2023 Early Career Scholar Prize Announcement

Humanity is pleased to announce a prize for the best essay published in the journal in a calendar year. The prize is open to graduate students or those without tenure track jobs at the time of submission. It’s our pleasure to announce the winner of the 2023 Early Career Essay Prize for Humanity journal: Howie Rechavia-Taylor. Howie Rechavia-Taylor, “German Colonialism In The Courtroom — Law, Reparation, And The Grammars of the Shoah,” Humanity 14, no. 2 (Summer 2023): 212-229. Abstract: In the quest to address the Continue reading →

Call for Papers, Fall 2024 Issue

Humanity Journal is inviting submissions that address the unfolding catastrophe we are witnessing in Gaza. Submissions can take different forms: 2000-3000 word essays, longer articles, poetry or experimental genres which speak to our devastating present. Shorter pieces will be featured on our blog on a rolling basis, and longer articles will go through an expedited review process to appear in our Fall 2024 issue. We are accepting longer submissions until 31 May — longer submissions must adhere to our Style Guide or face either significant Continue reading →

2022 EARLY CAREER SCHOLAR PRIZE ANNOUNCEMENT

Humanity is pleased to announce a prize for the best essay published in the journal in a calendar year. The prize is open to graduate students or those without tenure track jobs at the time of submission. It’s our pleasure to announce two winners of the 2022 Early Career Essay Prize for Humanity journal: Safiyah Rochelle and Emma Kluge. Safiyah Rochelle, “This Is What It Looks Like: Searching for Law’s Afterlife in Guantánamo” Humanity 13, no. 3 (Winter 2022): 381-401. Taking up a series of drawings Continue reading →

International Law: A Novel, by G. (reviewed by a protagonist)

This essay is part of a symposium on Gerry Simpson’s The Sentimental Life of International Law. All contributions to the symposium can be found here.   [I]rony [is employed] as a defense, . . . especially against the expression of intense affect . . . – M.H. Stein (1985) G.’s aspiration in his splendid new book[1] appears to be to rewrite international law as a vast novel, much as (another) G. sought to rewrite world history as a vast novel two centuries ago, in his Continue reading →

Barbarian International Law

This essay is part of a symposium on Gerry Simpson’s The Sentimental Life of International Law. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Gerry Simpson has written what he is pleased to describe—tongue firmly placed in cheek—in the alternative as “the most useless book in the history of international law,” presumably saving any timid would-be-readers the trouble of checking for themselves. What the intrepid rest of us do get instead are six chapters showcasing in typical Simpsonian fashion what is possible in writing Continue reading →

A Style for the Human Heart

This essay is part of a symposium on Gerry Simpson’s The Sentimental Life of International Law. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. The Sentimental Life of International Law approaches anew “our age-old longing for a decent international society” (1). In search for such decency, the book critiques international law’s disciplinary constitution by means of what it “forbids its practitioners to do.”[1] This inquiry is driven by an existential unease over the strictures international law places on our engagement with the ineffable violence Continue reading →

International Law and the Longing to Garden 

This essay is part of a symposium on Gerry Simpson’s The Sentimental Life of International Law. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Gerry Simpson’s The Sentimental Life of International Law is a book for re-envisioning ways to think and feel against the grain of international law. A plea for practitioners of international law to become more responsive to their own political longings, the book defamiliarizes the depoliticizing routines of international law in order to re-enliven a sense of imaginative possibilities even within Continue reading →

Reflections on The Sentimental Life of International Law

This essay is part of a symposium on Gerry Simpson’s The Sentimental Life of International Law. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Having read several times Gerry Simpson’s 2015 article in the London Review of International Law by the same name, it was an absolute pleasure and delight to read this book. Behind every piece of writing is an author, a person with sentiments, thoughts, and unique experiences. And behind every reader is likewise a person with sentiments, thoughts, and unique experiences. Continue reading →

My Book as a Russian Novel

This essay is part of a symposium on Gerry Simpson’s The Sentimental Life of International Law. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. These wise and witty rejoinders to my book made me, as usual, want to write another book in response—perhaps, the original book, but heavily modified. Reading one’s reviews is often a fraught business. One carefully placed arrow and you’re dead. Generally speaking, no matter how laudatory, we only remember those stinging, accurate barbs. But reading these essays had the opposite Continue reading →

Forum on New Histories of the Cold War

This essay is part of a forum on new histories of the Cold War. All contributions to the forum can be found here. Paul Thomas Chamberlain The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace New York: HarperCollins, 2018 Lorenz Lüthi Cold Wars: Asia, The Middle East, Europe Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020 Kristina Spohr Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World After 1989 New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020 Are we entering a new Cold War? Recent years have seen a deterioration of relations Continue reading →