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(Legal) Archives of the Present (LAW-DS-ARCHPRES)

LAW-DS-ARCHPRES

Description

Description

This seminar explores the foundations from which we produce knowledge about law, government and governance in the international legal order, loosely understood. What are the diverse materials (texts, images, data, objects, …) generated in present-day forms of governance, across local, national, regional or global contexts? How is this material and its production and collation related to law? And how do we work with these materials to frame questions and make arguments which illuminate law and governance themselves?

The seminar grows out of work in state diplomatic archives, on the one hand, and research on struggles over ‘transparency’ in contemporary international organizations, on the other. Both of these sites are important for contemporary international law: vindication of claims in the present and plans for the future can depend on records of what was done decades or centuries earlier, as well as on more recent deliberations. But we tend to think about these sites in quite different ways. This seminar is part of an effort to enliven holistic thinking about the information architectures underpinning contemporary international law and governance, and what is at stake in working with these (legal) archives of the present. We will draw on theorizations from history, anthropology, science and technology studies and socio-legal work, as well as law’s internal position on these questions (from rules of evidence to primary rules of property, privacy, etc). The seminar will pull these discipline- and tradition-specific theorizations into conversation with concrete cases, and with the projects of individual researchers. 

Running through the seminar sessions will be three guiding questions:

1. Where do we look for the sediment of governance, its records and traces? We are familiar with official text-based archives of governments and international organizations, but the sediment of governance also takes very different forms, some never well captured in official archives; and official archives themselves can be the object of deep contestation, particularly in periods of war, decolonization and political transition. How do we think creatively about official archives and the sources beyond them?

2. How does law relate to these archives of the present? Law is bound up with archives and information architectures in complex ways. Often archives are an artefact and byproduct of legal processes (cases, for example, knot together particular individuals and factual circumstances). Law can shape archives ex ante in myriad ways, from requiring retention of certain records and submission of data to governmental or intergovernmental bodies to controlling access. And law’s operation is often dependent on the existence of certain holdings of information: regulatory regimes, for example, often work through bodies of consistent and comparable data. Some of these complex interrelations between archives and law are coming to the surface in the current crisis of liberal international ordering. Data collection which sustains international treaty regimes on climate, environmental protection and global health are being disrupted or defunded. NGOs who themselves work through the collection and presentation of information, and have long been dependent on a complex of liberal states and relatively open international organizations, are having to find new ways of operating, securing an informational architecture and repository of evidence of atrocity against as well as through states. How do we theorize this relation between international law and the underlying practices of information-gathering and collation which we have long taken for granted? 

3. How do we work with the archives of the present? We often think of scholarly work in terms of ‘method’, and ‘methods’ differences are often mapped onto divides between disciplines. There is also, however, a real convergence between different disciplines on certain terrains. International organizations and their recent pasts, for example, are the subject of intersecting work by lawyers, historians, political scientists, international relations scholars, and many others. Might we approach questions about how we do research and make claims through the language of craft, rather than as arguments over method and discipline? And what kinds of challenges does this craft entail?

Scope

The seminar connects to, but will not overlap significantly with, those on digital infrastructures or empirical methods. It is framed around the recent past (20^th–21^st centuries, with stress on the latter) but may also be thought-provoking for those working on earlier periods. Given the breadth of the seminar, it is not offering a comprehensive survey of any particular archives or even ways of thinking about archives: the emphasis is on making connections and placing siloed debates in a larger picture. Concrete cases will skew towards imperial, international and transnational law and governance but not exclusively so, and those working in disciplines other than law, or on purely domestic contexts, are very welcome. 

Engagement

The requirements are: (a) participation in discussions; and (b) a brief informal intervention of c. 5–10 mins on an aspect of the seminar which speaks to your project, with a focus more on thinking aloud than presenting polished conclusions (you can bring, e.g., a problem or question you are encountering in your project, an insight you have had, a reading or argument which intersects with the themes under discussion). We may also experiment with some kind of collective authorship of reflections on the seminar as it proceeds—to be discussed in early sessions, and involvement in this would be optional. 

 

In order to receive credits or an attendance certificate for visitors, participants must attend at least 80% of the classes. Participation is in person only, with exceptions granted only in justified cases and subject to prior approval.

First, Second & Third Term: registration from 21 to 25 September 2026

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