| 1. |
- Arvidsson, Matilda, 1976, et al.
(författare)
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Eating, meat, catastrophe : Stream, Critical Legal Conference, Warwick 1-3 September 2017
- 2017
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Ingår i: Critical Legal Conference 2017 Stream, Warwick 1-3 September 2017..
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Human life depends on and is sustained by the death and consummation of others. Unless we eat something or someone we cannot live ourselves. Yet, we divide over what, how, and who to eat. This stream asks us to consider how our eating of others (plants, human-, and non-human animals) sustains our standing in a global legal-political order of gendered speciesism. Through technology of eating, we imperviously transform living entities into objects for us to eat, while simultaneously disclosing (sexual) politics of our eating (Adams, 2015). You are what you eat as Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2009) solicitously portrays. Consuming is not simply an ethical choice but also a profoundly ontological one, or as Stanescu suggests ‘a perpetual process of self-metamorphosis’ (2012, 39). Part of such a process is to define what constitutes meat – is ‘meatless’ in vitro meat (IVM), promising animal liberation and cleaner environment, meat? (Stephens, 2013) – and devouring others. But does constant boundary-work risk to turn us into a standing-reserve of future consumption (Heidegger, 1977: 27), of us turning into cannibals ready to mutilate and enslave (Engle, 1992: 1519)? Would cannibal veganism amount to greater realization of rights of both consumed and consumer or into a catastrophic collapse of our relationship with Nature and the animal-in-us (Viveiros de Castro 2014 & Sutton 2017)? Taking the overall theme of the conference ‘catastrophe’ to mean the life-producing, slow, everyday event of being through the death of others this stream asks if what, how, and whom we eat may tell us something important about our moral and legal standing.
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| 2. |
- Arvidsson, Matilda, 1976
(författare)
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Targeting, gender and international posthumanitarian law and practice: Warfare in the age of data–driven agency
- 2017
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Ingår i: Kent workshop in International Law and theory.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Focusing on targeting law and practice in contemporary warfare this article brings international humanitarian legal scholarship into conversation with posthumainist feminist theory for the purpose of thinking more carefully about the challenges for international humanitarian law (IHL) in the age of data-driven agency. I suggest that posthumanist feminist scholarship – in particular the work of Rosi Braidotti – is helpful to the IHL scholar for understanding and describing how contemporary warfare is already conducted and how the targetable body known through the IHL framework of seeing/knowing is necessarily already both material and to this, now also directly digital. Posthumanist ontology, moreover, avails a much needed critical position from which to question the ‘human’ and ‘humanitarian’ aim in IHL. A posthumanist turn in IHL – a posthumanitarian international law – which acknowledges and protects life beyond the anthropocenic world-order avails, I argue, a better description to IHL and scholarship of how contemporary warfare practice operates and how life and death in the post-anthropocene is already taking place since long.
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| 3. |
- Arvidsson, Matilda, 1976
(författare)
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The American Lieber Code in Occupied Iraq: Anachronism and the Turn to History in International Law and Practice
- 2017
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Ingår i: Invited research talk: Laureate Program in International Law Seminar Series, Melbourne Law School, Australia.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This seminar revisits the occupation of Iraq in 2003–2004 to ask about the use of the 19th century Lieber Code during this time. Why did an antiquated American Civil War code resurface in the wake of the international armed conflict in Iraq, and to what effect? Often referred to as a historical predecessor to contemporary international humanitarian law, the Lieber Code has received little attention as a prevailing source of the laws and practices of international armed conflicts of today. However, in this seminar, the Lieber Code is read as the legal framework through which the occupying powers in Iraq sought to frame the legality of the oscillation between exercising sovereign authority and acting as a non-sovereign authority of occupied territory in Iraq. Moreover, the Lieber Code’s prevalence in American military handbooks and literature, as both the origins of the international laws of armed conflict and as a source of the contemporary law and practice of warfare, indicates that the Lieber Code is far from an antiquated code primarily interesting for historical purposes. Drawing on recent debates on the ‘turn to history’ in international law, the seminar puts Anne Orford’s argument on international law’s anachronism to use — an argument well received for its potential as we revisit international law and its histories for critical ends. Few scholars, however, have examined how anachronism appears in contemporary international legal practice: this, by contrast, is a task for this seminar. This seminar foregrounds how the normative force of international law’s many pasts continues to operate in our present times and conditions
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| 4. |
- 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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| 5. |
- Arvidsson, Matilda, 1976
(författare)
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The international law and practice of occupation between transformation and preservation: the occupation of Iraq and the American Lieber Code
- 2017
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Ingår i: 50 Years after 1967: Evaluating the Past, Present and Future of of the Law of Belligerent Occupation: Conference Papers.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Contrary to the common understanding that transformative occupations are innovations of our own times contemporary scholars of international law and history have pointed to the historical, interdependent, and continuant prevalence of transformation and preservation as key legal notions and practices during occupations (Bhuta 2005; Benvenisti 2012; Stirk 2009; Arvidsson 2016). The techniques, sources, and arguments through which the relation between the two notions and practices have been worked out and put to action have, however, shifted over time and in relation to the specific context of each occupation. This paper departs from the occupation of Iraq 2003–2004 and asks about the use of the American General Orders no. 100 of 1863, known as the Lieber Code, as a way to consider the encounter between the past and the present of transformation and preservation in the laws and practices of occupation. The Lieber Code was drafted for the purpose the American Civil War and, as Helen Kinsella has noted, has been put to contemporary use almost exclusive within the context of international armed conflicts (as opposed to non-international armed conflicts) (Kinsella 2011). Drawing on the recent turn to history in international law (Craven et al 2007; Fassbender & Peters 2012; Orford 2017) the paper aims to explore the problems and potentials of turning to the laws and practices of the past (in this case the Lieber Code) in order to consider the conditions of law, war, and occupation in our own present time. How and to which effects did the Lieber Code enter into legal argument and practice during the war and occupation of Iraq, and what can we learn from it for the purpose of thinking about our current conditions? The paper identifies the use of the Lieber Code within the US administration as well as within the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) of Iraq. In particular, the paper attends to the ways in which the Lieber Code figures in US and CPA legal memos concerning the laws and practice of occupation, as well as in the Regulations, Orders, and Memoranda through which the CPA reconfigured the legal, political, and economic fabric of Iraq. The Lieber Code, the paper contends, was used as a source that exceeded (or rather, through which the administrations sought to exceed) contemporary IHL, invoked as part of an US “national common law of war” (Ohlin 2016), and as conveying “the laws and usages of war” (Arvidsson 2017). The recourse to the Lieber Code sought to underpin the exceedingly transformative occupation as lawful, and it served to de-emphasize the status quo principle. Based on the Lieber Code’s configuration of occupation (predating the modern IHL distinction between international and non-international armed conflicts, and specifically designed to cater to the idea that occupation of enemy territory does not include recognition of that territory or the enemy as sovereign) its formulations and previous uses allowed for a legal oscillation by the occupying powers in Iraq between, on the one hand, a strict separation between the sovereignty of the occupying power and that of the occupying people and territory (as reflected in contemporary IHL), and, on the other hand, the understanding of occupied territory and people as always-already within the sovereign jurisdiction of the occupying power (as reflected in the Lieber Code’s terminology and usage). Besides the criticism that may be raised against the use of the Lieber Code and the transformative measures pursued during the specific case of the occupation of Iraq, the Lieber Code’s “resurfacing” as a historical source of law in the contemporary law and practice of occupation raises questions and concerns of a more general kind. The analysis in this paper alerts us to the method through which the use of international law’s language in the past is anachronistically made into authoritative precedents and arguments in the present (Orford 2017); it further suggests that laws and legal configurations discarded in the name of “progression” may offer new analytic insights in our present times of insecurity, war, law and occupation. The example of the Lieber Code during the war and occupation of Iraq shows us, this paper argues, that “old” solutions to our present concerns may offer new frames of understanding and responding to the present. Yet, as the case of Iraq also shows, “old solutions”, or the recourse to laws and practices from the past, may also be as inadequate and damaging as “more” nor “new” laws as a prescription to the international problems we experience, at least so when pursued as a politics of furthering global unequal relations through the auspice of law. References Arvidsson, M. (2017). The Subject in International Law: The Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority of Occupied Iraq and its Laws. Unpublished dissertation. Arvidsson, M. (2016). ‘From teleology to eschatology: The katechon and the political theology of the international law of belligerent occupation’. In The Contemporary Relevance of Carl Schmitt: Law, Politics, Theology, eds. Arvidsson, Brännström, and Minkkinen, 223–36. London: Routledge. Craven, M. et al, eds. (2007) Time, History and International Law. Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Benvenisti, E. (2012). The International Law of Occupation, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bhuta, N. (2005). ‘The Antinomies of Transformative Occupation’. European Journal of International Law 16 (4): 721–40. Kinsella, H. (2011). The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Fassbender B. & Peters, A. eds. (2012). The Oxford Handbook of the History International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ohlin, D. (2016). ‘The Common Law of War’. Cornell Law School Legal Studies Research Papers Series, no 15–16. Orford, A. (2017). ‘International Law and the Limits of History’. In The Law of International Lawyers: Reading Martti Koskenniemi, eds. Wouter Werner, Marieke de Hoon, and Alexis Galán. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stirk, P. (2009). The Politics of Military Occupation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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| 6. |
- Arvidsson, Matilda, 1976
(författare)
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Transgression, life and death by ‘insect drones’: Towards a feminist ontology and posthumanitarian law
- 2017
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Ingår i: Invited research seminar talk, La Trobe Law School Seminar, Melbourne, Australia.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Abstract: This seminar revisits well-known contemporary warfare technologies, such as the use of drones and insect-simulating swarming technologies, in order to describe and explore the challenges for international humanitarian law (IHL) in a posthuman condition. Why, and to which effects, does IHL aim to humanize warfare, when humans and other agents at war seem ever-more technologized, transgressing boundaries between biological life and technological innovation? When war-agents queer boundaries between spices and subjects/objects by becoming-insects, can feminist posthumanist theory help us describe and critique both the ‘necropolitical’ forms of warfare and the anthropocentric law that seeks to govern it? Often discussed as either a utopian vision of warfare without human casualties, or a dystopian cataclysm of robotic take-over of the human world, ‘new technologies’ in warfare has attracted much attention. Both scholarship and practice agree that ‘keeping the human in the loop’ is paramount, maintaining ‘the human’ as the law’s ultimate protective aim as well as the agent accountable for military decisions. But what if IHL were to embrace the fact that both agents at war and people enduring war live ever-converging digital and material lives and that it is increasingly difficult to define where a human individual begins and ends? Could IHL become IPHL – international posthumanitarian law – extending both protection and accountability beyond the material human body and agency? Drawing on posthumanist feminist scholarship, in particular the work of Rosi Braidotti, this seminar aims to explore and describe the challenges facing contemporary IHL and lawyers when applying humanitarian provisions to drones, robots, and digital bodies alike.
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| 7. |
- McKenna, Miriam, et al.
(författare)
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The ‘turn to history’ and sources doctrine in international law: disruption, democratisation, and distress
- 2017
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Ingår i: ESIL Interest Group on the History of International Law Symposium : Evaluating the Turn to History of International Law. Naples, 6 September 2017..
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- It is common to describe the ‘turn to history’ in international law as arriving at a juncture of crisis and rapid transformation for the discipline. The rise of international legal history and historiography is depicted as the assumption of a necessary distance to the discipline, a sort of crucial ‘step back’ which allows scholars to understand the current state of international law by examining how it came to be. This paper considers an alternate narrative, one that instead observes the field of international legal history as a catalyst to these changes, a strategy that has been actively pursued by some scholars in the field in different ways, rather than a passive response to a changing world and discipline. In the paper, drawing on the work of Rose Parfitt, we ask how the ‘turn’ or ‘turns’ to history have impacted the discipline of international law, and in particular its sources doctrine. While several authors have surveyed the impact of non-traditional scholarship on the sources doctrine more generally in international law, this paper argues that the growth of the field of international legal history and historiography has a productively disruptive, democratising, yet at the same time distressing impact on the doctrine of international law and the discipline as a whole. History, we argue, becomes a strategy for opening up the field of international law to quite diverse ends. While new stories in international law will always come and go the lasting effects of ‘the turn to history’ on international law as a discipline resides in changing the fundamental structures of methodologies of the field – in particular the question and doctrine of sources.
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