Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Conference: Historicising International (Humanitarian) Law? – Could we? Should we?

On October 6-8, 2016, the Hugo Valentin Centre at Uppsala University and the Stockholm Center for International Law and Justice at Stockholm University will convene a conference on "Historicising International (Humanitarian) Law? – Could we? Should we?," in Uppsala. The program is here. Here's the idea:

During the last couple of decades, law has broken its conceptual isolation. Through interventions by authors such as Martti Koskenniemi and David Kennedy, a new critical way of looking at law has brought the field closer to the social sciences. Critical geographers such as Arnulf Becker Lorca show how to broaden the geographical understanding of law. Much, though not all, of this discussion is about the laws of war, and it is also through this subject that professional historians enter this field of study.

So: should we historicise law? Could we, in a workable way?