This new Spring Seminar offers a fascinating opportunity to explore the origins and development of international humanitarian warfare and to address the existing gaps and controversies in the methodologies and approaches related to this topic. The speakers are renowned scholars from the University of Melbourne, Tel Aviv University and Christ’s College Cambridge: Boyd van Dijk, Doreen Lustig and Giovanni Mantilla.
Our online discussion provides an insight into the history of capitalism and international law and the research landscape. The speakers are experts from Harvard, Wellesley College and ANU: Sven Beckert, Quinn Slobodian and Ntina Tzouvala
Dr Prabhakar Singh from Jindal Global Law School will be exploring the transformation of the law of nations through the history of the Indian princely states during the 19th century. International Lawyer Dr Carl Landauer and Parvathi Menon, Adjunct Lecturer in International Criminal Law at the University of Helsinki, will provide the commentary.
Dr. Mostafa Minawi, Associate Professor in History at Cornell University, will be investigating the precarity of Ottoman sovereignty in the Horn of Africa at the end of the nineteenth century in relation to a growing European global legal hegemony. Prof. Dr. Cemil Aydin, Global History Professor at the University of North Carolina, will be providing the commentary.
Dr. Samuel Fury Childs Daly, historian at Duke University, will present his book A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War forthcoming at Cambridge University Press. Professor Dr Elisio Macamo, sociologist and member of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel, and Dr Lasse Heerten, historian at Ruhr-University Bochum and author of The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism, will provide the commentary.
Kyle Rapp, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California will explore the British 1956 intervention in Suez and the American 1983 intervention in Grenada to define the role of international law in foreign-policy decision-making. Historian Dr. Ned Richardson-Little (Erfurt University), author of The Human Rights Dictatorship: Socialism, Global Solidarity and Revolution in East Germany (CUP, 2020) will provide the commentary.
Aden Knaap, Ph.D. candidate at Harvard, will be demonstrating that the First World War did not give birth to the idea of a legalist world organization, but that it was the continuation of the pre-war movement for the creation of the Permanent Court of Arbitral, resulting not as a series of parallel movements, but rather as a single Great Power movement, and being reconstituted during the war as a league of nations movement.
Andrew Levidis, research fellow at Cambridge, will examine Japanese imperial Diet debates of the interwar period focusing on sovereignty, legal pluralisms, imperial hierarchies, and racial utopian visions of world order in complex legal jurisdictions such as the imperial city of Dalian (neither fully colony nor metropole), international concessions in China, and the Manchurian settler colonial empire.
Boyd van Dijk, lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, will provide the commentary based on his expertise on the history of humanitarianism, international organizations and international law.
Diane Marie Amann, professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, will reveal a new narrative of intersectional sovereignties. Dr George Giannakopoulos (King’s College London/NYU London) will shed light on the imperial transformation of international law.
Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies will highlight the entanglement between the materiality of global governance and international law. Dr Daniel Joyce, senior lecturer at UNSW Law, will provide the response.
Kerstin von Lingen, professor at the University of Vienna, will present her new book on the origins of the crimes against humanity. Barak Kushner, professor at Cambridge, and Dr Sabina Ferhadbegovic from Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena will highlight the prolongation of these debates on Cold War battlefields, in the former ruins of the Japanese empire and in Socialist Yugoslavia
Dirk Moses, professor at Sydney University, will present his new work forthcoming at CUP, ‘The Problems of Genocide. Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression.’ Charles Maier, professor emeritus at Harvard, and author of ‘The Unmasterable Past – History, Holocaust & German National Identity,’ will provide the commentary.
Guillaume Mouralis, French historian and sociologist at Marc Bloch Center for Social Sciences Research (Berlin) will present his book on the Nuremberg Trial published in 2019 by Sciences Po University Press. Elizabeth Borgwardt, Associate Professor of History and of Law (by courtesy) from Washington University in St Louis who has written widely on the history of international law and human rights, will provide the response.