Re-imagining international law: From Critique to Praxis
postgraduate course, 6 ECTS
Unlike what the rhetoric of national-populist governments suggests, international law has never been the result of egalitarian globalists. Scholars and practitioners working in critical traditions have exposed it as an instrument that has been complicit in, and instrumental to, upholding the imperial world order, and have excavated how it is, at times, complicit in reproducing social hierarchies and capitalist and anthropocentric world orders.
In this course, we will revisit and discuss some of these critiques in order to reflect on how to make sense of international law in times of intensifying and intersecting crises, which undoubtedly call for coordinated global efforts. We will engage with different critical traditions, including post-colonial, queer, anti-racist and anti-capitalist approaches. We will then examine activist efforts to pursue decolonial, social and environmental objectives through critical praxis. In this process, we will engage with activism through judicial and expert processes, as well as proposals for radical change in specific subfields of international law, necessitated in part by developments such as the emergence of autonomous weapon systems and an increasing understanding of plenary processes.
The Political Economy of Natural Resources and International Law
postgraduate course, 6 ECTS
Since the 1990s, expressions such as the ‘resource curse’ and ‘paradox of plenty’ have been associated with unequal patterns of power, and wealth distribution in post-colonial and neo-colonial countries as well as to the ecological and social cost of natural resources exploitation, and the planetary costs of mineral resources-based production and consumption patterns. These negative effects of natural resources wealth can be described as ‘pathology of plenty’.
Taking various resource curse and paradox of plenty theories as a starting point, this course offers a critical examination of the role law plays in the pathology of plenty. More concretely, we will revisit how rights and principles such as sovereignty over natural resources and economic self-determination were applied in decolonisation processes, study the proliferation of international treaties protecting foreign property rights, and zoom in on various contract models used in the mineral resources sector to evaluate the distributional choices of cost and revenue.
Law by Colour Code 