Current Projects
1- Is International Law Racist? Locating Patterns and Processes of Racialisation in the International Legal Regime (2021-2023)
Mohsen al Attar, Ata Hind, Rohini Sen, & Claire Smith
Is international law racist? An array of legal scholars continues to ask this question as they try to make sense of the inequitable outcomes international law consistently produces for racialised populations. If international law is racist, what forms of racism does it engender and are they endemic? Systemic? Aetiological? Terminal? Alternatively, we might simply ask what sort of relationship prevails between race, racialisation, racism, and international law. These questions are complex and expansive; foremost, however, they are contentious.
Our book aims to stimulate dialogue about this relationship with emphasis on the role of international law in configuring patterns and processes of racialisation. We treat racialisation as problematic, charting not only the differences as they manifest – or are concealed – within international law but examining the ways international law explains, challenges, preserves, and perpetuates these differences. As the natural outgrowth of racial differentiation, racism is equally central to our analysis for the ideological content is intertwined with international law’s actors, procedures, and instruments and thus embedded within the international legal regime.[
Ultimately, our book explores a more appropriate quandary than the questions we opened with: we wonder whether international law is useful in the struggle against processes of racialisation and patterns of racism. Despite the causal character of our overriding query, we will intertwine descriptive and relational questions throughout as we unpack international law’s seemingly paradoxical involvement in these patterns and processes.
We will issue a call for contributions shortly.
2- I, Daniel Blake: Developing Social Cleansing as a Heuristic Device for Research in International Economic Law (2022-24)
Mohsen al Attar & Henrique Weil Afonso
Crises are common to contemporary global society. We identify a plethora of reasons including the perilousness of denationalised production, the over-exploitation of resources, and, perhaps foremost, the intensification of social inequalities precipitated by the former. Each of these exacerbates individual precarity and collective vulnerability. As precarity and vulnerability swell, constituencies lose faith in the established order. It hobbles along in some parts while disintegrating altogether in others. To hold the pieces together, ruling powers boost coercion, hoping that intimidation will quell the unrest. The adoption of reactionary laws by legislatures, the murder of protestors by police forces, and the imposition of draconian sentences by judges are examples of the ways in which the branches of government seek to preserve a crumbling edifice. Another strategy, and the one we explore in this project, is the practice of social cleansing.
Social cleansing is a peculiar term. Few have heard of it and, among those who have, even fewer agree on a definition. When applied, the interlocutor is usually shoehorning the symbolic power of ethnic cleansing, a far more familiar concept. On one hand, it characterises assaults carried out against certain kinds of people that seek to remove them from sight or to eliminate them altogether. Elites obsess over those who are houseless, impoverished, or require social assistance, demeaning and demonising them in equal measure. On the other hand, social cleansing also captures strategies that seek to remove people from their social support network. For example, to make desirable real estate in London available for re-development, boroughs pursue a programme of evictions of social tenants, relocating them to other cities, often hundreds of miles from their homes. Treating their communal bonds as irrelevant, even undesirable, councils cleanse people from their communities.
Under these conditions, the concept of social cleansing acquires purchase and potential. It is not only that state forces are gunning down the houseless or that the poor are being shanty-ed to urban outskirts, but that the state is cleansing itself of its social impetus. Welfare is supplanted by workfare; public housing is replaced with private tenancy; community schools are converted into free academies; and universities are reduced to service enterprises. We observe that Margaret Thatcher’s slogan – “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families” – was not descriptive but aspirational. More and more, to speak of society is to speak in the past tense.
Tackling social cleansing requires us to first conceptualise the brutality in a coordinated manner, hence the proposal in this essay. Foremost, a heuristic device can help develop an integrated and comparative research agenda, uniting scholars researching a range of topics. Frankly, because of the exploratory character of the concept, we are weary of concretising contours too soon. It surely includes social exclusion, economic exploitation and predation, not to mention disenfranchisement, all of which are intertwined with international economic law and political economy. These terms are poignant for each describes practices that impact upon social welfare in negative ways. However, the terms are often used autonomously, sometimes interchangeably, inhibiting the identification of wider patterns.
Our vision for social cleansing proposes to resolve this conundrum by developing a device under a common banner that will facilitate scholarly collaboration. Through this device, we can fuse disunited research strands, allowing for disciplinary cross-fertilisation and cross-enrichment, even creating conditions for the exploration of a meaningful alternative.
We encourage scholars interested in taking this conversation forward to contact us directly at drmohsenalattar@gmail.com and henriqueweil@faculdadedamas.edu.br.
3- Distressed Law and the Corrosion of Democracy (2023-25)
Law and mental distress go hand-in-hand. From the moment individuals enter a law school until the time they reach the bench and at every level in between, their mental health is on a downward trajectory. Disaffection, isolation, and depression are now pervasive enough to be perceived as ordinary.
More worrisome are the societal implications of a distressed legal profession. Legal actors author, execute, and interpret the rules that mediate our lives. How does their distress impact upon the performance of vital democratic roles? This project is the first leg in a wider investigation of mental health in the legal profession and will start at the source: by examining mental distress among law students. This, however, is only the beginning. We will use the data acquired to build a sequential study of the profession and to establish a collaborative network of legal professionals committed to seeing it through.
What ultimately drives this project is both apprehension and ambition. First, we fear that distressed lawyers can only produce distressed law, damaging democracy in the process. Second, we believe that an empirically driven programme of analysis and intervention can set right both the health of legal professionals and the health of our democracy.