Author Archives: Karin Loevy

About Karin Loevy

Karin Loevy is an Emile Noël Fellow at NYU School of Law where she leads the IILJ History & Theory of International Law workshop series and manages the JSD Program. Her first book, Emergencies in Public Law: The Legal Politics of Containment (CUP, 2016) examines emergencies as an area of legal and institutional mobilization and normalization. Her current project, a history of international law in the Middle East, unravels layers of non-sovereign territorial imagination in legal and diplomatic instruments on the way to the mandate system (1915-1923). An overview of this project won an ILR Prize for unsolicited articles.

The Balfour Declaration’s Territorial Landscape: Between Protection and Self-Determination

Abstract: Famously declaring British support for the establishment of a Jewish “national home” in Palestine, the Balfour declaration (November 1917) is commonly understood as the first international instrument recognizing the right to self-determination for the Jewish people in Palestine. But the territorial framework that the drafters of the declaration envisioned drew on nineteenth-century practices of imperial protection that sustained both rule and expansion in multi-national empires. Reframing the Balfour declaration as an instrument of protection, the article contributes to the study of the colonial context Continue reading → Continue reading →

Human Shields, Progress, and Agency on the Roof

This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire, is a detailed and effective mapping exercise introducing the reader to a growing field of legal and political interactions that center on the unstable dichotomy between killing and protecting civilians in war. Each of its 22 short chapters meticulously contextualizes a particular incident, a set of stories or an interface Continue reading →