Humanity Journal

The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, International Law Department, is holding a conference entitled “International Law and Time” in Geneva, Switzerland, from 12-13 June 2015. Registration for the conference is now open. The programme features the following panels: Attributing Meaning to Time: Visions of History and Future Role of Time in the Creation of Norms Time and the Operation of International Law Norms International Law between Change and Stability Continuity, Discontinuity, Recurrence Dealing with the Past: Legacy, Retroactivity and Beyond The conveners can Continue reading →

This is one entry in a roundtable on the NIEO, featuring posts by scholars who contributed to Humanity’s recent special issue on the topic. Be sure to read other posts by Kevin O’Sullivan and Patrick Sharma. My article focuses on the economic ideas behind the NIEO, specifically the ideas of the staff working for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Their ideas are rather surprising. They wrote about the need for markets, liberalization of trade, structural adjustment, export-oriented production, and increased financial flows. In our discussions at the Continue reading →

[I wrote these for the exciting upcoming Princeton conference; comments welcome below.]   The “history of human rights” is not a field I personally think ought to exist. The most important fact about it, in a certain sense, is that no one ever proposed to bring it into being until the present day. As its coverage expands backwards before the near present, it normally describes some interesting but partial inquiries that have long figured and could still figure in various prior fields, from the history Continue reading →

This is one entry in a roundtable on the NIEO, featuring posts by scholars who contributed to Humanity’s recent special issue on the topic. Be sure to read other posts by Johanna Bockman and Kevin O’Sullivan. Last October, the Chinese government announced the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). The AIIB is intended to rival the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), which are dominated by the United States and other developed countries, in providing financial assistance to countries in Asia. Continue reading →

Congrats to Miriam Ticktin, Humanity editorial collective member, who has been selected for a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in the School of Social Sciences.

Joseph Slaughter, one of the members of Humanity‘s editorial collective, published “We’re in the Middle of a Corporate Civil Rights Movement” on Talking Points Memo. Check it out. Among other things, Slaughter notes that while people “often talk of the women’s liberation and gay rights movements as building on the success of the African-American Civil Rights Movement,” corporations “may be the biggest beneficiaries of abolition and the civil rights struggle—as the successful pushback against the Indiana RFRA will ultimately prove.” As Slaughter points out, this has a history, Continue reading →

The Wall Street Journal runs my brief review of Jens Ohlin’s book contending that there is.

Congrats to David Singh Grewal (Yale) and Jedediah Purdy (Duke) who have curated and introduced a major new dossier in Law and Contemporary Problems on law and neoliberalism. The table of contents with links to full-text articles is here.

This post is the final response in our round table on Peter Slezkine’s essay from our most recent issue. Be sure to read the entries by Stephen Hopgood, Kenneth Roth, Aryeh Neier, and Bart De Sutter. I would like to thank Stephen Hopgood, Kenneth Roth, Aryeh Neier, and Bart de Sutter for their thoughtful comments. De Sutter is right to point to the limited availability of the internal documentation of Human Rights Watch (HRW). Much remains to be discovered, and I look forward to learning more about the history of the Helsinki Continue reading →

This post is part of our round table on Peter Slezkine’s essay on the origins of Human Rights Watch from our recent issue. Please be sure to read other entries by Stephen Hopgood, Kenneth Roth, Aryeh Neier, and a final response from the author. Peter Slezkine’s contribution is a welcome attempt to understand the expanding scope of Human Rights Watch (HRW) from its origins as the Helsinki Watch to its current claim to defend the rights of people worldwide. Despite the recent surge of interest in the history Continue reading →