Title: 'Empire Comes Home: Researching the Global Corporation and International Law'

Abstract: In July 2022, Sundhya began an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship for a multi-year collaborative project on Global Corporations and International Law. The starting point for the project is a widely shared intuition: that the rising power of global corporations poses a serious challenge to democratic rule within nation-states. Corporations have gone global, but the mechanisms to ensure they serve the public interest, pay tax and comply with national laws have not. Efforts are frustrated by a mismatch between the global operational structure of multinational corporations, and their national legal form. In this informal talk, Sundhya will talk about the intuition sparking the project, outline the need for new approach and sketch the lineaments of the research trajectory.

Sundhya Pahuja is ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Professor, and Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at the Melbourne Law School. She is known for her work on the encounter between plural forms of international law, the legal, historical, political and economic dimensions of the relations between Global South and North. Besides her project on the Global Corporation and International Law, her other current projects include an interdisciplinary project on Populism and International Law with Richard Joyce, James Martel, Andrew Benjamin and Rose Parfitt and Cold War Histories of International Law with Gerry Simpson and Matthew Craven. Sundhya is the author of the prize-winning book, Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality (Cambridge 2011). Her other books include The Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities (2021) edited with Shane Chalmers, International Law and the Cold War (2019) edited with Gerry Simpson and Matt Craven and The Oxford Handbook on International Law and Development (in press) edited with Luis Eslava and Ruth Buchanan.