Guest Speaker: Dr Serena Natile, University of Warwick Law School

Title of Talk: (Work-In-Progress) Transnational Social Security Law in the Digital Age: Towards a Grassroots Politics of Redistribution

Abstract: In this work-in-progress seminar I am going to present my new project, and related book, Transnational Social Security Law in the Digital Age: Towards A Grassroots Politics of Redistribution. The project develops a conceptual and regulatory framework for transnational social security law, paying critical attention to the recent digitalisation of social security programmes. In particular, the research asks whether a grassroots-inspired framework for transnational social security law can contribute to disrupt the unjust mode of wealth and power distribution legitimised by the international economic governance and create new mechanisms for global accountability and redistribution.

To answer this question the project develops a methodology that brings together a feminist political economy critique of international economic law (IEL) and a prefigurative law reform approach. The feminist political economy critique of IEL interrogates the assumption that trade and financial relations (economic production) should be regulated internationally while social security (the distribution of the wealth created) is the responsibility of states alone or should be provided via aid, charity, and philanthropy. This regulatory mismatch results in the unequal distribution of benefits, risks, and responsibilities on grounds of race, gender, socio-economic and migration status, coloniality and geopolitical location, affecting more vulnerable communities. The prefigurative law reform methodology combines prefigurative politics in the form of grassroots activists’ calls for global redistribution and an imaginative law approach that gives them the power to act as if they have the right to remake international law.