Call for Audience: International Law in a Dark Time

The Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights and Peking University Institute of International Law Collaboration Project (ECI-PUIIL Project) have issued a call for an audience for a seminar for doctoral students and junior researchers on "International Law in a Dark Time," on May 22-23, 2017, in Helsinki. The seminar will be directed by Anne Orford (Univ. of Melbourne) and Martti Koskenniemi (Univ. of Helsinki). Up to thirty participants may register to be in the audience. Registration is here; the deadline is May 15, 2017. The program is here. Here's the idea:

The Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights and Peking University Institute of International Law Collaboration Project (ECI-PUIIL Project) funded by CIMO is pleased to offer a seminar for PhD students and junior researchers to be held at Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki. The purpose of this workshop is to examine the transformations of law at a specific moment in history in which law and lawfulness appear as much part of the problem as the solution.

The background for this workshop is formed by the experience that in the past 25 years optimism about international progress after the end of the Cold War has diminished and law’s role in global governance has come to appear increasingly ambivalent: it has often proven either useless or actually harmful. From an easy acceptance of the ideology of the “rule of law” in the early 1990s, we have come to realise that law comes in many forms and supports very different and often contradictory policies. On the one hand, there has been a massive growth of law in various specialist fields ranging from human rights to the environment, war and security to the economy. At the same time, in many of these fields a sense of a “crisis” has emerged or persists. Sometimes the crisis has been attributed to external phenomena – and law has come to seem inefficient in dealing with them. At other times crisis may seem have been created or exacerbated by the law itself. Despite the “growth” of law in the field of human rights and the environment, huge numbers of people experience daily deprivation and no end can be seen to the degradation of the quality of the environment. Laws enacted to protect the security of human groups are used to discipline and oppress, and economic laws seem powerful to forestall the massive growth of global inequality. In a word, the benefits of the traditional recipe to international problems of “more law” may no longer seem sustainable.

The purpose of the workshop would be to examine law’s increasingly complex role and its often problematic consequences for international politics.