LCIL International Law Centre Podcast

A series of conversations on international legal scholarship, political engagement and the transformative potential of academia. Each conversation is chaired by Francisco José Quintana and Marina Veličković and centres around a theme, concept or a method and their relationship to political movements, struggles and margins from which they have emerged and within (and for) which they have emancipatory potential.This conversation will explore the significance, possibilities, and limits of researching international law from a “history and theory” approach. The distinctiveness of international legal analysis to understand crucial developments from decolonization to neoliberalism, and the political nature and economic foundations of legal form and legal formalism will serve as our starting points. The event will last one hour. Marina and Francisco will lead the conversation for ~40 minutes after which they will pass the pleasure and responsibility on to the audience.Umut Özsu is Associate Professor at the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University. He is a scholar of public international law, the history and theory of international law, and Marxist critiques of law, rights, and the state. He is the author of Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers (Oxford University Press, 2015), and is currently finalizing Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960–82 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). He is also co-editor of the Research Handbook on Law and Marxism (Edward Elgar, forthcoming) and The Extraterritoriality of Law: History, Theory, Politics (Routledge, 2019), as well as several journal symposia.

Lecture summary: This talk uses the novel coronavirus pandemic as an entry point to explore the intersections between race and global health. The pandemic is simultaneously reviving stereotypical colonial imaginations about disease directionality, but also challenging racialized hierarchies of diseases. This lecture illuminates how the racialization of diseases is reflected in historic and ongoing United States’ public health law policy as well as the global health law regime. By demonstrating the close relationship between often separately treated areas this lecture clarifies underlying currents in global health and public health law and policy that stem from fears of the racialized other. Rendering these intersections visible creates avenues for rethinking and reshaping both theory and praxis toward anti-subordination efforts. Matiangai Sirleaf is the Nathan Patz Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School of Law. Professor Sirleaf writes and teaches in the areas of global public health law, public international law, international human rights law, international criminal law, post-conflict and transitional justice and criminal law. She recently joined the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Law as a professor of law. Professor Sirleaf previously served as an associate professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, as an assistant professor of law at the University of Baltimore School of Law and as a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

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 will be given by Professor Susan Marks, Professor of International Law, London School of Economics. 6 pm Tuesday 2 March (Part 1): 'Dignity as a Worldly Concept' 6 pm Wednesday 3 March (Part 2): 'The Idea of Human Dignity' 6 pm Thursday 4 March (Part 3): 'Dignity and Indignity in the South African Toilet Wars' Lecture summary: These lectures explore dignity as a worldly phenomenon that is not just an idea, but also a social practice and lived experience. We say that dignity is a right, or a foundational concept for human rights, yet we know that, in reality, it is a privilege enjoyed by some of us more than others and all of us at some times of our lives more than at others. How are we to understand asymmetries in the distribution of dignity? What can we learn by approaching dignity from the perspective of the presumptively undignified? When dignity is not simply denied but refused, can we then make out a different, defiant dignity with a different relationship to indignity? Professor Susan Marks joined the LSE in 2010 as Professor of International Law. She previously taught at King’s College London and, prior to that, at the University of Cambridge, where she was a fellow of Emmanuel College. Her work attempts to bring insights from the radical tradition to the study of international law and human rights.

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 will be given by Professor Susan Marks, Professor of International Law, London School of Economics. Lecture summary: These lectures explore dignity as a worldly phenomenon that is not just an idea, but also a social practice and lived experience. We say that dignity is a right, or a foundational concept for human rights, yet we know that, in reality, it is a privilege enjoyed by some of us more than others and all of us at some times of our lives more than at others. How are we to understand asymmetries in the distribution of dignity? What can we learn by approaching dignity from the perspective of the presumptively undignified? When dignity is not simply denied but refused, can we then make out a different, defiant dignity with a different relationship to indignity? Professor Susan Marks joined the LSE in 2010 as Professor of International Law. She previously taught at King’s College London and, prior to that, at the University of Cambridge, where she was a fellow of Emmanuel College. Her work attempts to bring insights from the radical tradition to the study of international law and human rights.

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 will be given by Professor Susan Marks, Professor of International Law, London School of Economics. Lecture summary: These lectures explore dignity as a worldly phenomenon that is not just an idea, but also a social practice and lived experience. We say that dignity is a right, or a foundational concept for human rights, yet we know that, in reality, it is a privilege enjoyed by some of us more than others and all of us at some times of our lives more than at others. How are we to understand asymmetries in the distribution of dignity? What can we learn by approaching dignity from the perspective of the presumptively undignified? When dignity is not simply denied but refused, can we then make out a different, defiant dignity with a different relationship to indignity? Professor Susan Marks joined the LSE in 2010 as Professor of International Law. She previously taught at King’s College London and, prior to that, at the University of Cambridge, where she was a fellow of Emmanuel College. Her work attempts to bring insights from the radical tradition to the study of international law and human rights.

Lecture summary: Like many other areas of work, international humanitarian practice and thinking are being transformed by digital technology and associated socio-technical practices. Institutional developments within the United Nations (UN) are telling. Just over ten years ago, the UN Secretary General announced the launch of the UN Global Pulse project, dedicating to enabling, showcasing and promoting the “scaled adoption of big data innovation for sustainable development and humanitarian action”. This project has since been advanced through Pulse Labs in Jakarta, Kampala and New York and one soon to be set up in Samoa. Other, cognate initiatives have been launched throughout the UN system. Prominent, international public-private collaborations aim to harness digital technology for humanitarian ends: initiatives such as the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. And more or less every major technology company across the world is investing in the humanitarian field: Facebook’s Data for Good initiative; Google.org’s Crisis Response work; and Alibaba’s collaboration with the World Food Program to develop Hunger Map LIVE are indicative examples. International humanitarianism is taking on new imperatives, protagonists, investments, techniques and objects of inquiry in connection with the expanding reach of the digital. Given the centrality of humanitarianism to the way that the international plane has been imagined, regulated, materialized and militarized throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, these shifts are worthy of close attention.This talk will present one chapter of a book project investigating this domain of ‘digital humanitarianism’ – a chapter concerned with maps and mapping. It focuses on recent shifts from two-dimensional mapping for humanitarian ends towards multi-dimensional, real-time mapping for the same purposes, associated with geographic information systems (GIS) and the generation and deployment of map cubes (multi-dimensional arrays of data values presenting cartographic visualization of each dimension). It offers a brief recollection of humanitarian mapping through “snapshots” from the practice in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries (Valentine Seaman’s yellow fever maps; Charles Booth’s poverty maps; Bangladesh flood mapping; and the FAO’s Food Insecurity and Vulnerability Information and Mapping Systems). Against this background, we will consider the rise of crowd-sourcing as a digitally facilitated way of making cartographic knowledge for humanitarian governance purposes, as illustrated by the Missing Maps Project (a joint project of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team – a U.S.-registered non-profit – and three other not-for-profit organizations: American Red Cross; British Red Cross; and Médecins Sans Frontières). We will explore how this affects how particular spaces are assembled, delimited, surveyed and readied for humanitarian intervention and with what implications for international legal relations and the jurisdiction of different actors on this terrain.Fleur Johns is Professor in the Faculty of Law, working in the areas of public international law, legal theory, law and development, law and society (or socio-legal studies), and law and technology. Fleur studies emergent patterns of governance on the global plane, and their social, political and economic implications, employing an interdisciplinary approach that draws on the social sciences and humanities and combines the study of public and private law. In 2021, Fleur will commence a four-year Australian Research Council Future Fellowship working on a project entitled 'Diplomatic Knowledge, Disasters and the Future of International Legal Order'. In 2021-2022, Fleur will be a Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Fleur is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

Lecture summary: Recent scientific information presents an alarming diagnosis of the multiple adverse consequences of climate change on the ocean: levels of ocean acidification not seen in millions of years, changes in ocean chemistry, warming temperatures and deoxygenation threating marine life, in particular coral reefs; and rapidly melting glaciers and ice sheets challenging the survival of some island States and threatening existing maritime boundaries and entitlements. There are two different applicable international regimes, one for the ocean and the other for climate change. Yet neither has a clear mandate for the ocean-climate nexus. The 1982 United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea, often referred to as the Constitution for the oceans, negotiated before climate change emerged on the international agenda, makes no reference to climate change. The 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, with a clear mandate for atmospheric climate change, limits the role of the ocean to serving as sink or reservoir for greenhouse gases. The 2015 Paris Agreement added little more other than a preambular reference to ocean ecosystems.The lecture will examine whether and how these two principal legal regimes can meet the test for international law in providing a dialectic and evolutive response to the pressing challenges of the climate-ocean nexus.Nilüfer Oral is Director of the Centre of International Law (CIL) at the National University of Singapore and a member of the law faculty at Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey. She is member of the UN International Law Commission and co-chair of the study group on sea-level rise in relation to international law. She served as climate change negotiator for the Turkish Ministry (2009 – 2016). She has also appeared before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. Nilufer Oral is a Distinguished Fellow of the Law of the Sea Institute at Berkeley Law (University of California Law Berkeley); Senior Fellow of the National University of Singapore Law School; and Honorary Research Fellow at University of Dundee. Dr. Oral was elected to the Council of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (2012-2016) and served as Chair of the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law (2014-2017). She is currently a member of the Steering Committee of the World Commission on Environmental Law.Dr Oral is the series editor for the International Straits of the World publications (Brill); member of the Board of Editors of the European Society of International Law Series; Board of Editors of the International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law; Associate Editor of the Research Perspectives in the Law of the Sea (Brill); and International Advisory Board, Chinese Journal of Environmental Law (Brill) She has published numerous articles edited several books, and has spoken at many international conferences.

Lecture summary: Visual international law tells stories. Image and art supporting imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also projected the authority, legitimacy, and universality of international law. This lecture argues that depictions of treaty-making, international legal theorists, and conferences were about painting European international law as ‘successful’—telling stories of an authoritative, universal, and virtue-laden mode of international regulation. That same approach also stretched into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including through the physical construction of international law in the architecture of its statement buildings, such as the International Court of Justice. Dr Kate Miles is a Fellow, Lecturer and Director of Studies in Law at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. She is also a Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge. She is the author of a monograph published by Cambridge University Press: The Origins of International Investment Law: Empire, Environment and the Safeguarding of Capital. She is also the author of a forthcoming monograph also with Cambridge University Press: Visual International Law: Image, Symbol, Art and Architecture. As an undergraduate in law and arts at the University of Auckland, she studied law, art history, philosophy and ancient history. She holds a B.A. in Art History, LL.B., and an LL.M. in Environmental Law (Hons I) from the University of Auckland, an LL.M. in International Legal Studies from NYU School of Law, and a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney. Since 2015, her research has drawn together those interdisciplinary threads and engaged with the visuality of international law. In particular, it has focused on the role of the visual in projecting the authority, legitimacy and universality of imperial international law.

Lecture summary: Commander Ian Park (Royal Navy International Law Legal Adviser) will offer a view on the role of the military legal adviser during armed conflict and peacetime military operations. He will consider recent armed conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, and Royal Navy peacetime military operations in the Arabian Gulf and Mediterranean. Commander Ian Park is a logistics officer and barrister in the Royal Navy and has served in seven ships and deployed worldwide in support of the Royal Navy’s contribution to defence. He has also deployed as a legal adviser on operations to Afghanistan and, on many occasions, to the Middle East. Ian is, or has been, a Hudson Fellow at Oxford University, a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School, a First Sea Lord’s Fellow and a Freeman of the City of London. He is a graduate of St. John’s College, Cambridge, has a doctorate in law from Balliol College, Oxford and has lectured at Harvard Law School, Cambridge University, Oxford University, The Academy of Military Sciences, Beijing, Hanoi University, USSH Hanoi and Freiburg University amongst other institutions. Ian is the author of, inter alia, ‘The Right to Life in Armed Conflict’ (Oxford University Press, 2018) and in 2018 was the winner of the outstanding performance by an HM Forces barrister at the UK Bar Awards.

Lecture summary: This lecture will explore how the Inter-American Court of Human Rights produces cognitive categories that deeply influence the way in which states, activists and victims understand their own reality, and decide their strategies therein. Moreover, it will discuss how the Inter-American Court triggers the production of domestic knowledge, which in turn influences the Court’s understanding of local reality, and the Court’s role in it. Further information: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-journal-of-internationa... René Urueña is an Associate Professor and Director of Research at the Universidad de Los Andes School of Law (Colombia). He holds a doctoral degree (exima cum laude) from the University of Helsinki, has been several times an expert witness before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and served as an adviser of the Selection Committee of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (Colombia)