Announcement from the convenors of the new ANZSIL History and Theory of International Law Interest Group.
Haris Jamil explores the colonial inheritance of contemporary contempt of court laws in India and how the civilising mission is reinvented domestically to stifle radical dissent and revolution. Jamil observes the ease with which such laws sit alongside international human rights law.
As all of our lives now seem suspended between an imagined past and an unknown future, Banan Abdelrahman reflects along with those who are habitually unsettled and displaced, by entering into one family’s experience of a significant journey.
Compiled and narrated by Shahd Hammouri.
Christiane Wilke reflects on the possible gaps in the ICC’s engagement with Afghanistan through the lens of the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan’s Annual Report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict.
Vasanthi Venkatesh and Fahad Ahmad reflect on the BJP’s insidious use of legitimate state power through administrative regulation, constitutionalism, citizenship determination, adoption of international law and neoliberal economic policies, to further its ‘Hindutva’ ideology.
Adil Hasan Khan unpacks the colonial histories of the project of modernity in India and transcends the distinction between secular and anti-secular. He envisions a relationship between law, religion and politics whereby politics is neither fully determined by religion and law, nor entirely bereft of an ethic; and he turns to traditions of civility to inspire peaceful cohabitation.
Shahd Hammouri recalls Allende’s speech and traces the spirals of history – the discourse and conduct – that over time led to the gradual exclusion of economic and corporate matters from public international law, and the normalisation of such a state of affairs.
Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh reflects on the historical trajectories and consequences of the international community’s domestication of Kashmir, and maps how the Indian legal order serves to simultaneously effectuate and erase the conditions of militarized occupation, armed conflict and complex permanent emergency in Kashmir.
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui discusses her monograph, ‘Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism’, with Ntina Tzouvala.