the Bretton Woods era, has become a major soft law force in the global financial sector since the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision was created in 1974. The dichotomy between profit maximization and systemic risk at the core of global finance today is overseen and guided by the technocrats of the Basel Committee, the Financial Stability Board and other institutions of international financial law.Today, the pendulums of international monetary and financial law may be reversing again. Armed conflict, rising authoritarianism, growing fragmentation of the global financial system, and a revival of capital controls and other restrictions on capital flows could reinvigorate international monetary law and the IMF. This institution has reimagined itself multiple times already while staying true to its original mandate of safeguarding monetary stability.Michael Waibel is a professor of international law at the University of Vienna. His teaching and writing focus on international law, international economic law, sovereign debt and international dispute settlement. He received the Deák Prize of the American Society of International Law, the Book Prize of the European Society of International Law and a Leverhulme Prize for his research. He is Co-General Editor of the ICSID Reports (with Jorge Viñuales) and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of International Economic Law (with Kathleen Claussen and Sergio Puig).

Lecture summary: This paper looks at the political purchase of International Conflict Feminism (ICF) in helping constitute the normative framework guiding and legitimizing laws and policies advanced under the rubric of Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). It attends to how these have intersected with the work of the international criminal court (ICC) in new modalities of lawfare that have taken place against the backdrop of Security Council action, including its military interventions in Muslim majority countries. These intertwined projects – ICF, CVE and International Criminal Law – can be situated in the dominant structures of global governance that have rendered their driving logics the thinkable default option, and their legitimacy the dominant common sense for diverse groups, from feminist lawyers to military strategists. This analysis comes together in reading the Al Hassan case at the ICC as the grain of sand through which we examine the universe at the crossroads of sharia panic, sex panic and security panic.Vasuki Nesiah teaches human rights, legal and social theory at NYU Gallatin where she is also faculty director of the Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights. She has published on the history and politics of human rights, humanitarianism, international criminal law, reparations, global feminisims, and decolonization. Nesiah was awarded the Jacob Javits Professorship (2022), Gallatin Distinguished Teacher Award in 2021 and the NYU Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Faculty Award in 2020. Her current book projects include International Conflict Feminism (forthcoming from University of Pennsylvania Press) and Reading the Ruins: Colonialism, Slavery, and International Law. A founding member of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), she is also co-editing TWAIL: A Handbook with Anthony Anghie, Bhupinder Chimni, Michael Fakhri, and Karin Mickelson (forthcoming from Elgar).

Lecture summary: This research examines international law’s longstanding entanglement with communications infrastructure. There is increasing concern regarding the rise of private global power in the form of global digital platforms and their model of information capitalism. This paper responds by focusing on historical connections between international law and infrastructure as a means of examining their relationship in the global communications context. This reveals a longer trajectory to current interest in information capitalism’s effects on international life.Current concerns focus on the power of private digital platforms and the networked communicative infrastructure they maintain for the global economy. Introducing an historical perspective to such debates highlights infrastructure’s ongoing connections to violence and exploitation. This points to the wider and constitutive role of infrastructure in international life and underscores the need to address the blending of public and private forms of power in global governance.While the technologies driving change and re-appraisal within the contemporary international legal imagination are clearly distinct, viewing infrastructure as regulation in the current day requires us to confront continuing patterns of inequality and discrimination, which in turn can be connected with a longer international legal history. Such a focus can also help to explain how the traditional form of international law as a limited system of positive rules and of managerial ordering came to dominate the legal imagination and entrench a state-centrism which now appears anachronistic in light of the reality of private power and its concentration on the international plane.Dr Daniel Joyce is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney. He specialises in international law, media law and human rights. Daniel is an Affiliated Research Fellow at the Erik Castrén Institute at the University of Helsinki, an Associate of the Australian Human Rights Institute and a member of the Allens Hub for Technology, Law & Innovation. His monograph Informed Publics, Media and International Law was published by Hart in 2020. He is a visiting fellow at LSE Law School from September 2023 until March 2024.

Lecture summary: In this talk, Lucas Lixinski examines the erasure of Indigenous perspectives from the literature on the turn to history in international law. Considering the turn to history’s promise to offer alternative imaginations by recovering history, it is somewhat surprising and disappointing that so much of this turn is narrated from the perspective of colonisers. Lixinski unpacks the implications of this turn to Indigenous agency and victimhood, and leverages alternative retellings of Indigenous peoples’ engagement with European international law that focus on Indigenous agency, diplomacy, and power. The talk fundamentally challenges what we take for granted in emancipatory international legal projects, and offers possibilities for rethinking how we do international legal history.Dr Lucas Lixinski is Professor at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney. His research interests main centre on international human rights adjudication and international cultural heritage law, and sometimes international legal history especially in relation to rights. His latest monograph is Legalized Identities: Cultural Heritage Law and the Shaping of Transitional Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which he started developing while a visitor at the Lauterpacht Centre in 2018.