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Ordering, Binding, and Pacifying: (De)Constructing Legal Communities in International and European Law (LAW-RT-ORDPAC-25)

LAW-RT-ORDPAC-25

Purpose

 

Description

Before law can regulate relations, how does it bring them into existence? Through what normative and discursive practices are legal subjects bound together as part of a legal community—whether in the international sphere or within the European Union? What forms of relationality does law create, and through what techniques? These questions come into focus when we consider how legal discourse first establishes the attachments it later governs. When international law invokes the language of friendship to justify the formation of legal relations, often asymmetrical ones, it lays the foundation for their regulation. When EU law appeals to neutrality and social cohesion to exclude religious expression from the workplace, it delineates who belongs. When EU law conceptualises sustainable consumption on the basis of an abstract idea of the consumer and therefore sustains the gendered division of labour, it embeds normative roles. In each case, law does not merely reflect existing bonds; it produces them through techniques that create legal relations in a normative, hierarchical, and political fashion.

As a way of reading and understanding these instances together, this seminar proposes a critical exploration of the legal form in relation to the conceptualisations of law deriving from an analysis of ordering, binding, and pacifying as legal techniques. Starting from the premise that communities, societies, and subjects are not natural but rather legally constructed, the course invites participants to question how legal systems produce them, relying on ideological commitments to cohesion, order, and peace.

Through five sessions, we will interrogate the normative foundations of the legal production of social relations. Namely, we will examine how legal categories misrecognise and invisibilise, attach and alienate, privilege and oppress. From the logics of order construction to the dynamics of coercive inclusion and the pacifying function of legal discourses, we will trace how law (re)produces particular visions of unity and relationality, often at the cost of difference and dissent. During the sessions, the conveners will guide participants through examples from both international and European law. The course thus aims at stimulating reflections on their similarities and dissonances and fostering meaningful discussions between disciplines. Drawing on literature from both areas and from critical theories (e.g. feminist theory, Marxism, queer theory, and decolonial approaches), the seminar also invites participants to contemplate alternative imaginaries of legally built relations. In our concluding session, we will collectively explore concepts such as solidarity, kinship, and care as potential grounds for rethinking the law’s normative interventions beyond the imperatives of control and conformity.

This seminar will be of interest to participants working on legal theory, international law, and European law. No prior theoretical background is required. Relying on perspectives from their own disciplines, participants will engage with a range of literature and legal sources and will be encouraged to develop their own critical positions.

Course reading list: https://readinglist.eui.eu/leganto/public/39EUI_INST/lists/2943726030008406?auth=SAML&idpCode=SAML_LEGANTO

First, Second & Third Term: registration from 22 to 26 September 2025

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