{"title":"Toward a democratic theory of contagion: virality and performativity with Eve Sedgwick, JL Austin, Hortense Spillers, and Patricia Williams","authors":"B. Honig","doi":"10.1093/lril/lrad002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrad002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In Euripides’ Bacchae, the 2015 film The Fits, and John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971), refusal is depicted as worryingly contagious and efforts are made to contain it. But each represents a different model of contagion. In the Bacchae, refusal breaks out all-at-once; in The Fits, a contagion passes through a community in a sequence, mutating as it travels; in A Theory of Justice, refusal is contagious but isolable. In each of these examples, efforts to contain contagion are made via ‘deformatives’, Eve Sedgwick’s term for Austinian performative utterances that shame or stigmatize gender queerness and are themselves, she says, ‘uniquely contagious’. Might their phobic contagion be reworked into a more philic form for democratic theory? Sedgwick might object since she thinks Austin’s exemplary performative is the ‘I do’ of the straight, marrying couple. But How To Do Things with Words shows Austin turning not just to the couple but also to the crowd, which may be gathered or dispersed by another recurring example—that of a bull in the field. This is the first of three counterexamples offered here of the potentially democratic and viral powers of performativity: Austin’s crowd-drawing and-dispersing bull (isolable, yet uncontainable), Hortense Spillers’ viral constitutionalism which may be made to mutate (the sequence model), and Patricia Williams’s alchemy of rights (the all-at-once model of outbreak). In all three, the power and impotence of law is explored: in the comedy of Austin’s memorandum warning about the bull, in Spiller’s constitutionalism, and in Williams’ new rights. In all three contagion is let loose. Efforts to contain it with law, whether by way of property, romance, or whiteness, are mocked, and new consideration of contagion’s democratic possibilities are invited.each virus tells its own story\u0000 – J Osmundson, Virology","PeriodicalId":43782,"journal":{"name":"London Review of International Law","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48917472","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}
{"title":"The justice archive: transitional justice and digital memory","authors":"Iavor Rangelov, Ruti G. Teitel","doi":"10.1093/lril/lrad001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrad001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article introduces the justice archive as a concept and set of practices emerging from recent developments in transitional justice, memory, and digital technology. Drawing on evidence from the Americas and the Balkans, it examines digital archiving and memory activism and considers the role of international law and regulation.","PeriodicalId":43782,"journal":{"name":"London Review of International Law","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47622751","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}
{"title":"Problematising diversity: The change that international lawyers (do not) want for international courts","authors":"Juliana Santos de Carvalho, J. Uriburu","doi":"10.1093/lril/lrac020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrac020","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Scholars working on international courts and tribunals (ICTs) have recently seized the agenda of the diversity of the international judiciary and international institutions more broadly. Focusing, above all, on the lack of women in the different international benches around the world, they have criticised and proposed reforms to the composition of ICTs. This paper argues that the burgeoning literature on the diversity in ICTs expresses a particular politics of inclusion for the composition of the international judiciary. We begin by explaining the importance of looking into knowledge production in international legal scholarship as a site of (re)production of the field’s boundaries and situating the literature under study within the broader universe of the scholarship on ICTs. We then lay out this paper’s main contribution: a reconstruction and critical analysis of the normative commitments of the politics of inclusion underlying the literature on diversity in ICTs.","PeriodicalId":43782,"journal":{"name":"London Review of International Law","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46511432","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}
{"title":"Sensing suffering: on common-sense and compassion in the legal imagination and recognition of torture","authors":"Ergun Cakal","doi":"10.1093/lril/lrac019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrac019","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Emotion and imagination are central to recognising another’s suffering—aiding in evaluating what is seen, heard, and registered. Tending to torture’s adjudication, this article connects the ‘law and torture’ jurisprudence to two areas of ‘law and emotion’ scholarship, namely common-sense and compassion (and, with the latter, empathy).","PeriodicalId":43782,"journal":{"name":"London Review of International Law","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45040237","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}
{"title":"Grand theft in international law","authors":"Lys Kulamadayil","doi":"10.1093/lril/lrac018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrac018","url":null,"abstract":"Commonly subsumed under the legal concepts of corruption and money-laundering, the theft of public wealth on a massive scale with the aid of transnational financial institutions has, so far, largely been neglected by legal scholarship and legal practise. Drawing on two grand theft cases, this article’s objectives are threefold. Firstly, it explains the concept of grand theft by illustrating how it operates. Secondly, it retraces legal responses to grand theft in jurisdictions of countries, which are home to key financial markets places, to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of this legal regime in practice. Thirdly, it reflects on the obstacles to researching grand theft.","PeriodicalId":43782,"journal":{"name":"London Review of International Law","volume":"47 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138540596","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}
{"title":"Infrastructural developmentalism and its many types of global law: a comparative look at the UN Sustainable Development Goals and China’s Belt and Road Initiative","authors":"Alejandro Rodiles","doi":"10.1093/lril/lrac017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrac017","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 We are currently witnessing the evolution of two gigantic development programmes: the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Perceived and real differences notwithstanding, both place infrastructures at the heart of global development. The present article analyses the relations between this new developmental thinking and law. The fluid rearrangement of public and private, formal and informal legal frameworks spurred by BRI indicate the emergence of a transnational legal infrastructure both tied to and facilitated by a material pragmatism at odds with China’s rhetorical embracement of international law as we know it. The implementation infrastructure of SDGs, for its part, reveals a resilience-driven style of governance difficult to reconcile with the futurity attaching to the idea of law. While these findings would suggest a retreat from international law, the present article argues that many types of global law are emerging and resurfacing from infrastructural developmentalism.","PeriodicalId":43782,"journal":{"name":"London Review of International Law","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47783225","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}
{"title":"Building (of) the international community: a history of the Peace Palace through transnational gifts and local bureaucracy","authors":"T. Aalberts, S. Stolk","doi":"10.1093/lril/lrac013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrac013","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The Peace Palace in The Hague is more than a mere venue where international law is practiced. Initiated after the 1899 Peace Conference it provided a material home for the emergent international community and as such, we argue, helped to sing this community into existence. This article traces the process of materialising the grand international ideal of ‘peace through justice’ by shedding light on its bureaucratic backstage of transnational diplomacy. Taking a ritual perspective on gift-giving as a way to constitute relationships, we analyse how three sets of gifts were crucial to (the) building (of) the emergent international community: finding a proper site (as a gift from the Dutch government), securing Andrew Carnegie’s financial gift, and collecting materials and artworks donated by the States as gifts to the Palace. We examine how each of these arrangements involved a complex web of public and private transnational actors, temporalities, and bickering over nitty gritty details as the conditions of possibility for giving and receiving gifts, and constituting the international community.","PeriodicalId":43782,"journal":{"name":"London Review of International Law","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46478442","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}
{"title":"Unclosure: The international law of seabed mining and the systemic cycles of capital accumulation","authors":"Michele Tedeschini","doi":"10.1093/lril/lrac016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrac016","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The growing electric vehicle industry is heavily reliant on minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper. As corporations scramble to access vast deposits of those minerals lying in the ocean floor, the international law of seabed mining has come under scrutiny. This article situates negotiations concerning that law, which took place between 1973 and 1994, within Giovanni Arrighi’s historiographical framework of the systemic cycles of capital accumulation. It argues that the legal regime in question was shaped by the Reagan administration, as part of a strategy to solve a profitability crisis affecting US nationals. While temporarily diverting wealth towards American financial markets, however, the legal arrangements that the United States imposed could not affect the dynamics of capital accumulation on a global scale.","PeriodicalId":43782,"journal":{"name":"London Review of International Law","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44914787","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}
{"title":"Locating the informed publics","authors":"W. Werner","doi":"10.1093/lril/lrac010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrac010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43782,"journal":{"name":"London Review of International Law","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47311848","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}
{"title":"Subaltern subjectivity and embodiment in human rights practices","authors":"Shaimaa Abdelkarim","doi":"10.1093/lril/lrac014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/lril/lrac014","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article problematises the representation of subaltern resistance in practices of human rights. It critiques the normative framing of the subaltern by those practices, a framing which it argues contributes to their subjugation. Against such framing, the article follows the 2011 Egyptian uprising through the film Rags & Tatters, offering a practice of freedom beyond human rights and through self-recollection.","PeriodicalId":43782,"journal":{"name":"London Review of International Law","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43746147","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}