Academy Professor with the University of Helsinki and author of the classics works From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument (1989, 2005), and The Gentle Civilizers of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960 (2002). He has been a member of the UN International Law Commission (2002–2006) and judge at the Administrative Tribunal of the Asian Development Bank (1997–2002). From 1978 to 1994 he was member of the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. He is a member of the Institut de droit international.
This essay is a comment on the proposal by human rights activists and lawyers, made in various international and domestic contexts, for ‘‘mainstreaming’’ human rights into an aspect of the regular business of (international) governance.
Our new issue features a conversation between Jasbir K. Puar and Oishik Sircar, available open-access on the Humanity journal website. The issue also includes essays on the politics humanitarian architecture and the Parisian “Yellow Bubble,” family planning projects in postcolonial Morocco, how Amnesty International's formative years shaped professional human rights activism, and the linguistic and affective labor of field interpreters for UN missions. It contains review essays on theories of political violence and on global histories of slavery and indentured labor.
This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. In his now classic essay published in NLH in 1976, “The Origin of Genres,” Tzvetan Todorov famously articulated the following: “It is because genres exist as an institution that they function as ‘horizons of expectation’ for readers, and as ‘models of writing’ for authors.” He goes on to argue that “Genres communicate with the society in which they flourish by means of institutionalization,” and Continue reading →
This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Which forms are most amenable for narrating the afterlives of slavery and why? Which configurations of race and power come to the fore and which recede when contemporary Afro-diasporic writers take up the slave narrative to address contemporary human-rights violations in Africa? What happens to the mutually constitutive relationship between race and form across different spaces and times? These are the questions that animate Continue reading →