Join the International Law Working Group for the 4th session of the International Law Reading Group.
About the Readings:
The Reading Group is convening its last session of this academic year! This time, we’re discussing two, relatively short texts. What role there is of violence in society, politics and law? What are the causes and nature of violence? Both Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ and Hannah Arendt’s ‘On Violence’ offer influential accounts of violence.
Hannah Arendt’s On Violence, written in 1970, with the Holocaust and Hiroshima still fresh in recent memory, offered a startling dissection of violence in the twentieth century. Arendt argues that violence and power are ultimately incompatible, and that one fills the vacuum created by the other. Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence questions how violence and law relate to one another. Benjamin argues that the law is intimately entangled with violence, distinguishing between law-making and law-preserving violence. Notorious for its obscurity, we are excited to disentangle it together! Read together, we explore Arendt’s and Benjamin’s accounts for what they imply for how we understand law, legitimacy, and the role of violence in structuring political and legal orders.
About the International Law Reading Group
Together with Prof. Arnulf Becker-Lorca, the International Law Reading Group provides an informal space where we can meet and discuss some foundational works of international legal thought - those kinds of texts we often cite, but rarely take the chance to fully read. Please feel encouraged to join, even if you have only read parts of it and want to tune in to the discussion.
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