An interview with Chaumtoli Huq about the student uprising that overthrew Bangladesh’s government, the future direction of the country, and the lessons we can take from this moment.
Recent calls for the use of boycotts, divestment, and economic sanctions against Israel may seem to stand in tension with another position widely held on the left: the condemnation of economic sanctions as neo-imperial warfare. However, we can resolve this tension by recovering a central insight from the period of anticolonial lawmaking.
American courts exercise authority beyond U.S. borders, including over foreign governments, all the time. To most observers, this is simply a consequence of increasing economic globalization and legal modernization, which untethered jurisdiction from territory. But this is a mistake. Law has not become divorced from territory but instead actively remapped it; it has not merely responded to globalization, but actively produced it.
While governments in both the west and global south have become increasingly critical of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, these states have nearly all maintained normal trade relations with Israel. How should we understand this mismatch between political rhetoric and economic policy? And where might we look for signs of more material anti-imperial responses on the horizon?
The rule of law is inherently fragile, as law’s legitimacy ultimately depends on politics. Yet as demonstrated by the successful referendum in Berlin to expropriate more than 250,000 apartments from corporate landlords, this very dependence can empower democratic mobilization and redirect the conservative nature of the law towards a progressive future.
According to international law, third-party states have an obligation to block the transit of arms and jet fuel to Israel.
In the aftermath of Dobbs, EU institutions and leaders have started to mobilize to defend reproductive freedom. However, the EU’s current approach to abortion access – which regulates it through economic and human rights frameworks – not only contributes to a stratified system of care, but also risks privatizing and depoliticizing the issue.
Boycotts and international sanctions both represent alternative means of lawmaking that challenge the liberal legal order. But while the disruptive potential of boycotts has largely been contained, international sanctions have evaded the constraints of international law. By looking to the social-movement roots of international sanctions, we might be able to imagine an alternative to today’s world of unfettered unilateral economic coercion.
Traditional interpretations of the Genocide Convention construe the crime of genocide in notoriously limited terms. By contrast, South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ represents an effort to construct a historically-grounded and political economy-informed understanding of genocidal violence.
The United States has long used economic coercion in hopes of achieving “economic peace” in Israel/Palestine. Yet its vision of this peace has notably shifted over time. While earlier sanctions punished those who disrupted the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” or undermined neoliberal dreams of global commercial integration, Biden’s recent sanctions against West Bank settlers aim primarily to secure a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, relegating Palestinians to observer status.
Law students at Columbia, CUNY, NYU, and Yale explain the demands behind the ongoing anti-war protests and offer their reflections from the encampments.
While every possible form of pressure should be brought to bear on the Biden administration to cut off the flow of arms to Israel, the prevailing law and policy debate tends to obscure some key aspects of how U.S. imperialism actually works. For the United States does not simply ship arms abroad, it is also the world’s leading arms trafficker, wielding enormous power over how weapons made by other countries circulate throughout the world as an immense collection of commodities.
An interview with Vincent Bevins on what we can learn from the failed protests of the previous decade.
Before we move to further concentrate global surveillance and propaganda power in the hands of the United States, we should be clear-eyed about the threats to speech and privacy that emanate from within.
Ganesh Sitaraman, Sanjay Jolly, Zephyr Teachout, Nikolas Guggenberger, Anupam Chander, and Elettra Bietti share their initial reactions to the pending TikTok ban.
