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Giorgio Agamben’s recent intervention which characterizes the measures implemented in response to the Covid-19 pandemic as an exercise in the biopolitics of the ‘state of exception’ has sparked an important debate on how to think of biopolitics.

The very notion of biopolitics, as it was formulated by Michel Foucault, has been a very important contribution to our understanding the changes…

As academics in a post-truth world, I believe we have an urgent and important task. In a world where emotional appeals and emotive decision-making are seemingly the norm, academia should be in the business of truth. Rather than lament reality, we should be revealing the reasons for the possibility of our reality and charting a path that unveils the possibility for change.

I believe that, as…

Key Concept

The economic and political management of human populations through their exposure to death has become a global phenomenon. Wars, genocides, refugee “crisis”, ecocide and contemporary processes of pauperization and precarization reveal how increasing masses of individuals are now governed through their direct and indirect exposure to death. In order to unpack those processes, Achille…

Ethics of Tragedy: Dwelling, Thinking, Measuring

Available in paperback now from online bookshops and as a ‘fair access’ E-book from Counterpress

Author: Ari Hirvonen Adjunct Professor in Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory at the University of Helsinki

B & W 229 x 152 mm | Perfect Bound on White w/Matte Laminate | 344 pages | Paperback ISBN 978-1-910761-09-0 | E-book (PDF) ISBN N/A | 30 January 2020

Ethics of Tragedy is a profound analysis of…

The Politics of International lawyers: Whose Legacy Is at Stake? Reflections on Martti Koskenniemi’s series on ‘The Politics of International Law’

Martti Koskenniemi. Photo: © Pekka Elomaa. Reproduced with permission.

The latest issue of the European Journal of International Law opens with the third instalment of Martti Koskenniemi’s The Politics of International Law series. This post offers some reflections on Koskenniemi’s article, although it is not intended as a full response to it.

First, a disclaimer in the style of Liliana Obregón[1.…

Hannah Arendt: The Right to Have Rights

Key Concept

Hannah Arendt. From ‘Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt’. ZEITGEIST FILMS

Shortly after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, the English translation of Hannah Arendt’s essay was published under the title ‘The Rights of Man: What Are They?'[1. The essay was first published in 1946 as a response to Hermann Broch’s project for an ‘International…

BIRKBECK LAW REVIEW ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2019 ‘DYSTOPIAS HERE AND NOW: CRITICAL THOUGHT AT THE ENDS OF TIME’

11-12 OCTOBER 2019

Call for Contributions

Looming ecological disaster; the rise of nationalist authoritarianism; the stubborn persistence of systematic oppression based on race, gender, sexuality and other axes of social difference, the dismantling of any semblance of social security and solidarity: as we prepare ourselves to enter the third decade of the 21st century, there is certainly no…

Law & Critique: Property and the Interests of Things

We take it for granted that the very wealthy use trusts to leave their wealth to their children. Have they not always done so? After all, the aristocracy has used one or another variant of the trust form for centuries to pass on rolling hills, country piles and precious heirlooms. So what has changed? A number of cases[i]have recently come before the courts that deal with one specific issue in…

CfP: What is Real about Law and Technology

In 2018 both Bruno Latour and Giorgio Agamben published books addressing the epistemological crisis. Climate skepticism, false news and social media echo chambers have led to a profound, divisive and ugly politicisation of knowledge in the West. Latour and Agamben both chart this process and attempt to establish some sort of ‘real’ upon which consensuses and collective constructive action can be…

The Future of Sex Work: Labour unfreedom & Criminality at work

The central and uniting demand of the sex worker rights movement around the world is the decriminalization of consensual adult sex work. This is based on the recognition that criminal law intervention makes sex workers less rather than more safe, and that sex workers are engaged in a legitimate form of work, not the commission of a crime.

A core task of activists and academics has been amassing…

CfP: The International Economic Law Collective

The inaugural conference of the International Economic Law Collective is entitled: ‘Disrupting Narratives and Pluralising Engagement in International Economic Law Scholarship, Teaching and Practice’, and will take place on the 6th and 7th of November 2019 at the University of Warwick.

International economic law (IEL) as an arena of scholarship, policy and practice has developed exponentially over…

CfP: Resistance to development projects in Latin America: Taking stock of the role of law

It is generally accepted in the Law and Development literature that law has multiple, and often conflicting roles in setting development agenda and its outcomes. On the one hand, it can be complicit in creating, perpetuating and/or expanding inequalities, violence and social tensions, and on the other hand it can have emancipatory potential as it enables people to challenge arbitrary and/or…

UNSW Scientia Scholarship on ‘The Crisis of Human Rights’

Rirkrit Tiravanija Untitled (One Dollar Do We Dream Under the Same Sky), 2015

UNSW is continuing its generous Scientia Scholarship scheme, which features a full fee waiver, a $41,209 (AUD) annual stipend, and an annual professional development fund. The UNSW Scientia PhD Scholarship Scheme is part of UNSW’s dedication to harnessing our cutting-edge research to solve complex problems and improve…

Art, Law and the Elements: The Turn of the Venice Biennale

58th Venice Art Biennale ‘May You Live in Interesting Times’

The 58th Venice Art Biennale is a sweeping turn towards the elemental. Aligned with many practices and disciplines (law and art amongst them), this turn to the elemental is everywhere in the Biennale: in the choice of materials, of forms, of artists by the main curator, even in the choice of the name: the ironic title of this year’s…

The Far-Right in Austria; Or why ousting the current government won’t change an extreme consensus

On Monday May 27th, a no-confidence vote against chancellor Sebastian Kurz’ (ÖVP) provisional minority government was successfully held in Austrian parliament.[i] This vote followed a political crisis provoked by a video recently circulated, which shows former Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache (FPÖ) and his close associate Johannes Gudenus (FPÖ) in a meeting with an alleged investor,…

Rights as a Distraction from ‘Belonging’: A Response to the Shamima Begum Ruling

Mohamad Hafez – Baggage #1

I’m not an accomplished Tweeter. When I tried to Tweet about an event I spoke at recently and typed ‘Shamima’, the autocorrect changed it to ‘shaming’.[1]It’s funny how often that happens – some unintended link to a truth identified by autocorrect (my own surname autocorrects to Sikhism – which is part of who I am). It’s a truth of Shamima’s identity – there has been an…

A Short History of Throwing Food at Fascists

In the last month, milkshakes have been lobbed at several far right candidates in the Euro elections. First it was former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson, then UKIP’s misogynist YouTuber Carl Benjamin and now Nigel Farage as he was out campaigning in Newcastle for his new Brexit Party. When Farage visited Edinburgh, the local police advised McDonald’s not to sell milkshakesand there…