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Normalizing pathologies of difference : the discursive function of IMF conditionality
No full textThis thesis aims to complicate conventional understandings of the way in which the conditionally of the International Monetary Fund operates in relation to North/South relations. Part One is comprised of three sections. The first section is a brief introduction to the context of the project, namely the need to re-examine the contemporary roles of international economic institutions in what is perceived to be a globalizing economic environment. The second section provides an outline of the methodologies being used in the paper. In this regard, the author will explain the need to compile a historical genealogy of the legal development of Fund conditionality vis a vis the South, and describe the interdisciplinary approaches to discourse analysis taken in the paper. The third section briefly sets out the origins of the International Monetary Fund and provides a background to the Fund\u27s conditionality. Part Two is a detailed account, or historical genealogy, of the way in which the IMF became involved in the business of lending to the South. This account is directed at tracing the transformation of the Fund through what the author considers to be three major developments in the evolution of Fund conditionality. The transformation which the author argues took place was a transformation of the role of the Fund from an institution concerned primarily with managing monetary institutions between industrialised nations to a surveillance organisation directed at providing information about the Third World to the First World. Part Three takes the idea of the contemporary role of the Fund as a surveillance organisation revealed in the preceding section and explores what discursive functions the Fund might be performing in the context of the relationship between North and South. In this regard the author identifies two major themes underlying IMF discourse about the Third World both of which suggest that an underlying sense of danger of the Third World is felt by the First World, and that this sense of danger replicates older fears. The author then examines the discursive practices employed to address these fears and the extent to which they too resonate with older discursive strategies. The author then considers why the reoccurrence of these older discursive technologies might be problematic. Part Four provides some closing comments about the insights gained from the preceding analysis. In doing so, it offers a tentative suggestion for how we might productively disrupt the colonial continuum of which the discursive practices described above seem to form part
Normalizing pathologies of difference : the discursive function of IMF conditionality
No full textThis thesis aims to complicate conventional understandings of the way in which the
"conditionally" of the International Monetary Fund operates in relation to North/South
relations.
Part One is comprised of three sections. The first section is a brief introduction to the
context of the project, namely the need to re-examine the contemporary roles of
international economic institutions in what is perceived to be a globalizing economic
environment. The second section provides an outline of the methodologies being used
in the paper. In this regard, the author will explain the need to compile a historical
genealogy of the legal development of Fund conditionality vis a vis the South, and
describe the interdisciplinary approaches to discourse analysis taken in the paper. The
third section briefly sets out the origins of the International Monetary Fund and
provides a background to the Fund's conditionality.
Part Two is a detailed account, or historical genealogy, of the way in which the IMF
became involved in the business of lending to the South. This account is directed at
tracing the transformation of the Fund through what the author considers to be three
major developments in the evolution of Fund conditionality. The transformation which
the author argues took place was a transformation of the role of the Fund from an
institution concerned primarily with managing monetary institutions between
industrialised nations to a surveillance organisation directed at providing information
about the Third World to the First World.
Part Three takes the idea of the contemporary role of the Fund as a surveillance
organisation revealed in the preceding section and explores what discursive functions
the Fund might be performing in the context of the relationship between North and
South. In this regard the author identifies two major themes underlying IMF discourse
about the Third World both of which suggest that an underlying sense of danger of the
Third World is felt by the First World, and that this sense of danger replicates older
fears. The author then examines the discursive practices employed to address these
fears and the extent to which they too resonate with older discursive strategies. The
author then considers why the reoccurrence of these older discursive technologies might
be problematic.
Part Four provides some closing comments about the insights gained from the
preceding analysis. In doing so, it offers a tentative suggestion for how we might
productively disrupt the colonial continuum of which the discursive practices described
above seem to form part.Law, Faculty ofGraduat
The time of revolution
Full text linkIn focusing upon the pervasive theme of temporality that marks RP Anand’s seminal New States and International Law (1972) it is argued that one of his central pre-occupations was a concern for what it meant for the peoples of the Third World to live contemporaneously with those in the North. Noting the significance of a universal temporal calculus (clock time) for processes of both nation-building and global capitalism it is suggested that the temporal disjunctions that appeared to structure Anand’s account of ‘contemporary’ international law was to foreground the limits of both. For just as each depended upon putting into operation a temporal technology – engendering a ‘fictional presentness’ by the measuring of life against the clock – so also did that technology both reveal the asymmetrical conditions of life in the world, and the scale of the challenge placed before the world by the utopia of ‘presentness’
Lord-healer of lost cases
No full text‘Lord-Healer of Lost Cases’ is a Bengali short story in English translation. The original story – Beni Laskarer Mundu – published in 1972, is in the genre of historical fiction that Sunil Gangopadhyay’s key works are renowned for. Set in a fictional post-enlightenment nineteenth-century British-India, the story revolves around the head of a man called Benimadhab Laskar. His head, through a series of events, turns into a prospective artefact for juridical and medical inquiry because of his unique ability to accurately foretell whether a client was guilty or innocent. The translators’ afterword reads this story as an invitation to think about jurisprudence from a postcolonial location that acknowledges law to be a body of knowledge formed through contradictory inheritances. The translators foreground the way in which the story raises questions about law by unsettling the Manichean dualisms of reason/emotion, fact/fiction, science/supernatural, logic/superstition, modernity/tradition, religious/secular. At a political level, the afterword shows how the story helps to think of Southern histories as syncretic. It belies any nationalist claims to a pure past (in this case a Hindu one), ideas that are particularly significant for the current times in India, which is seeing a violent consolidation of Hindu nationalism
Automating Authority: The human and automation in legal discourse on the Meaningful Control of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems
No full textThe notion of Meaningful Human Control (MHC) is increasingly offered as a viable legal mechanism for the regulation of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS). This chapter argues that despite sophisticated knowledge of the inseparability of humans and machines in the LAWS context, MHC presupposes a non-technological, non-automated human, inherently capable of conscious and reflective judgment even in highly automated settings. The presence of this human ‘in the loop’ of a decision to engage a target is set to become the limit principle defining the legality of autonomous weapons at international law. Manufacturing an image of the human as non-technological, and human judgment as non-automated, has long been central to legal authority and self-understanding. But what would it mean if this presuppositional figure becomes the criterion of legality for autonomous systems—just as smart technologies and human-machine hybridity render it practically meaningless? Legal regulatory paradigms of normativity, it is suggested, face an existential threat in the LAWS context. They risk becoming themselves ‘automated’; deprived of a juridical relation to the world they claim to govern. In this context, law and humanities must articulate notions of humanity that are not premised ‘anthropogenically’ on the exclusion of technology, and new principles of evaluation and authority adequate to the resulting immanent field of ‘artificial life’
Towards a carceral geography of international law
No full textThis chapter provides a preliminary sketch of the relationship(s) between international law and carceral space. It draws on legal and carceral geography to explore how practices of, and ideas about, incarceration travel between different legal spaces, examining the contingency of aspects of international law’s carceral geography and its connections across states, domestic and international jurisdictions, and disparate legal fields. The chapter shows how islands within the resulting carceral archipelago are connected through shared physical spaces and through the movement of common ideas and ideologies. This movement is influenced by logics of capitalism and colonialism. The chapter concludes by considering the implications of this carceral archipelago for critical international lawyers and for resisting practices of carcerality
The travels of human rights
No full textThis chapter discusses a travelling exhibition designed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1950 to introduce the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948. It describes the history of the exhibition and the way that UNESCO regarded photography as neutral, ideal for generating an internationalist sensibility. It then examines the way that UNESCO used particular images to construct an account of the universality of human rights
International Law and the Production of new resources: Lessons from the colonisation of Mars
Full text linkInternational law’s role in the creation, exploitation and governance of natural resources is complex and nuanced. How the law relating to resource ownership and use interacts with the law protecting the environment and economic governance is a vital contemporary question. In this chapter I approach this question through a reading of Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction novel Red Mars, about the human colonisation of Mars. This novel provides a scenario to ask what law applies, how the law effects action, where the law is broken and what new law might be needed. The first half of the chapter is concerned with that work, then the second half takes a step back to consider international law and new resources more generally, before finishing on an argument for the value of science fiction for thinking about law and technology
The Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities
No full textThis Handbook brings together 40 of the world’s leading scholars and rising stars who study international law from disciplines in the humanities – from history to literature, philosophy to the visual arts – to showcase the distinctive contributions that this field has made to the study of international law over the past two decades.Including authors from Australia, Canada, Europe, India, South Africa, the UK and the USA, all the contributors engage the question of what is distinctive, and critical, about the work that has been done and that continues to be done in the field of ‘international law and the humanities’. For many of these authors, answering this question involves reflecting on the work they themselves have been contributing to this path-breaking field since its inception at the end of the twentieth century. For others, it involves offering models of the new work they are carrying out, or else reflecting on the future directions of a field that has now taken its place as one of the most important sites for the study of international legal practice and theory. Each of the book’s six parts foregrounds a different element, or cluster of elements, of international law and the humanities, from an attention to the office, conduct and training of the jurist and jurisprudent (Part 1); to scholarly craft and technique (Part 2); to questions of authority and responsibility (Part 3); history and historiography (Part 4); plurality and community (Part 5); as well as the challenge of thinking, and rethinking, international legal concepts for our times (Part 6).Outlining new ways of imagining, and doing, international law at a moment in time when original, critical thought and practice is more necessary than ever, this Handbook will be essential for scholars, students and practitioners in international law, international relations, as well as in law and the humanities more generally.</p
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