Unlike what the rhetoric of national-populist governments suggests, international law has never been the result of egalitarian globalists. Scholars and practitioners working in critical traditions have exposed it as an instrument that has been complicit in, and instrumental to, upholding the imperial world order, and have excavated how it is, at times, complicit in reproducing social hierarchies and capitalist and anthropocentric world orders.
In this course, we will revisit and discuss some of these critiques in order to reflect on how to make sense of international law in times of intensifying and intersecting crises, which undoubtedly call for coordinated global efforts. We will engage with different critical traditions, including post-colonial, queer, anti-racist and anti-capitalist approaches. We will then examine activist efforts to pursue decolonial, social and environmental objectives through critical praxis. In this process, we will engage with activism through judicial and expert processes, as well as proposals for radical change in specific subfields of international law, necessitated in part by developments such as the emergence of autonomous weapon systems and an increasing understanding of plenary processes.
- Учитель: Giacomo Bruno
- Учитель: Lys Kulamadayil