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30.07.2025
51 Minuten
There were gasps in the courtroom when the ICJ delivered
its advisory opinion on the obligations of States in
respect of climate change on 23 July 2025. In this episode,
Margaret Young (Melbourne Law School), Phoebe Okowa (Queen Mary
University of London, member of the International Law Commission)
and Lavanya Rajamani (Oxford) explore how, with its robust and at
times radical reasoning, the Court has delivered a truly
significant moment for international law.
Scholarship referred to in the episode includes Phoebe N.
Okowa, State Responsibility for Transboundary Air Pollution
in International Law (2000); Lavanya
Rajamani, ‘Interpreting the Paris Agreement in its Normative
Environment’ (2024) 77 Current Legal Problems 167;
Margaret A. Young, ‘Climate Change and Law: A Global
Challenge for Legal Education’ (2021) 40 University of
Queensland Law Journal 351; and Margaret A. Young,
‘Fragmentation’ in Lavanya Rajamani and Jacqueline Peel (eds), Oxford
Handbook of International Environmental Law (2021) 85.
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25.07.2025
59 Minuten
In this episode, Dapo Akande, Marko Milanovic and Philippa Webb
are joined by Tom Dannenbaum to discuss two sets of issues.
First, the legality of the use of force by Israel and the United
States against Iran, and specifically its nuclear programme, from
the standpoint of the jus ad bellum. The discussion turns
around the possible justifications that Israel can give for its
use of force, including the notion of stopping an imminent armed
attack by Iran. Second, the recent judgment of the Grand Chamber
of the European Court of Human Rights in the interstate case
of Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia, which deals with
various aspects of the war in Ukraine, including the downing of
the MH17. In particular, the contributors analyze the Court’s
approach to extraterritorial jurisdiction and to the network of
relationships between the European Convention, international
humanitarian law and the jus ad bellum.
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30.06.2025
42 Minuten
Migration has become a defining issue of our time, visibly
shaping political discourse, legal systems, and public
imaginaries. Yet for all its salience, international law’s
capacity to respond to the complexities of human mobility remains
fractured, fragile, and often inadequate. In this episode, we
take a hard look at the international legal architecture
surrounding migration: where it comes from, where it fails, and
what alternative frameworks might exist beyond the dominant focus
on non-refoulement and transnational criminal law. We begin with
a frank assessment: despite landmark treaties like the 1951
Refugee Convention, international law provides no comprehensive
regime for facilitating – much less fostering – human mobility.
Instead, migrants are increasingly subject to carceral and
criminalizing legal responses, while international legal regimes
defer to the sovereignty and discretion of receiving states.
Joining us for this episode are three experts in global migration
law and governance: Jaya Ramji Nogales (Temple Law School in
Philadelphia), Noora Lori (Boston University), and Amanda Bisong
(European Center for Development Policy Management). Together,
they offer critical insights on how legal scholars and
practitioners might better understand, challenge, and reimagine
the role of international law in regulating – and enabling –
mobility across borders.
Scholarship mentioned includes Bina Fernandez’s ‘Traffickers,
Brokers, Employment Agents, and Social Networks: The Regulation
of Intermediaries in the Migration of Ethiopian Domestic Workers
to the Middle East’ (2013) 47 International Migration Review
814–43 and Petra Molnar’s The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving
Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2024).
Mehr
05.06.2025
41 Minuten
Susan Marks’ EJIL 36(1) Foreword asks ‘If the World is a Family,
What Kind of Family Is It?’. It’s a provocative question for
international lawyers, as the trope of the family runs through
the discipline in all kinds of complex, even contradictory, ways.
In this episode, Janne Nijman (Graduate Institute &
University of Amsterdam) interviews Susan Marks (LSE) about her
Foreword and the larger project it inaugurates. Their
conversation ranges across the three ‘cases’ featured in the
Foreword—the human family in human rights law, the ‘family of
nations’, and the child as future in climate change debates—and
beyond. What are the stakes of employing these familial tropes?
What do they offer and what might they mask? What alternative
discourses or imaginaries might be available?
The exchange moves through visual as well as textual languages of
family, in the form of photography exhibitions (for a glimpse:
New York Museum of Modern Art’s ‘The Family of Man’ (1955); the
deliberate counterpoint and tribute, Fenix’s ‘The Family of
Migrants’ (2025); as well as World Press Photo’s ‘Ties that Bind:
Photography and Family’ (2025)).
Other scholarship mentioned includes Ariella Azoulay’s analysis
of the Family of Man exhibition as ‘A Visual Universal
Declaration of Human Rights’; Stephen Humphreys’ ‘Against Future
Generations’ (from EJIL 33(4), Nov 2022); Lee Edelman’s No Future
(2004); Jodi Dean’s Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging
(2019); and Janne Nijman’s ‘Grotius’ Imago
Dei Anthropology: Grounding Ius Naturae et Gentium’ in
Koskenniemi et al (eds), International Law and Religion:
Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (2017).
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02.05.2025
48 Minuten
International law operates in a world of rapid technological
transformation. From the battlefield to the border, from online
content moderation to open-source investigation, from
humanitarianism to development, from counterterrorism to
migration management, practices of central concern to
international lawyers are progressively altered by the
introduction of new technological tools. Many of these
developments are troubling. The use of advanced algorithmic
targeting tools used by Israel in Gaza instantiates both the
tremendous civilian harm that data-driven technologies amplify
and inflict, as well as the limitations of our existing legal
repertoire in registering the nature, depth and scale of such
harms. These injustices are layered onto the entrenched
hierarchies, inequalities and sanctioned forms of violence in
international law, but they also take on novel shapes as power
and authority are routed along digital paths.
In this episode, Dimitri Van Den Meerssche (Queen Mary University
of London) is joined by Angelina Fisher (Guarini Global Law and
Tech initiative, NYU) and André Dao (Laureate Program in Global
Corporations, Melbourne Law School). Their conversation, drawing
on a recent EJIL book review symposium, spans the co-constitutive
relations between international law and technology, the limits of
human rights, and new avenues for legal critique and resistance
that reclaim a shared, collective future against its algorithmic
appropriation.
Other scholarship mentioned in the course of the episode
includes: Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (translated by B.
Wing) (1997); Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence
– Translating International Law into Local Justice (2005); Fleur
Johns, Non-Legality in International Law: Unruly Law (2013);
Ratna Kapur, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights – Freedom in a
Fishbowl (2020); Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in
China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (2021); Henning Lahmann,
‘Self-Determination in the Age of Algorithmic Warfare’ (2025)
European Journal of Legal Studies 161–214.
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Über diesen Podcast
EJIL: The Podcast! aims to provide in-depth, expert and accessible
discussion of international law issues in contemporary
international and national affairs. It features the Editors of the
European Journal of International Law and of its blog, EJIL: Talk!
The podcast is produced by the European Journal of Law with support
from staff at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of
Oxford.
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