In May 2018 I was privileged to conduct two lengthy interviews with Judge Crawford in his chambers at the Peace Palace in The Hague. The audio and written transcripts of these are available on the Eminent Scholars Archive (ESA) website[1]. His distinctive outlook on international law gives rise to what I have called a Crawfordian Vision of International Law, and I have used his interviews as a basis for identifying some of its characteristics. (Quotations in italics are referred to Question numbers in his interview transcripts).
Opinio Iuris has an extended interview with Martti Koskenniemi, following his lecture on 29 November 2018 in The Hague on "International Law and the Far Right."
First paragraph:
Last week in the Peace Palace, Prof. Martti Koskenniemi spoke about international law and the rise of the far right for the Hague-based T.M.C. Asser Instituut. “Economic reforms are of no concern to these protesters. And the more you try to reform, the more you will appear like a hopeless idiot.” An interview with Prof. Martti Koskenniemi on the backlash against globalism, fake expertise and the smoking gun in his historical work by Dimitri van den Meerssche & Pascal Messer. At the Fourth Asser Annual Lecture you spoke about the current ‘backlash’ against international law and its institutions and the rise of the extreme right. You seem to have your own analysis on the nature of this backlash and where it stems from. Yes. I am critical of this liberal understanding which tries to establish a sympathetic relationship with people who are assumed to have been, as the cliché goes, ‘left behind’, those lost somewhere in an ‘unavoidable process of globalisation’. This sociological and economic account looks at the way in which the economic benefits from globalisation have not reached a group of people. These people would be reacting to their relative deprivation, by being critical of elites and of life in the city. And by Brexit and by voting for Trump, and by kicking in the ass those people who they think are responsible for their deprivation and marginalisation.
Prof. Koskenniemi's lecture was announced earlier on this blog.
See the video of the original lecture below (Youtube):
The Blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas has published an interview with Martti Koskenniemi.
First paragraph:
Anne: Your work has long explored the nature of governance through international law—in the past as much as in the present. The book project you have been working on over the past years, which explores the correlation of sovereignty and property in international law, is no different in this regard. As you seek to illustrate, sovereignty arises from an often hidden foundation of private property relations, while these exact relations are bound to be delimited by what we call ‘public power’—meaning we ultimately have been, and continue to be, governed by both. This argument re-emphasizes some of the questions your earlier work has tackled with regard to the critical role of international law in politics—or, to be more accurate, international law asinternational politics. But it also appears to address a more fundamental problem in the conceptualization of international law by suggesting that seemingly benign relations of private property are intrinsically connected to the realm of international power struggles. In your mind, how does this project depart from, or perhaps even in part revise, your prior work on the origins of modern international law?
