‘The Natural’ in International Law
What is ‘natural’ in international law and who decides what is ‘natural’? In this workshop we will not only explore what international law represents as ‘the natural’, but also where ideas of what is natural come from, how international law naturalizes certain conditions and how it responds to changes of what social systems perceive to be ‘the natural’.
Event details of
‘The Natural’ in International Law
- Start date
- 8 September 2022
- End date
- 9 September 2022
- Time
- 09:00
- Location
- Roeterseilandcampus - building A
- Room
- A3.15/A3.01
We will discuss whether appeals to the natural are productive and under what circumstances they should be used, or if they should be used at all in law and legal reasoning. In tackling these questions, we will build on scholarly work on how international law reflects and reproduces social conditions, how it transforms historical contingencies into inevitabilities and how it solidifies social hierarchies by naturalizing them. We will focus our attention on three primary subject areas, namely the environment, the economy, and social order.
September 8th 12:45–15:00 hrs.
Opening Roundtable: Locating ‘the Natural’ in International Law
- Justin Desautels-Stein (University of Colorado)
- Moshe Hirsch (University of Jerusalem)
- Emily Jones (University of Essex)
- Moderator: Ingo Venzke (University of Amsterdam)
September 9th 15:15–16:45 hrs.
Closing Roundtable: Can international law do without ‘the natural’?
- Anna Spain Bradley (UCLA)
- Ntina Tzouvala (Australian National University)
- Claire Cutler (University of Victoria)
- Moderator: Fuad Zarbiyev (Graduate Institute, Geneva)
