This MWP Multidisciplinary Research Workshop inquires into the multi-faceted ways in which (inter/national) law deals with ‘hard’ cases and draws legitimacy from the logic of sovereignty to portray violence against individuals as the legitimate exercise of sovereignty. This event will be held in hybrid format.
Adapting a law in context approach, the panels shed light on empirical contexts where sovereignty is exercised de jure, and violence is committed, by state agents and/or de facto by non-state actors, often in contexts of armed conflicts and political opposition. Each of these scenarios, and the combination thereof, raises distinct challenges for law, which is invoked by both perpetrators and victims to simultaneously legitimize and contest sovereignty and violence.
The keynote lecture problematizes the liberal underpinnings of the law’s treatment of violence. Exploring de facto sovereignty in liberal-democratic contexts, the first panel discusses how sovereignty’s spatial and temporal aspects define the limitations of il/legitimate violence in India and Israel. The second panel turns to European and inter-American human rights courts to inquire how international law addresses the tensions between the principles of state sovereignty and individual justice. It explores the effectiveness of supranational courts vis-à-vis (authoritarian) states engaged in violence against their citizens.
PROGRAMME
First Panel
11:00 – 12:30 Keynote Lecture
Chair: Revital Madar (EUI)
Ayça Çubukçu (LSE): Liberal Violence
Reflecting on the intimacy between liberalism and violence through the scholarship of Talal Asad, this talk will explore how liberalism enables violence and violence enables liberalism.
Second Panel
14:00 – 15:30 What, where, and whose sovereignty?
Chair: Ana Luísa Bernardino (IHEID/EUI)
Shubha Kamala Prasad (EUI), Democracies and repression: Using the law for increased domestic coercive capacity
Revital Madar (EUI), When legal military norms trickle down: how do lower national courts in Israel employ the logic of open-fire regulations?
Discussant: Hayal Akarsu (Utrecht University)
Third Panel
16:00-18:00 Supranational human rights courts and state violence: Between judicial certainty and individual justice
Chair: Neha Jain (EUI)
Jorge Contesse (Rutgers University), Violence and sovereignty in inter-American human rights law
Dilek Kurban (EUI), What is in effectiveness? The European and inter-American human rights courts and state violence
Philip Leach (Middlesex University), State violence- A critique of the law and practice of the European Court of Human Rights
Discussant: Carla Ferstman (University of Essex/EUI)