POSTPONED - New Work in International Law - Works in Progress

*** This event has been postponed to a later date ***

This event is open to the public and all members of the Law School, staff and students, are encouraged to attend. It will showcase recent works in progress by International Law Faculty of the University of Edinburgh Law School.

Dr Rotem Giladi

'Decolonizing International Humanitarian Law: Law, History, and Culture’

While in recent years, historians of international humanitarian law have turned to examine the effect of decolonisation on humanitarian, it remains the case that ‘the literature on the links between the development of the laws of war and the development of the legal architecture of empire and colonialism remains surprisingly thin’ (Vergerio, 2019 ms); ‘contemporary scholarship’, as Helen Kinsella noted in 2011, ‘remains governed by its failure to think through’ the ‘constitutive relations between the defining moments of the laws of war and the emergence of colonization as an integral part of the modern nation-state’. Indeed, histories of what most commentators continue to explain the modern project of restraining the conduct of war by reference to a narrative of European moral triumph or, more recently, to a story of European state-building. In the last two decades, international law historians have devised many of the tools required to reflect on the colonial origins of the laws of war; nonetheless, they have paid less attention to colonial wars as a distinct topic of study. Critical engagements with the history of the laws of war remain, surprisingly, few and far between. 

Against this backdrop, the research agenda presented here seeks to sketch sustained inquiries into what ‘decolonising international humanitarian’ law might entail—its imperial and colonial origins and postcolonial legacies alike. These pay particular attention to the colonial settings of ideas about and discourses of ‘humanity’—in war and in peace—and their migration to the metropole and into doctrine and positive international law governing war. They search for the colonial ‘other’ and explore the colonial encounter, and the echoes of ‘petty wars’ and colonial confrontation and revolt in the formative texts and moments of the moderns laws of war: from Henri Dunant’s travels in northern Italy and Francis Lieber’s racial sensibilities to the implicit and explicit assumptions about hierarchy and difference attending the making of the St. Petersburg and Brussels declaration, the debates of the IDI and the 1880 Oxford Manual, and course of the Hague Peace Conferences. 

At the same time, the research agenda argues that the epistemological hybridity of the law governing colonial violence limits the instruction of the study of doctrine and discursive practices—that is, the study of the history of ideas. Instead, it advocates a turn to the normative study of colonial violence as a cultural performance as a way not merely to overcome but rather understand the broader political and social functions of the laws of war—and of the law’s hybridity.

Comments: Prof Andrew Lang

 

Dr Kasey McCall Smith

‘Torture on Trial’

This article seeks to shine a light on the military commission cases taking place in Guantánamo. It aims to fill a gap in the legal literature about the interrelated nature of the prohibition against torture and the right to fair trial. It argues that the US government’s failure to directly address the issue of torture of the five 9/11 defendants directly undermines the capacity of the military commission to deliver justice in concert with accepted interpretations of the right to a fair trial because the breach of the prohibition against torture has not been vindicated.

Comments: Prof Nehal Bhuta

 

Dr Rafael Lima Sakr

The International Monetary System: Reinterpreting the Last Eight Decades

This article argues that the international monetary system can be understood, fairly transformed and sustainably governed if it is reinterpreted as the present history of its normative and institutional architecture. Mainstream literature usefully explains the legal genesis and development of the system with reference to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Despite the accomplishments of this specialist scholarship, the multi-dimensional effects of last-decade transformations reveal a number of limitations in the way that the legal history of the system is remembered and understood. Taken together, these recent developments suggest that the need to depart from a traditional view of the system’s architecture as constituted primarily by public international law and centred on the IMF. Reassessing the system in light of the 21st-century challenges requires fundamentally an alternative approach to historicising and analysing its last eight decades. This new perspective enriches the understanding of the past and broadens the range of possibilities to innovatively address the present and future challenges to the international monetary system.

Comments: Dr Filippo Fontanelli