The IILAH Podcast

Institute of International Law and the Humanities
The IILAH Podcast

The IILAH podcast is the online home of lectures and conversations hosted by the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at Melbourne Law School. IILAH supports interdisciplinary scholarship on emerging questions of international law, governance and justice. Many of the significant modes of thought that have framed the way in which international lawyers understand the world have developed in conversation with the humanities. IILAH continues this engagement, through fostering dialogue with scholars working in disciplines such as anthropology, cultural studies, geography, history, linguistics, literature, philosophy, politics, theology and art.

  1. Daniel McLoughlin: Useless for Fascism (Seminar)

    2 JUNE

    Daniel McLoughlin: Useless for Fascism (Seminar)

    In this episode, Dr Daniel McLoughlin (UNSW) presents on Giorgio Agamben’s Covid Critique and the Homo Sacer Project. This seminar was chaired by Dr Richard Joyce. On the 26th of February 2020, Giorgio Agamben published a short piece on his personal website, entitled ‘Invention of an Epidemic,’ which argued that the Italian state was exploiting the appearance of COVID-19 to govern by emergency decree. Over the following year, he went on to criticise the use of masks, compared the “Green Pass” to the Yellow Star, and argued that academics teaching online were the “perfect equivalent” of Nazi collaborators. Agamben’s work has been enormously influential in critical legal theory over the past two decades. However, these interventions generated a great deal of criticism, with commentators accusing him of peddling “critical-cum-conspiracy theory,” and urging us to “forget about Agamben.” This paper analysed Agamben’s interventions around the pandemic and their relationship to his philosophical critique of law and politics. It argued that they illustrate limits to his analysis of sovereignty and his concern with the politics of totalitarianism, as they have the potential to play into a politics that presupposes a virtuous liberal status quo that has been lost and needs to be restored. There are, however, two aspects of Agamben’s thought in the Homo Sacer project that mitigate against this conceptual danger: his deconstruction of the concepts that underpin the legitimacy of the modern democratic state; and his analysis of the relationship between liberal democracy, biopolitics, and governmentality. Daniel McLoughlin’s claim is that these issues, taken together, have generated the much-noted proximity between Agamben’s critique of the response to COVID, and that of the far right.

    1 hr
  2. Queer Connections: A Triple Book Launch

    29 MAY

    Queer Connections: A Triple Book Launch

    This episode of the IILAH podcast captures the discussion at 'Queer Connections: A Triple Book Launch', where speakers celebrated and drew out the connections between three recent edited volumes focused on queer approaches to law: - Nuno Ferreira, Maria Federica Moscati & Senthorun Raj (eds), Queer Judgments (2025, Counterpress) - Claerwen O’Hara and Tamsin Phillipa Paige (eds), Queer Engagements with International Law: Times, Spaces, Imaginings (Routledge, 2024) - Tamsin Phillipa Paige and Claerwen O’Hara (eds), Queer Encounters with International Law: Lives, Communities, Subjectivities (Routledge, 2024) 'Queer Judgments' brings together scholars, lawyers, and activists from around the world who are interested in re-imagining and re-writing legal judgments by using queer and related critical perspectives. This edited collection has an international reach and multidisciplinary scope, and takes the reader through 26 judgments and commentaries on various legal fields: from crime and sodomy cases to privacy and discrimination cases, from family and parenthood cases to health and reproduction cases, and ending with asylum and migration cases. Queer Judgments is intended to be a teaching, research, and advocacy resource for anyone interested in critical perspectives on jurisprudence, queerness, and social justice. 'Queer Encounters with International Law' and 'Queer Engagements with International Law' are sibling edited books, which apply insights from queer theory to a range of new issues and topics in international law. Queer Encounters explores new issues relating to gender, sexuality and LGBTIQ communities in international law, such as recent contestation over the definition of ‘gender’ in international criminal and human rights law and the possibility of building an international queer abolitionist movement. Queer Engagements moves beyond queer theory’s site of origin by applying queer theory to a range of new topics international law not directly related to gender and sexuality, including international environmental law, international space law, international heritage law and travaux préparatoires. Speakers included: Dr Senthorun (Sen) Raj, Dr Claerwen O'Hara, Professor Di Otto, Dr Julia Dehm, Dr Danish Sheikh and Sarah Ward.

    1 hr
  3. Radha Ivory: The Concept of International Law Reform (Seminar)

    4 APR

    Radha Ivory: The Concept of International Law Reform (Seminar)

    The Concept of International Law Reform and the Case of Negotiated Settlements in Foreign Bribery Matters In this episode of the IILAH Podcast, Dr Radha Ivory presented on the topic of international law reform and the case of negotiated settlements in foreign bribery matters. This seminar was chaired by IILAH member and ANZSIL President, Professor Alison Duxbury. The concept of reform is present in its absence in the literature on international lawmaking and legal theory. The international legal system is subject to pressures for change. Its actors respond to those pressures with projects for legal improvement. Scholars comment on those malfunctions and attempted fixes, some elaborating general frameworks for appraisal, others conceiving of transnational law-making processes and yet others deconstructing the very discourse of international legal progress. However, as a group, international lawyers have baulked at the concept of reform. That aversion has been attributed to our discipline’s defensive posture and the international legal system’s lack of machinery for efficiently replacing outdated principles and rules. ‘Reform’ implies an admission of deficit and an orderly and authoritative change process that would not seem to be in keeping with typical pathways of legal change beyond the state. This article seeks to reverse that trend by proposing a two-part concept of international law reform. The procedural part of that concept enables legal scholars to discern and describe instances of quasi-legislative change in the international legal space. The substantive part prompts them to select and apply criteria for assessing the merits of a particular textual change or proposal. The resultant concept of international law reform is necessary, Radha argues, in a legal system that lacks centralised legislative processes and comprehensive rules for demarcating and legitimating authoritative normative developments. Through a detailed case study from international anticorruption law, the article shows how international law reform is an essential framework for analysis. Radha's published paper can be read here: https://academic.oup.com/ejil/article/35/4/867/7930301

    58 min
  4. Daniel Quiroga-Villamarin: Architects of the Better World (Seminar)

    05/12/2024

    Daniel Quiroga-Villamarin: Architects of the Better World (Seminar)

    In this episode of the IILAH Podcast, Daniel Quiroga-Villamarin, presents on his book project, 'Architects on the Better World'. This seminar was chaired by Dr Laura Petersen. Even before the Unitedstatesean President Truman urged the attendants of the 1945 United Nations Conference on International Organization to see themselves as “architects of the better world,” the field of global governance has proven to be a fertile ground for metaphors drawn from architecture. Indeed, in the collective imagination of practitioners and scholars alike, the international legal order appears as a vast and towering edifice: a veritable “architecture” that overlooks “areas” of governance sustained by normative “pillars.” But international law’s castles, of course, were not built solely in the air. For the metaphorical use of architectonical language only hides international law’s profound lack of engagement with the material and concrete spaces in which the “international” is produced, contested, and disputed. Conversely, my book project, takes the “architecture of international cooperation” as a relevant question for international legal history. Instead of taking purpose-built environments for granted, I trace the birth of what I call the “international parliamentary complex” during international law’s “move to institutions” in the short twentieth century (1919-1998). With this, I refer to the emergence of buildings that claimed to serve as “international parliaments” throughout this period —especially those linked to universal or regional International Organizations. I follow this arc from “interwar” Geneva to the end of the Cold War, studying the ways in which this tendency to “parlamentarize” interpolity relations has mutated throughout the century. I do so by drawing from multilingual archival materials related to buildings erected in Geneva, New York City, Bogotá, Addis Ababa, Vienna, and Rome. By historicizing space and spatializing history, I explore the intersections between international law, democracy, and architecture in our unending quest to construct a just, and hopefully “better,” international order.

    56 min

Ratings & Reviews

3.7
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

The IILAH podcast is the online home of lectures and conversations hosted by the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at Melbourne Law School. IILAH supports interdisciplinary scholarship on emerging questions of international law, governance and justice. Many of the significant modes of thought that have framed the way in which international lawyers understand the world have developed in conversation with the humanities. IILAH continues this engagement, through fostering dialogue with scholars working in disciplines such as anthropology, cultural studies, geography, history, linguistics, literature, philosophy, politics, theology and art.

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