IILJ History and Theory of International Law Workshop: Covid 19 and the Scripts of Emergency Powers

May 18, 2020

Emergency measures enacted across the planet make it vital that scholars, administrators, and journalists grapple with multiple forms of emergency and the implications for executive power. The scholars convened here have studied emergency and crisis in the context of pronounced inequalities. These include past and contemporary colonial, settler colonial and imperial settings, as well as many others. A historical, transnational and relational perspective that highlights the problematique of ‘the routinization of emergency’ in peacetime, enables us to pose critical questions in the current context, and to closely examine, and where warranted contest, long-term institutional changes enacted now in the wake of the pandemic.

Convened and moderated by Vasuki Nesiah, Yael Berda and Karin Loevy, the meeting will include short presentations by each of the participants and an open discussion. This is not intended to be an public event but a substantive preliminary group discussion to be followed up in the next academic year. This event is co-sponsored by IILJ’s History and Theory of International Law Workshops and NYU’s Gallatin School.

Group 1 – Technologies and Structures

  1. Fleur Johns
  2. John Reynolds
  3. Ntina Tzouvala
  4. Nomi Lazar
  5. Bhavani Raman
  6. Heidi Stark

Group 2 – Scale: From the Planetary to the Local

  1. Jinee Lockanita
  2. Rohit De
  3. Will Smiley
  4. Yael Berda
  5. Luis Eslava
  6. Smadar Ben Nathan

Group 3 – Perpetual Crisis

  1. Anthony Farley
  2. Nathaniel Berman
  3. Karin Loevy
  4. Vasuki Nesiah
  5. Rose Parfitt

The IILJ History and Theory of International Law Workshops are presented with the support of the NYU Global Institute for Advanced Study, Project on International Legal Orders and their Histories.