The New Aesthetics of International Law: After Institutions

with Annelise Riles

The Stockholm Centre for International Law and Justice invites you to a seminar with

Annelise Riles

on

The New Aesthetics of International Law: After Institutions

Riles, Annelise

In this seminar, Professor Riles wants to suggest that we are moving into a post-institutional world—one defined not by a return from institutions to law but by a new set of global aesthetic practices which she will call the aesthetics of tagging. Riles will discuss two examples—the UN SDGs and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and end with a few thoughts on what such a moment demands of us as theorist-practitioners.

***

Annelise Riles is Professor of Law at Northwestern University. She is the winner of the American Society of International Law Certificate of Merit for The Network Inside Out  and received the Maier Prize for lifetime academic achievement from the Humboldt Foundation. She has been knighted by the French government (Order of Academic Palms) for her contributions to diplomacy. She serves as Peace Correspondent for the City of Nagasaki. She is the host of a successful podcast with Foreign Policy Magazine entitled Everyday Ambassadors, which explores how each of us can serve as diplomats to bring greater peace to a divided world.

SCILJ appreciates your voluntary registration at scilj@juridicum.su.se.

You can also follow the seminar via this zoom link.

The Crisis of Kartenpolitik: Critical Geography and International Law

with Nikolas Rajkovic

The Stockholm Centre for International Law and Justice invites you to a seminar with

 

Nikolas Rajkovic
on

The Crisis of Kartenpolitik: Critical Geography and International Law

Nikolas Rajkovic • European University Institute

Description: Please join Professor Dr Nikolas M. Rajkovic for an insightful discussion on Critical Geography and International Law. Geography has an enigmatic place within the discipline of International Law. It is ubiquitous, but yet obscure. Many types of disciplinary lawyers engage implicitly with geography in everyday practice, yet this has been at some distance from Geography in the capital “G” and thus disciplinary sense. International Law remains defined by core concepts with inherent geographic and cartographic lineage, such as territory, territoriality, extraterritoriality, and jurisdiction. Few legal scholars appreciate the depth of this association between International Law and disciplinary Geography. Notably, International Law’s spatial premises did not arise from the discipline’s own interrogations, but rather from its import and veneration of a cartographic model crowned by modern science. An ingestion so complete, in fact, that few notice how the generative notions of cartography and geometry became quietly subsumed by, and forgotten within, the institutionalized grammar of territory and jurisdiction.
This has left international lawyers—among many experts—stuck to an eternalized “World Map” of states that hinders scrutiny into novel geometric and non-geometric boundaries of authority. There is a misplaced concreteness assigned to statist cartography that overlooks how the res—or material terrenes—of boundaries actually reside in evolving assemblages of maps, lists, algorithms, guards, fences, gates, ISO standards, weapons, passports and other technologies, which have given material life to such axioms as states and markets. Such spatial and normative dynamics raise pertinent questions: Why do international lawyers rarely reflect on their geographic theory or theorizing? How is a discipline innately defined by (i.e. International) and involved with geography seemingly distant from evolving Geographic thought?

Bio: Nikolas M. Rajkovic is Professor and Chair of International Law at Tilburg University (The Netherlands), and is the former Head of the Department of Public Law and Governance (PLG). He is also currently a Visiting Fellow at the Law Department of the European University Institute (Italy). Nikolas is a senior faculty, and an Academic Council, member of the Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP). His current research is at the intersection of International Law, International Relations, and Critical Geography. He is completing a forthcoming book for Cambridge University Press (2026) Off the Map: A Critical Geography of International Law.

Registration: SCILJ appreciates your registration at scilj@juridicum.su.se before 22 November.

Zoom: https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/63741058965

There is a problem with the previous link. Please try this one: https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/62751247112

Inaugural Lecture of the 2024 Olof Palme Guest Professor

with Anne Orford

The Stockholm Centre for International Law and Justice, in cooperation with the Department of Law at the University of Gothenburg and the Faculty of Law at Lund University, invites you to the

 

Inaugural Lecture of the 2024 Olof Palme Guest Professor
with

Anne Orford

Anne Orford

The Securitization of Climate Change

Commentator: Professor Jonas Ebbesson, Director of the Stockholm Environmental Law and Policy Centre

The event will be opened by President Astrid Söderbergh Widding

 

Description:
A growing number of states and their legal advisors are turning to security as a frame through which to address the challenge of climate change in international fora, including the UN Security Council. While many states and civil society groups are uneasy about the push to treat non-military or non-traditional issues as threats to international peace and security, the trend towards treating climate change as a security threat appears to be gaining momentum. This lecture will explore what is at stake in securitizing climate change. It will consider how the relative strengths of states and other actors in different international fora have influenced the direction of the securitization project, evaluate the motivations and arguments made by the proponents of these changes, and consider the consequences of framing climate change as a security challenge or a matter for international criminal law. It will consider the geopolitical implications of securitizing climate change, and the effect of treating great powers (many of whom are also great polluters) as legitimate managers of the climate issue, while shifting the focus of global attention and action away from more broad-based negotiations associated with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process. More broadly, it will ask what it means to adopt a ‘wartime mentality’ in response to climate change (as advocated by John Kerry, President Biden’s former climate envoy), and consider whose security is enhanced by entrusting climate politics to the military and intelligence communities.

Bio:
Anne Orford is Melbourne Laureate Professor and Michael D Kirby Chair of International Law at Melbourne Law School, and Visiting Professor of Law and John Harvey Gregory Lecturer on World Organization at Harvard Law School. She researches and teaches in the areas of international law, international dispute settlement, international economic law, climate change, and the history and theory of international law. She is a Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and a past President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law. She has been a Visiting Legal Fellow at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and an international expert adviser on climate change and international law to the Pacific Islands Forum. Her latest book, International Law and the Politics of History (Cambridge University Press, 2021), was awarded the 2022 European Society of International Law Monograph Prize for Excellence in International Law Scholarship.
 
Please register at scilj@juridicum.su.se, preferably before 27 August, for the campus event.

 

The event will also be livestreamed (click here).