International Law of State Responsibility and COVID-19: An Ideology Critique

Despite minimal prospects of success, international lawyers spent the first few months of the global pandemic discussing whether the rules of state responsibility could be invoked against states, especially China, for their acts and omissions regarding COVID-19. In this piece, we take these debates seriously, if not necessarily literally. We argue that the unrealistic nature of these debates does not make them irrelevant. Rather, we propose an ideology critique of state responsibility as a legal field. Our approach is two-fold. First, we argue these debates need to be situated within the rise of geopolitical competition between the US and its allies on the one hand and China on the other. In this context, state responsibility is always laid at the feet of one’s opponents. Secondly, we posit that my emphasising the role of states, recourse to state responsibility renders invisible the role of transnational processes of capitalist production and exchange that have profound effects on nature and set the stage for the emergence and spread of infectious diseases. Drawing from the work of the geographer Neil Smith, we argue against the ‘naturalisation’ of disasters performed much of the international legal discourse about COVID-19.

Theorizing Liberal Orders in Crisis Then and Now: Returning to Carr and Horkheimer

This article pursues an original line of inquiry by placing E.H. Carr in direct relation with his contemporary, Max Horkheimer. Although Carr is often cited as a progenitor by realists and critical theorists, these invocations of ancestry rarely go beyond passing references to Carr in presentist terms—i.e., how he relates to their present-day projects. By means of an extensive engagement with Horkheimer and Carr, the article reveals a shared commitment to ideology critique directed at bourgeois civilization. The article demonstrates that Carr's epistemology, critique of the harmony of interests, complex treatment of utopianism, and theorization of social transformation all have their counterparts in Horkheimer. The recovery of Carr's depth and sophistication as a theorist by means of a comparison of his positions with those of Horkheimer shows that at the time of its composition The Twenty Years’ Crisis was a cutting-edge exercise in critique by a theorist working on an ambitious canvas of civilizational scale. The article concludes with a section that demonstrates the continued relevance of Carr and Horkheimer by reference to contemporary debates about the crises currently affecting the liberal international order.

Science Communication and Open Access: The Critique of the Political Economy of Capitalist Academic Publishers as Ideology Critique

Starting from a theoretical and methodological foundation of an academic ideology critique, the production, distribution and valorisation of science communication will be analysed in exemplary fashion. The focus is on the criticism of publishing houses’ business models in the sphere of open Access publishing. These models are propagated and implemented by science and politics. Thus, academic publications continue to be traded as commodities. The existing relationships of power and domination are thereby reproduced. In contrast, the emancipatory potential of non-commercial science communication based on the digitalisation of production and distribution is shown.