IGLP/CBS Faculty Advanced Research Colloquium

The twilight of open market ideologies in the global north, great powers entangled in conflicts and rivalries, “de-coupling” and “friend-shoring” the new watchwords – is the political economy of the world shifting? The old arrangements – legal, political, cultural — were built on legal foundations. They were legal projects and practices, encoded in legal vocabularies and bolted together as bundles of entitlements and liabilities. How might these legal foundations be shifting, what opportunities and challenges for progressive politics might be embedded in them?

In this Advanced Research Colloquium, we will revisit the legalities that structure the world’s economic and non-economic struggles across a range of fields: development, environmental sustainability, global value chains and international trade, human rights, science and technology, and security among other areas. We will zoom in on the ways law and legal instruments are mobilized and deployed in the attempt to both sustain, remodel and reduce the global scope of social processes. And how legal notions frame the terrain for the many distributive struggles that course through ‘problem solving’ efforts in all these areas. We hope to bring together work undertaken in various legal fields which grapple with these issues from the conventional international legal world to private law, ‘conflict of laws’, ‘interlegality’, ‘legal transplants’, and ‘transformative law’ among others.