The question of what international law is – what it encompasses, what it does, how it looks like –  has been central to scholarly and practitioners debates since the inception of the discipline in the late nineteenth century, and even before around concerns with regards to the possible province of jus gentium. As the New Directions in the Theory & History of International Law lecture series has demonstrated, resolving this question today requires an acknowledgement of the political as well as the aesthetic economy underpinning the development of the international legal order. This final lecture of the series will wrap up this line of enquiry by exploring what’s at stake in both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic representations of the past, present and future of international law.

Speaker

Dr Luis Eslava teaches and researches in the areas of International Law, International Development, and International Legal Theory and History. Luis is teaching the course International Law and Development: Global South Perspectives at the Graduate Institute in Spring 2023.

Bringing together insights from anthropology, history, political economy and legal and social theory, his work focuses on the multiple ways in which international norms, aspirations and institutional practices, both old and new, come to shape people’s everyday life. Paying attention to the global legal and economic order and its relation to precarity and violence in the Global South, his work argues that closer critical attention needs to be paid to the co-constitutive relationship between international law ‘up there’ and life ‘down here’.

Introductory remarks and moderation

Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín (Geneva Graduate Institute)

This event is part of the workshop series "New Directions in the Theory & History of International Law"