Debt Underworlds - Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering

Debt as Site and Struggle of Global Dis/Ordering

Rather than focusing only on how (sovereign) debt is formally recognised and regulated in international law, this episode foregrounds the material structures of global ordering and disordering that debt generates. This entails an attentiveness to the histories of violence that are thereby enacted or amplified, as well as a focus on practices of resistance and expressions of political subjectivity that emerge in relation to the construction and circulation of debt. How is this fabrication of debt implicated in the profoundly unequal configurations of global ordering that emerged after the formal end of empire? Which legal forms and institutions shaped and were shaped by these formations of debt and the uncommon wealth they sustained? Inversely, which practices of redistribution and reparation can be articulated in relation to the unpayable debt thereby accrued?

The speakers:

Vasuki Nesiah is Professor of Practice in Human Rights and International Law at the Gallatin School, NYU. Vasuki’s work on debt and reparations as politics of refusal brings together critical legal theory, decolonial thinking, Black feminist theory, and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) – a school of thought and of practice of which she is a founding member. Vasuki’s current focus is on her book project Reading the Ruins: Slavery, Colonialism and International Law, as well as a co-edited Handbook on TWAIL under contract with Edward Elgar.

Kojo Koram is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck University of London. He is the author of Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire (John Murray, 2022) – which was nominated for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing – and editor of The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line (Pluto Press, 2019). Alongside his academic work, Kojo regularly writes for the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, Dissent, and the New Statesman.

Event Resources:


Vasuki Nesiah, ‘A Double Take on Debt: Reparations Claims and Regimes of Visibility in a Politics of Refusal’ (2022) 59:1 Osgoode Hall Law Journal 153-187
Vasuki Nesiah, ‘Indebted: The Cruel Optimism of Leaning in to Empowerment’ in Governance Feminisms (UMP 2018) 505-554
Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri and Vasuki Nesiah (eds), Bandung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures (CUP 2017)
Kojo Koram, Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire (John Murray, 2022)
David Graeber, Debt: The First 500 Years (2011)
Jerome E. Roos, Why Not Default? The Political Economy of Sovereign Debt (PUP 2019)
Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008)

Films & videos:


‘BOOMERANG: Empire and Britain’s economy’ (OpenDemocracy, 2023, featuring Kojo Koram)
Vasuki Nesiah, ‘Debt, International Law and Reparations’ (UCL Decolonising Law Lecture series 2021-2022)
Bamako (directed by Abderrahmane Sissako; Mali, United States, 2006)
Life and Debt (Directed by Stephanie Black, United States, 2001)