EJIL: The Podcast!

European Journal of International Law
EJIL: The Podcast!

EJIL: The Podcast! aims to provide in-depth, expert and accessible discussion of international law issues in contemporary international and national affairs. It features the Editors of the European Journal of International Law and of its blog, EJIL: Talk! The podcast is produced by the European Journal of Law with support from staff at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.

  1. JUN 5

    Episode 34: In the Family: Family Tropes in International Law

    Susan Marks’ EJIL 36(1) Foreword asks ‘If the World is a Family, What Kind of Family Is It?’. It’s a provocative question for international lawyers, as the trope of the family runs through the discipline in all kinds of complex, even contradictory, ways. In this episode, Janne Nijman (Graduate Institute & University of Amsterdam) interviews Susan Marks (LSE) about her Foreword and the larger project it inaugurates. Their conversation ranges across the three ‘cases’ featured in the Foreword—the human family in human rights law, the ‘family of nations’, and the child as future in climate change debates—and beyond. What are the stakes of employing these familial tropes? What do they offer and what might they mask? What alternative discourses or imaginaries might be available? The exchange moves through visual as well as textual languages of family, in the form of photography exhibitions (for a glimpse: New York Museum of Modern Art’s ‘The Family of Man’ (1955); the deliberate counterpoint and tribute, Fenix’s ‘The Family of Migrants’ (2025); as well as World Press Photo’s ‘Ties that Bind: Photography and Family’ (2025)).  Other scholarship mentioned includes Ariella Azoulay’s analysis of the Family of Man exhibition as ‘A Visual Universal Declaration of Human Rights’; Stephen Humphreys’ ‘Against Future Generations’ (from EJIL 33(4), Nov 2022); Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004); Jodi Dean’s Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (2019); and Janne Nijman’s ‘Grotius’ Imago Dei Anthropology: Grounding Ius Naturae et Gentium’ in Koskenniemi et al (eds), International Law and Religion: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (2017).

    41 min
  2. MAY 2

    Episode 33: Owning the Future? International Law and Technology as a Critical Project

    International law operates in a world of rapid technological transformation. From the battlefield to the border, from online content moderation to open-source investigation, from humanitarianism to development, from counterterrorism to migration management, practices of central concern to international lawyers are progressively altered by the introduction of new technological tools. Many of these developments are troubling. The use of advanced algorithmic targeting tools used by Israel in Gaza instantiates both the tremendous civilian harm that data-driven technologies amplify and inflict, as well as the limitations of our existing legal repertoire in registering the nature, depth and scale of such harms. These injustices are layered onto the entrenched hierarchies, inequalities and sanctioned forms of violence in international law, but they also take on novel shapes as power and authority are routed along digital paths.  In this episode, Dimitri Van Den Meerssche (Queen Mary University of London) is joined by Angelina Fisher (Guarini Global Law and Tech initiative, NYU) and André Dao (Laureate Program in Global Corporations, Melbourne Law School). Their conversation, drawing on a recent EJIL book review symposium, spans the co-constitutive relations between international law and technology, the limits of human rights, and new avenues for legal critique and resistance that reclaim a shared, collective future against its algorithmic appropriation. Other scholarship mentioned in the course of the episode includes: Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (translated by B. Wing) (1997); Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence – Translating International Law into Local Justice (2005); Fleur Johns, Non-Legality in International Law: Unruly Law (2013); Ratna Kapur, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights – Freedom in a Fishbowl (2020); Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (2021); Henning Lahmann, ‘Self-Determination in the Age of Algorithmic Warfare’ (2025) European Journal of Legal Studies 161–214.

    48 min

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
10 Ratings

About

EJIL: The Podcast! aims to provide in-depth, expert and accessible discussion of international law issues in contemporary international and national affairs. It features the Editors of the European Journal of International Law and of its blog, EJIL: Talk! The podcast is produced by the European Journal of Law with support from staff at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.

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