AJIL UnboundPub Date : 2023-03-28DOI: 10.1017/aju.2023.11
E. Achiume, Gay McDougall
{"title":"Anti-Racism at the United Nations","authors":"E. Achiume, Gay McDougall","doi":"10.1017/aju.2023.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2023.11","url":null,"abstract":"Racial injustice and inequality remain contested internationally, and the United Nations remains a prominent site for this contestation. In this essay, we describe the architecture designated by the United Nations to address racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance. We highlight recent normative and institutional innovations and their connection with older mechanisms and milestones. From our experience within this architecture, we reflect on shortcomings and dysfunctions that are built into it, and discuss pressing threats and challenges. We highlight the twenty-year-long, unprincipled opposition of members of the Western Europe and Other States Group (WEOG) within the United Nations to the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA), which they have used to block progressive efforts to dismantle contemporary and historic racial injustice. We also highlight recent successes within the architecture, noting remarkable, if tenuous, shifts in the normative framing of racism and racial injustice at the United Nations.","PeriodicalId":36818,"journal":{"name":"AJIL Unbound","volume":"117 1","pages":"82 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43530324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AJIL UnboundPub Date : 2023-03-28DOI: 10.1017/aju.2023.3
D. E. Johnson, C. Powell
{"title":"Pauli Murray: Human Rights Visionary and Trailblazer","authors":"D. E. Johnson, C. Powell","doi":"10.1017/aju.2023.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2023.3","url":null,"abstract":"While other scholars have discussed Dr. Pauli Murray's remarkable contributions to race and sex equality law,1 few, if any, have placed her contributions within the context of the broader tradition of human rights law. And yet, she identified herself specifically through this lens, using the terminology and law of human rights, in part shaped by her friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a delegate to the UN Drafting Committee for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).2 This essay addresses a lacuna in legal scholarship by exploring the ways in which Murray's work fits into the Black intellectual tradition concerning the human rights idea. It also seeks to provide a greater understanding concerning contributions to human rights (and more broadly, international law) made by Howard University School of Law, where she attended law school and one of us is on the faculty. Among other linkages, Clarence Clyde Ferguson, a dean of Howard Law School and former ambassador, was the first Black president of the American Society of International Law.","PeriodicalId":36818,"journal":{"name":"AJIL Unbound","volume":"117 1","pages":"37 - 42"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49160477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AJIL UnboundPub Date : 2023-03-28DOI: 10.1017/aju.2023.7
Vasuki Nesiah
{"title":"Slavery's Afterlives: Humanitarian Imperialism and Free Contract","authors":"Vasuki Nesiah","doi":"10.1017/aju.2023.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2023.7","url":null,"abstract":"In 1833, slavery was abolished across the British Empire, but its specter continued to haunt the new labor regimes inaugurated in slavery's wake. While much of the analysis of these dynamics focuses on the triangular trade in the Atlantic, this essay focuses on the Indian Ocean. Slavery was largely replaced by indentured labor in the Indian Ocean world, marking a historically significant shift in the political economy of empire, the legal architecture of labor, and the discourses through which the imperial racial capitalist system was legitimated and contested. In the decades that followed, labor became incorporated into market institutions that continued into the post-colonial era. Yet, today, almost two hundred years later, slavery's spectral presence continues to inhabit international labor policy. I argue that the reference to slavery was incorporated into discourses of protection and free contract in ways that sought to sanitize and rationalize regimes of indenture and wage labor in the Indian Ocean world. Thus, paradoxically, slavery is often invoked in ways that are disconnected from its own material history. This essay seeks to trace the persistence of that double move of invocation and disconnection as itself symptomatic of the past in the present. In the context of the nineteenth century labor regime transitions, we might describe imperialism, humanitarianism, and capitalism as having a Weberian relationship of “elective affinities.” Slavery's haunting of the political and normative imagination of alternative labor systems encapsulated those affinities by fusing the denunciation of slavery with the promise of protection and profit, redeeming humanitarian imperialism and commodified labor.","PeriodicalId":36818,"journal":{"name":"AJIL Unbound","volume":"117 1","pages":"66 - 70"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41335941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AJIL UnboundPub Date : 2023-01-09DOI: 10.1017/aju.2022.71
Nahuel Maisley
{"title":"The Infrastructure of International Law-Making: How Buildings Shape the Publicness of the Global Law-Making System","authors":"Nahuel Maisley","doi":"10.1017/aju.2022.71","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2022.71","url":null,"abstract":"International law is a peculiar form of global ordering, one marked by the “imperative of trying to turn a capacity for crude coercion into legitimate authority.”1 The international law-making system is therefore discursively structured around an aspiration to “publicness,”2 around a commitment to secure “some responsiveness to the claims and interests developed within the relevant publics.”3 As it is evident to any observer, this commitment is oftentimes not honored and the process is frequently detached from the ideas, interests, and priorities of those whose lives are ultimately governed by international law.4 The typical analysis of this detachment tends to focus on the role played by the enabling norms—specifically, the norms governing representation, participation, and deliberation in the international law-making system.5 In this Essay, I argue, however, that the actual publicness of the system is also shaped—sometimes in combination with the law, sometimes in competition with it—by the infrastructure of international law-making.6 For all the grand statements about transparency and public engagement, for all the sincere attempts at inclusion and all the ostentatious legal principles, my claim is that the built environment—the chambers, the fences, the checkpoints, the hallways—generally ensures, both materially and symbolically, that the sites of decision making, where law is ultimately created, are distanced from multiple sites of contestation, where the various publics and counterpublics make their voices heard.7","PeriodicalId":36818,"journal":{"name":"AJIL Unbound","volume":"117 1","pages":"21 - 25"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44986925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AJIL UnboundPub Date : 2023-01-09DOI: 10.1017/aju.2022.72
Edefe Ojomo
{"title":"International Law and Regional Electricity Infrastructure: The West African Power Pool","authors":"Edefe Ojomo","doi":"10.1017/aju.2022.72","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2022.72","url":null,"abstract":"In nearly all regions, politico-legal projects for regional organization and integration often prioritize infrastructure construction and maintenance. In West Africa, the development of a regional organization by the post-colonial independent states, in particular the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) formed in 1975, has enabled states to allocate certain powers to formal and informal regional political institutions with the aim of building state effectiveness and capacity and hence increasing public support and popular legitimacy. In this Essay, I argue that regional organizations serve as governance structures whose infrastructural and institutional mechanisms contextually address the needs of states and their citizens. This account particularly applies to West African electricity arrangements overseen through an unusual ECOWAS-linked regional infrastructural organization, the West African Power Pool (WAPP). The case of WAPP demonstrates how the energy infrastructure shapes and modifies regional institutional rules and practices.","PeriodicalId":36818,"journal":{"name":"AJIL Unbound","volume":"117 1","pages":"16 - 20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41644044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AJIL UnboundPub Date : 2023-01-09DOI: 10.1017/aju.2022.70
Deborah E. Cowen
{"title":"Law as Infrastructure of Colonial Space: Sketches from Turtle Island","authors":"Deborah E. Cowen","doi":"10.1017/aju.2022.70","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2022.70","url":null,"abstract":"Heraclitus's words remind us that law and infrastructure have lived in intimate relation, in practice and thought, for millennia. This intimacy is palpable in the context of settler worldmaking where colonial jurisdiction is enacted by constraining, with an eye to replacing, Indigenous jurisdiction. Here, the authority to have authority is often asserted in practice through violent attempts to control connectivity and movement. To this day, imperial powers assert jurisdiction over space through infrastructures that enhance or inhibit the motion of goods and people, like railroads, pipelines, border walls, and police.2 This Essay investigates the co-production of colonial law and infrastructure on Turtle Island—an Indigenous name for the continent of North America, which already highlights a different conception of jurisdiction and law through its anchor in creation stories. The brief sketches that follow emphasize the co-constitution of law and infrastructure, yet they also propose a relationship that exceeds proximity or metaphor. Law operates through the ordering of extension, and in this sense, can productively be thought of infrastructurally, as “the movement or patterning of social form.”3 This Essay argues that approaching law infrastructurally foregrounds the contingency of seemingly solid structures, including centrally that of settler jurisdiction.","PeriodicalId":36818,"journal":{"name":"AJIL Unbound","volume":"117 1","pages":"5 - 10"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48851037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AJIL UnboundPub Date : 2023-01-09DOI: 10.1017/aju.2022.73
M. Ticktin
{"title":"Building Borders and “No Borders”: Infrastructural Politics as Imagination","authors":"M. Ticktin","doi":"10.1017/aju.2022.73","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2022.73","url":null,"abstract":"Since 2015 when migration across the Mediterranean was declared a “crisis” in Europe, the language of crisis and invasion has persisted, structuring conversations and political imaginations. This has led many to argue for the strict closure of borders and the deportation of migrants or “people on the move,”1 and to a deepening set of racisms within borders. But this “crisis” has also led to a less publicized, opposing struggle against borders, in the service of a more egalitarian world. I argue that in order to really understand how borders are being regulated or unregulated, we need to look not only at the international legal realm, but also at infrastructural politics.2 In this Essay, I will discuss two different terrains of infrastructural struggle over migration and borders: the first is about border walls, which are built to close off resources and partition the world into haves and have nots; the second is an infrastructure of collective living, where people-on-the-move are occupying abandoned spaces and working against borders and private property. I suggest that it is important to attend to the infrastructural dimensions of migration and border regimes, as they can produce and regularize exclusion and conceal it from the conventional field of political discussion and legal contestation. At the same time, new infrastructures can prefigure better, more equitable worlds.","PeriodicalId":36818,"journal":{"name":"AJIL Unbound","volume":"117 1","pages":"11 - 15"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44662731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AJIL UnboundPub Date : 2023-01-09DOI: 10.1017/aju.2022.74
B. Kingsbury
{"title":"Introduction to the Symposium on Infrastructuring International Law","authors":"B. Kingsbury","doi":"10.1017/aju.2022.74","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2022.74","url":null,"abstract":"Infrastructures encompass dynamic networks and assemblages that enable and control flows of goods, people, and information over space. These can be physical, informational, or digital; most now are combinations of these, for example, the Internet, or Global Positioning and Navigation Systems (such as GPS and Beidou). Many other things run or depend on an infrastructure—andmost infrastructures depend on or link with other infrastructures. Some infrastructures lie underneath, barely noticed for long periods until things go wrong, while others attract much public and political attention and are joyously celebrated, fiercely resisted, or resignedly accepted. Infrastructures are important, but not much systematic work has been done on the significance of their relationship with international (or transversal) law. Consideration of how infrastructures affect or shape international law entails consideration of how relations, processes, and imaginations of particular infrastructures interact with law, and vice versa. This symposium contributes to the investigation of how infrastructures may work as fundamental components of regulatory ordering—or may work against or orthogonal to some such ordering projects and in support of competing or resistance projects.1 Even if it is not (yet) studied as a field, international infrastructure law is a large practice area and many of its components have long been prominent in specialized scholarship.2 International law—its praxis, doctrines, and structures—is routinely deployed in the enabling and controlling of certain kinds of transnational infrastructures, or the flows these infrastructures channel or block. Some notable infrastructures could barely exist or function without particular international law arrangements (specific infrastructures of this sort include the Suez Canal, the France-UKChannel Tunnel, the Schengen Information System, the World Health Organization’s pandemic monitoring system, and the Nordstream 2 pipeline built but suspended from becoming operational following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine). International law figures in sprawling initiatives of “infrastructural developmentalism” such as the Belt and Road Initiative or the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.3 International law enables or regulates financing and investment protection for large physical infrastructures, requirements to obtain","PeriodicalId":36818,"journal":{"name":"AJIL Unbound","volume":"117 1","pages":"1 - 4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43310282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AJIL UnboundPub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/aju.2023.36
Julia Emtseva
{"title":"Unveiling the “Legal Conscience of the Civilized World:” a Critical Look at the Institut de Droit International","authors":"Julia Emtseva","doi":"10.1017/aju.2023.36","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2023.36","url":null,"abstract":"For the past 150 years, the Institut de Droit International (IDI) has held a prominent position in the field of international law, garnering recognition as one of the world's distinguished professional organizations for international lawyers. Yet, a closer look at its structures reveals that in fact, the IDI has been and remains an elitist club, comprised of renowned international legal jurists, practitioners, and scholars. Its goal was and is to formulate “principles from which rules [of international law] could be deduced.”1 While there may be doubts regarding the contemporary authority of the IDI in shaping today's international law, it possessed significant influence during its first century of existence. Therefore, on the occasion of its 150th anniversary, this essay offers an alternative perspective on the IDI's contribution to the field, focusing on the implications of its claimed status of the “legal conscience of the civilized world” and exploring whether this status had somehow impacted international legal norms and principles. While further empirical investigation is required to establish a definitive correlation between the IDI's affiliations with the “civilized world” and a skewed focus of international law on Western legal traditions, a few examples can serve as a starting point. The illustrations from the IDI's engagement with the laws of war—specifically, the nineteenth-century regulation of occupation and the post-World War II determination of military targets—exemplify how the inherent elitism rooted in the notion of “civilization” can be discerned in pivotal advancements of international law.","PeriodicalId":36818,"journal":{"name":"AJIL Unbound","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135358597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AJIL UnboundPub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1017/aju.2023.34
Sara Dezalay
{"title":"Legal Knowledge as Social and Political Capital","authors":"Sara Dezalay","doi":"10.1017/aju.2023.34","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2023.34","url":null,"abstract":"The 150th anniversary of the Institut de Droit International (IDI) and the International Law Association (ILA) provides an opportunity to assess the role of legal scholarship in the codification and institutionalization of international law. This essay argues that academic expertise is a form of social and political capital that is at once individual, institutional, and structural. Empirically focused on international dispute settlement mechanisms (interstate adjudication and arbitration), this essay underscores that academic expertise shapes the professional status of international lawyers, and influences the clout of international institutions as codifiers of international law.","PeriodicalId":36818,"journal":{"name":"AJIL Unbound","volume":"81 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136257201","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}