War and order: rethinking criminal accountability for the Iraq War

Public calls for the criminal accountability of UK and US politicians for the 2003 Iraq war are part of the war’s legal legacies. This article questions whether criminal sanction can be a corrective to war by considering whether the relationship between the two might be understood as symbiotic.

The museum and the border: the Merseyside Maritime Museum and the construction of the migrant and refugee

This article examines how the state imagines and represents migration. Using the Merseyside Maritime Museum as a frame, it provides key insights into how perspectives of time and particular constructions of colonial history have contributed to a system of immigration law that is characterised by a policy of institutional forgetting.

The tyranny of strangers: transformative occupations old and new

In the aftermath of the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003, considerable attention was given to the apparent emergence of a new type of belligerent occupation—the ‘transformative occupation’ which apparently challenged the traditional assumptions of the law of occupation. The suggestion here is that, as an examination of the British occupation of Mesopotamia between 1914-1924 reveals, the ‘transformative occupation’ is by no means a new institution, but is one that may be associated with a tradition of thought and practice in which the institution of belligerent occupationwas made congruent with the operational rationalities of colonial rule by re-imagining it as a form of sacred trust. The legacy of that history, it is contended, is critical for understanding the role of occupation law today.

International law, politics and opposition to the Iraq War

A key feature of the Iraq war was the prominence of international legal argument. This article argues that the motif of the ‘illegal war’ was crucial in mobilisations against the war. It traces the reasons for the prominence of this ‘illegal war’ motif and the wider political consequences of its adoption.

Public invocations of international law and legacies of the Iraq War

This essay reads three texts: Charlotte Peevers’s The Politics of Justifying Force: the Suez Crisis, the Iraq War and International Law, the 2016 Report of the UK Iraq Inquiry, and Ayça Çubukçu’s For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal On Iraq. It explores what each of the texts tells us about the role of international law as a public language and suggests how we might think of the texts as creating one legacy of the Iraq War.

Maritime demarcation in the Gulf after 2003

This paper uses the Iranian detention of twelve British naval and marine personnel in the Northern Gulf in March 2007 as a prompt to examine the place of the 2003 invasion of Iraq within the continuities and ruptures of the international legal imagination, including that of critical international lawyers.

A life in human rights: a conversation with Dennis Davis

Dennis Davis is Judge of the High Court of South Africa, Judge President of the Competition Appeal Court, and Honorary Professor of Law at the University of Cape Town. In this wide-ranging conversation with Tor Krever, he reflects on his political and intellectual trajectory—from early encounters with Marx to anti-apartheid activism to a leading position in the South African judiciary—and his lifelong commitment to a radical left politics.

The Polish Rider: CH Alexandrowicz and the reorientation of international law, Part II: declension and the promise of renewal

This article is the second of a two-part analysis of the work of the international legal historian, CH Alexandrowicz. Part II analyses Alexandrowicz’s narrative of the decline of international law represented by 19th-century positivism and the scramble for African territory, where legal principles such as the protectorate became mere tools for acquisition, and treaties bereft of obligation. It traces his sympathy for the post-independence ‘new states’, his hope for the renewal of international law, the Romantic narrative imbuing his secular, modernist eschatology, and his continuing engagement with Indian Constitutional development.

The law of the global economy and the spectre of inequality

Drawing on my inaugural lecture, I argue that the spectre of inequality haunts international law. The presence of the spectre first of all draws attention to what is rotten in the global economic order: how the law of the global economy has contributed to high levels of inequality while, at the same time, abdicating responsibility for it. Second, like all spectres, international law’s spectre of inequality is animated by a spirit, the spirit of social justice. It points to forsaken paths, lost memories and conjures up past possibilities that were not realized. Third, the spectre endures unless we give in and break with current repetitions. It directs those in search of progressive change towards productive contradictions within global order. Those contradictions are indeed carriers of hope. They offer reason to believe that the future is open. Engaging with the spectre of inequality in international law turns out to be much less daunting than failing to do so.