_{The Centre for Critical Legal Studies (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/research/centres/ccls/) has finally gotten the all clear from the myriad different academic and administrative committees in the University. We have lots of plans and ideas, but we would like to open it out to everyone now, firstly to join the centre, and secondly to help us plan our activities. We don't want to bombard you with information at this stage, so we want to just draw your attention to three things:}

_{1. Events Our plan is to run a small reading group each week on Thursday morning. This will continue on from the R&R group that Stephen has run so well in recent years. The Group will read a mixture of our own work as we prep it for publication and key critical texts. It will be open to everyone who might be interested, including UGs, PGs, sessional staff, professional services, and academic staff. We will be producing notes on the readings which we will start to build into a pedagogic archive. Please pass on details to any students or colleagues who might like to come along. This year it will always be at 10am in S2.09 on Thursdays. Our first reading group is this coming Thursday (the 3rd of October). We will be discussing the Introduction to Christine’s exciting new book. It is attached it here.}

_{2. Membership To join the Centre - for staff - you need to sign into the Warwick website, go to your staff page and click the CCLS in the sidebar. Once it is highlighted you are in. For others, for now, membership is really just attending events, planning events which the centre might be able to help with, or taking part in our other activities.}

_{3. CCLS Day Finally, as far as possible, all events for the CCLS will be organised on one day per week, to help make planning more easy. Thursday will be the key CCLS day this year.}

_{Best wishes,}

_{Illan and Christine}

_{Title: Imperialism, Hypocrisy and the Politics of International Law}

^{Abstract: ‘International lawyers typically dismiss accusations of ‘hypocrisy’ as rhetoric. By contrast, this paper argues that such accusations are central to international law. The article begins by examining the centrality of accusations of hypocrisy to the 2014 Crimea crisis, noting the crucial juridical function of accusations of hypocrisy. In order to unpack this, the paper turns to political theorists of hypocrisy, who see a structural link between ‘modernity’ and ‘hypocrisy’. Modern societies lack an overarching set of agreed ‘values’, making accusations of hypocrisy a crucial political currency. At the same time, the contradiction between formal legal equality and social and economic inequality in modern society constantly generates hypocritical behaviour. The paper demonstrates that we can only fully understand this situation in light of the social relations of capitalism. The article charts historically how the unfolding of capitalist social relations gave rise to different configurations of hypocrisy within international law. In this way, accusations of hypocrisy were articulated in the context of colonialism and its associated practices of racialisation. At the same time, however, colonised states attempted to seize upon accusations of hypocrisy for their own liberatory ends. The paper demonstrates that the close connection between such accusations, capitalism and racialisation ultimately limited their emancipatory potential. The paper concludes by asking how such accusations might be deployed in politically useful ways’}