| 1. |
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Constituent Power: Law, Popular Rule and Politics
- 2020
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Samlingsverk (redaktörskap) (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Recent social and political developments, including the presidential elections in the United States, antidemocratic state policies in Hungary and Poland, and the political climate in the rest of Europe have brought questions relating to the position and composition of ’the people’ in constitutional democracies to the forefront. This book confronts these questions head on as leading scholars across the fields of law, legal theory, political theory and history explore the contemporary problems facing constitutional democracies. With a strong focus on constitutional law, this book examines the legal as well as the political power of ‘the people’ in constitutional democracies. Bringing together an international range of contributors from the USA, Latin America, the UK and continental Europe, it explores the complex relationship between constitutional democracy and ‘the people’. Contributors explore this relationship through the lens of radical democracy, engaging with the work of key figures such as Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, Claude Lefort and Jacques Rancière.
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| 2. |
- Arvidsson, Matilda, 1976
(författare)
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The Embodied Politics of Justice in Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’: The Laws of Carnivore Domination and the Fulfillment of Desire as Plant Life
- 2017
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Ingår i: Critical Legal Conference book, Warwick 1-3 September 2017.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In her widely acclaimed novel ‘The Vegetarian’ Han Kang introduces us to a protagonist who overnight transforms her carnivourous life into a vegan one. The awaking from a dream in which she experience a bloodbath of meat and meat eating moves her over the course of the novel’s narrative from, in the first part, turning vegan to, in the second part of the novel, experience erotic desire and consummation as part of a conflated animal/plant life and finally, in the third part of the novel, to experience photosynthesis embodied as life fulfilled and the death from animal and carnivourous life. This paper takes Kang’s novel as its starting point and asks about the laws of human animality – of carnivore, inter- and intraspecies masculine domination (Gaard 2017) – and what it implies to leave a carnivourous life behind as a human animal (Adams, 2015). While veganism is commonly understood as a dietary choice – often a part of a ‘green turn’ for the Western urban hipster – Kang’s novel reveals the multi-facetted layers of a non-carnivore life as questioning masculine, interspecies forms of domination. What we eat – the veganism in Kang’s novel – becomes an ontological question, one of self-metamorphosis (Stanescu 2012, 39). Kang emphasizes veganism as a reminder of our (in)ability of deciding over our own bodies and lives – in particular our female bodies and female lives. While resisting the laws of carnivore domination by transforming one’s life through veganism (implying not only dietary rules, but also a commitment to the eradication of domination both intra- and interspecies) may be translated into an embodied politics of justice, how are we to conceive of our own animality as other-than-plant life?
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| 3. |
- Arvidsson, Matilda, 1976, et al.
(författare)
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International Law and Posthuman Theory: Introduction to the Blog Symposium
- 2024
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Ingår i: Planet Politics Institute.
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this blog post symposium we are pleased to showcase our work and that of our authors of the International Law and Posthuman Theory (Routledge, 2024) on the Planet Politics Institute Blog. Over a series of forthcoming posts, several of our authors will discuss their work, exploring how their chapter speaks specifically to planet politics. While many of the chapters in the collection speak directly to environmental issues, most notably those in the section of the book titled ‘The Environment and the Nonhuman,’ what we found interesting, when reflecting on the works, is how each of them, in some way, speak back to the environment – be that through discussions of land, property and ownership or through a focus, for example, on the links between “old” and “new” materialism, or on racial capitalism. Interestingly, it seems that using a critical posthuman lens ensures that the environment, whether framed as nature itself or more broadly as matter, remains at the forefront of thought even when analysing topics that do not, on the face of it, seem to have much to do with environmental issues. This, for us, is one of the strengths of posthuman theory, in that it allows for a bringing together of multiple vectors of oppression and multiple issues of critical concern together, allowing for links to be drawn between, for example, between coloniality, capitalism and gender and the impact of those structures on the environment, legally, conceptually and practically.
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| 4. |
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International Law and Posthuman Theory
- 2024
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Samlingsverk (redaktörskap) (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- From the vast environmental devastation being caused by climate change, to the increasing use of artificial intelligence by various international legal actors, to international law’s ongoing need to face up to its colonial past, international law is changing. Assembling a series of voices from across the field of international law, this book demonstrates how posthuman theory can be used to better understand and tackle some of the challenges that contemporary international law is facing. International law traditionally aims to regulate and preserve a stable global order in which states act as its main subjects, yet the sources availed for this ordering exercise – international legal statutes, customary international law, historical precedents and general principles of law – create a framework, reactive and conservative in character. International law’s perpetual turn towards its own past slows down its capacity to act on contemporary challenges and imagine futures yet to come – unless it is coupled with a theoretical framework worthy of that task. This collection maintains that posthuman theory can be used to better understand and tackle some of the challenges that contemporary international law is facing. Covering a wide array of key contemporary topics – from environmental law and the law of the sea, to issues of race and the continued power of colonialism in international law, to human rights law, to key concerns raised by conflict, and the impact of science and technology on international law – this collection is the first to bring new and emerging research on posthuman theory and international law together into one volume. This book’s posthuman engagement with central international legal debates, prefaced by Rosi Braidotti, the leading scholar in the field of posthuman theory, provides a perfect resource for students and scholars in international law, as well as critical and socio-legal theorists, and others with interests in posthuman thought, technology, colonialism and ecology.
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| 5. |
- Jones, Emily, et al.
(författare)
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Introduction to International Law and Posthuman Theory
- 2024
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Ingår i: International law and posthuman theory / edited by Matilda Arvidsson and Emily Jones.. - Abingdon : Routledge. - 9781032658032
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this introduction to the edited volume International Law and Posthuman Theory posthuman theory is situated as sitting between the convergence of, on the one hand, critical post-humanism, i.e., the critique of the white, heterosexual, able-bodied man as the central focus of Western thought (including legal thought) and post-anthropocentrism on the other, i.e. the idea that the human sits in hierarchy over nature, matter, non-human animals and machines. Drawing on the growing body of posthuman international legal scholarship, the introduction shows how posthuman theory may be helpful to international law and legal analyses as well as how this body of scholarship enters into conversation with related concerns and ongoing debates in international law. Positioning the chapters of the volume in context of both posthuman and international legal scholarship and practice, this introduction, moreover, provides concrete examples of how to approach some of the most pressing concerns of our own time.
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| 6. |
- Arvidsson, Matilda, 1976
(författare)
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Being Together - The Silent Touch of Plants. A Posthuman Account of Life, Death, and More-than-Human Kinship
- 2024
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Ingår i: The Fatigue Files Podcast.
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this podcast episode, Professor Anna Grear speaks with Dr Matilda Arvidsson. Drawing on posthuman feminism, Matilda recounts her journey with non-human others in the form of plants as kin in a relationship of 'being together'. The conversation, which also touches on trauma, violence, life and death, invites a refreshing appreciation of how our relationship with non-humans are foundational to our own selves.
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| 7. |
- Arvidsson, Matilda, 1976
(författare)
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Evangelical Lutheran Mission, Law, and the Colonial State as Corporation: The “Thick” and the “Thin” of Sovereign Power in the Congo Free State, 1881–1908
- 2024
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Ingår i: The Laureate Research Program ‘Global Corporations & International Law’ podcast, Melbourne Law School, Australia.
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In 1881 Swedish Evangelical Lutheran missionaries from The Mission Covenant Church of Sweden (Svenska missionsförbundet) arrived at the entry of the Kongo river – there to stay until Congolese independence in 1961. While nominally in Congo to ‘christen the heathens,’ and to provide the teachings and structures needed to build a Christian model society, the Swedes became actively implicated in the colonial works of state-building. Several became civil servants – Officers Civile d’Etat – in the Free State. Yet, as the Free State gradually emerged as a ‘thin’ state, primarily operating as a corporation aiming at extracting natural resources from Congo – maximizing commercial profits for export to Europe, and implementing capitalist structures of labour and taxation – the Swedes took on ‘thick’ sovereign powers of state building: performing as Rule of Law actors in makeshift courts of law – implementing a combined version of pre-colonial Bakongo norms, Congo Free State Decrees, and Swedish Lutheran theological norms – setting up an education system, health clinics, and not the least insisting on eradicating the Bakongo matrilineal kinship structures and putting a strictly patriarchal, heterosexual, nuclear family structure in its place. This paper is based on archival work of the largest surviving archive on pre-colonial Congo and the Congo Free State, at the Swedish National Archives (Riksarkivet) in Stockholm. In contrast to previous research, which place the Swedish missionaries as colonial actors, I argue that the Swedes were state builders and Rule of Law actors deeply implicated with the Congo Free State, providing the ‘thick’ work so that the colonialists of the Free State could pursue its ‘thin’. Due acknowledgement to my project partner Dr Simon Larsson, University of Gothenburg, for his extensive archival work enabling this paper, as well as to Maxim Buchet, for research assistance and translation of original research documents from the French.
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| 8. |
- Arvidsson, Matilda, 1976
(författare)
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Knit, code, resist: Feminist performative practices of non-fascist living with AI and law
- 2024
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- How does knitting, code, law, and women's history of embodied and performative resistance come together? In this research project I explore relations between coding as women's knitted secret coded messages in the resistance movements during World War II, and everyday resistance to contemporary forms of surveillance through knitted "anti-surveillance" knitwear.
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| 9. |
- Arvidsson, Matilda, 1976, et al.
(författare)
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Law and Disorder in the Postcolony? Law, Missionaries, and the Utopias of Pre-colonial to Present-day Kongo DRC
- 2022
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Ingår i: Law and Society Association Annual Meeting 2022.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Our panel turns to history to understand challenges to law and order in the present; examining the present-day ‘failed state’ of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Drawing on unique archival material, centring on the activities of Mission Covenant Church of Sweden (Svenska Missionskyrkan) in lower Congo, 1881–1961, we take on the well-established thesis that ‘disorder’ in the contemporary ‘postcolony’ flows from how the introduction of law and order was pursued during the pre-colonial and colonial era. In this panel Christian and Global North contributions towards the establishment of the Rule of Law, as well as the international legal interests and investments, in contemporary Congo DRC are examined through critical international legal, social-anthropological, and historical trajectories.
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| 10. |
- Arvidsson, Matilda, 1976
(författare)
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My Sudanese Stills: Seeing the Prince of Tobacco
- 2022
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Ingår i: The Shipwrights Review of De-Centered English.
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Contemplating colonialism, death, and the impossibility of seeing what one is looking straight at, this creative non fiction short story fleshes out the darkness and desires of power and race structures in a Sudanese setting in the early years of the current millennia.
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