Warwick Law School Public Lecture - Registration Form

Abstract: International law has never seemed so much under attack, yet these attacks have deep continuities in imperial and hegemonic behavior. What is new is the brutality of the language of transgression and its justification through an appeal not just to sovereignty but to an imagined wellspring of deep popular discontent. The crisis of international law is also, more deeply, a crisis of the state and of society, perhaps a veritable crisis of ‘civilization’. Should we take populism and authoritarianism as intellectual projects seriously? What does it mean to not even bother to cloak one’s actions in the language of law? What material and cognitive conditions have made this moment of breakdown possible? And what comes next? Nostalgia for the old international legal order is very unevenly shared, and for good reason. As to the defense of international law as merely a gentler form of wielding power, it is bound to fall flat. Part of the critique of populist-authoritarians lands because international law is indeed, sometimes, abstract, formalist, elitist and technocratic. The question however is not whether international law is dead, but what international law is dying. International law was never merely the “rules based liberal international order” yet the intellectual preconditions for producing renewal are still unclear. Might renewal come from a further provincialization of the West?

This is an in-person event.

It will be followed by a Q&A and drinks reception.