Search

Using the 2015 arbitral award in von Pezold v. Zimbabwe as its starting point, this piece reflects on the relationship between racial capitalism and international law. Stressing the particularities both of this specific case and of the field of investment arbitration, I nevertheless argue that the tribunal’s finding that Zimbabwe’s land redistribution program had been racially discriminatory against white commercial farmers is symptomatic of broader argumentative structures in international law. In particular, I suggest that it was three argumentative moves that led to this perverse outcome: a temporal fencing of racism, a spatial containment of racism and, finally, a strict conceptualization of racism as prejudice pertaining to “skin color.” The combination of these three moves allowed the arbitrators to artificially separate the question of race/ism from questions of property and wealth distribution, capitalist accumulation, and exploitation. Far from being aberrational, these three moves are commonplace in (neo)liberal domestic and international legal systems and contribute to the invisibilization of racial capitalism as a structure of dispossession, exploitation, and abandonment.

Using the 2015 arbitral award in von Pezold v. Zimbabwe as its starting point, this piece reflects on the relationship between racial capitalism and international law. Stressing the particularities both of this specific case and of the field of investment arbitration, I nevertheless argue that the tribunal’s finding that Zimbabwe’s land redistribution program had been racially discriminatory against white commercial farmers is symptomatic of broader argumentative structures in international law. In particular, I suggest that it was three argumentative moves that led to this perverse outcome: a temporal fencing of racism, a spatial containment of racism and, finally, a strict conceptualization of racism as prejudice pertaining to “skin color.” The combination of these three moves allowed the arbitrators to artificially separate the question of race/ism from questions of property and wealth distribution, capitalist accumulation, and exploitation. Far from being aberrational, these three moves are commonplace in (neo)liberal domestic and international legal systems and contribute to the invisibilization of racial capitalism as a structure of dispossession, exploitation, and abandonment.

The abstract is included in the text.

The abstract is included in the text.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the different historical and geographical contexts in which extraterritorial regimes have developed, the myriad political and economic pressures in response to which such regimes have grown, the highly uneven distributions of extraterritorial privilege that have resulted from these processes. It demonstrates that assertions of legal authority ‘beyond’ territorial frontiers have always played a central role in the constitution and consolidation of sovereignty. The book explains extra-territorial jurisdiction in the legal strategies and ‘state spaces’ of US empire, both before and after the Second World War. It also explores the question of the extraterritorial application of the European Convention of Human Rights, one of the most controversial issues faced by the Strasbourg court. The book is concerned with the limitations of thinking about legal obligations through the prism of extraterritoriality.

Submission to the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights, Annual Business and Human Rights Forum 2018.

Submission to the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights, Annual Business and Human Rights Forum 2018.

Events of historic proportions often feel anti-climactic. In March 2012, Greece, a developed capitalist state and a member of the Eurozone, engaged in the biggest debt restructuring venture to date, covering 200 billion euros (260 billion USD) and reducing the private debt burden by over 50%. The exchange was not purely voluntary, since the majority of bonds were subjected to Greek law and an amendment made the offer compulsory for all holders of such bonds, subject to approval by creditors holding two-thirds of outstanding principal. The triggering of these Collective Action Clauses (CACs) led the Determinations Committee of the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) to declare a ‘credit event’. Even though official pronouncements carefully avoided the word, much of the press and relevant literature saw this as the biggest default to date and at the same time as a confirmation of the unthinkable: EU member states could now default. Despite fears for immediate and uncontrollable contagion, the ‘credit event’ did not spread to other unstable economies of the European South, such as Portugal, Spain or Italy. After a brief period of optimism and successive years of harsh austerity the Greek sovereign debt stands at 176,9% of the GDP , while the Italian sovereign debt exceeds 132% of the GDP and Portugal’s is just below 130%. The Eurozone might not have exploded (yet), but perceptions that the sovereign debt crisis was resolved, or that it is a uniquely Greek problem, appear distinctly misplaced. In this respect, the special edition of the Yale Journal of International Law on sovereign debt curated by Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky and Matthias Goldmann, is a highly topical and relevant intervention that approaches an urgent issue of global political economy from an international legal perspective and articulates specific – if incremental – proposals for the application of general principles of international law to sovereign debt restructuring.

Negli ultimi tempi, Mr. Macron si è dimostrato nostalgico. Dapprima, ha ceduto alla nostalgia per il XVIII secolo (http://www.gqmagazine.co.uk/article/emmanuel-macron-policies-beliefs-philosophy) e la successione dinastica, affermando che il popolo francese non avrebbe voluto giustiziare il re e che la Rivoluzione ha lasciato un vuoto (a forma di re) nel cuore della Repubblica, un vuoto che solo altre figure di tipo autoritario possono colmare. Poi, Mr. Macron ha ceduto alla nostalgia per il XIX secolo. Rispondendo a una domanda circa la possibilità di un Piano Marshall per l’Africa, il presidente francese ha scartato l’idea affermando che, a differenza dell’Europa post 1945, il problema dell’Africa ha a che vedere con la civilizzazione (https://twitter.com/dsquareddigest/status/884668098305036288) e che, quindi, un intervento sulla falsa riga del piano Marshall sarebbe uno spreco di miliardi incapace di stabilizzare alcunché. La replica di Macron ha dell’incredibile, e ci parla non solo di una certa mentalità coloniale nei confronti dell’Africa, ma anche delle attuali inclinazioni imperiali della classe dirigente europea, così come delle connessioni di queste tendenze con i tentativi di ristrutturazione del capitalismo fuori e dentro il continente.

Note from the Editors: We conclude 2017 with a roundtable discussion of the second edition of Professor B.S. Chimni’s International Law and World Order: A Critique of Contemporary Approaches. Given numerous changes that rapidly transpired in the international system since 2016, the roundtable discussion will certainly spur continuing exchanges among scholars, academics, and practitioners on the evolving contours of the international legal system and the art, science, and profession of international law.

Amongst mounting controversies surrounding the Greek bailout program and the referendum called by the Greek government, questions about the constitutionality of the initiative have been raised. The matter is of great importance, since the Council of the State will rule on the constitutionality of the bill this Friday. Given what is at stake, this might seem to be a totally peripheral question. That said, we will attempt a response, so as to clarify certain legal questions and also to point at the uses and abuses of constitutional arguments.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a stark example of how the proliferation of international economic law during the past three decades is an essential part of the neoliberal agenda and therefore ‘part of the problem’.

It is pos sible that after the rise and the fall of the Keynesian govern ment ality, the neo lib eral model of gov ernance and leg ality reaches its apogee in the af ter math of the 2008 crisis