LCIL International Law Seminar Series Cambridge University

Lecture summary: In 2015, the United States military dropped a bomb on a hospital in Afghanistan run by Médecins Sans Frontières, killing forty-two staff and patients. Testifying afterwards before a Senate Committee, General John F. Campbell explained that “[t]he hospital was mistakenly struck.” In 2019, while providing air support to partner forces under attack by ISIS, the U.S. military killed dozens of women and children. Central Command concluded that any civilian deaths “were accidental.” In August 2021, during a rushed withdrawal from Afghanistan, the U.S. military executed a drone strike in Kabul that killed ten civilians, including an aid worker for a U.S. charity and seven children in his family. The Pentagon later admitted it was a “tragic mistake.” In these cases and others like them, no one set out to kill the civilians who died. Such events are usually chalked up as sad but inevitable consequences of war - as regrettable “mistakes.”

In this lecture, based on a forthcoming co-authored article, Professor Oona Hathaway will examine the law on “mistakes” in war. She will consider whether and when the law holds individuals and states responsible for “mistakes.” To see how the law works, or fails to work, in practice, she will examine the US military’s own assessments of civilian casualties. She will show that “mistakes” are far more common than generally acknowledged. Some errors are, moreover, the predictable - and avoidable - result of a system that does too little to learn from its mistakes. She will focus her remarks on the United States, both because of its global military operations and because of the power of its example to shape global practices. The United States is far from alone, however. Thus, lessons learned from its failures can be instructive for other states as well.

Lecture summary: This lecture examines the treatment of marine genetic resources (MGR) in the negotiations and the text of the new Treaty on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ). The Treaty provides a coherent governance framework for MGR including an unexpected techno-fix to the most longstanding problem of biodiversity governance, some normative novelty on principles, and a trendsetting approach to valuation of aggregate usage of genetic resources. Yet, this painstakingly formed framework continues to be buffeted by self-interested attempts to redefine and relitigate the value of genetic resources; particularly around decoupling use from access to genetic resources, dematerialisation from physical resources and dis-enclosure under legal frameworks, all of which are now stable features in this and other Treaty-making contexts. How can we better characterise the success of the BBNJ Treaty in a way that helps resist de facto erosion following ratification?

Relevant papers
S Thambisetty ‘The Unfree Commons: Freedom of Marine Scientific Research and the Status of Genetic Resources Beyond National Jurisdiction (Dec 4, 2023) LSE Legal Studies Working Paper No. 24/2023 87 Modern Law Review (2024) Forthcoming

S Thambisetty, P Oldham, C Chiarolla, The Expert Briefing Document: A Developing Country Perspective on the Making of The BBNJ Treaty (September 21, 2023). LSE Legal Studies Working Paper No. 30/2023, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4580046 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4580046

P Oldham, Paul C Chiarolla, S Thambisetty, Digital Sequence Information in the UN High Seas Treaty: Insights from the Global Biodiversity Framework-related Decisions (January 30, 2023). LSE Law - Policy Briefing Paper No. 53, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4343130 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4343130

Lecture summary: From European colonialism to the ‘post’colonial constellation, modern international law has developed in parallel with the changing legal forms of industrialised countries’ access to the natural resources of the global South. Following this development, we can see how imperial environmentalism was translated to the transnational law of natural resources. The historic perspective also highlights that the specific ambivalence of colonial and postcolonial environmental protection (exploitation vs. protection) is an ambivalence built into international law itself. In accordance with its colonial origins, international law has institutionalised a specific path to economic growth and development that presupposes and stabilises a world order supported by the industrialised countries of the North. At the same time, with the principle of equal sovereignty and self-determination, it recognises difference from the dominant economic and industrial culture as a political principle.

Analysing international law’s approach to natural resources also directs our attention to changing ideas of nature and to the heart of international law's anthropocentrism, questioning its efficacy in tackling the ecological crisis. What we see here is an extractivist rationality that is intrinsically linked to the commodification of natural resources and green economy approaches in international environmental law. Last not least, a natural resource perspective highlights the fact that the legal concepts devised to determine how we share the world’s resources entail distributive processes among humans themselves.

Sigrid Boysen is Professor of International Law at Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg and a Judge at the Hamburg State Constitutional Court. She serves as editor-in-chief of the international law review ‘Archiv des Völkerrechts’, has held positions as Visiting Research Fellow at Princeton University (2014), the Institute for Global Law & Policy at Harvard Law School (2021/22) and is currently Fernand Braudel Fellow at the Law Department of the European University Institute in Florence. Her research focuses on international law with a particular focus on the theory of international law, the law of natural resources, environmental justice, international environmental and economic law, and constitutional law. Recent publications include Die postkoloniale Konstellation. Natürliche Ressourcen und das Völkerrecht der Moderne, Mohr Siebeck 2021; ‘Postcolonial Global Constitutionalism’, in: Lang and Wiener (eds.), Handbook on Global Constitutionalism, 2nd ed. 2023, 166-184.

The Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lecture is an annual three-part lecture series given in Cambridge to commemorate the unique contribution to the development of international law of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht. These lectures are given annually by a person of eminence in the field of international law. This year's lecture was given by Prof Beth Simmons, University of Pennsylvania.

Summary: The Golden Age of globalization has reached an end in the popular and political imagination. In its place has arisen growing anxiety about state borders. What is the evidence of such a shift? What are the causes and consequences? What answers does international law have for how international borders should be governed, especially as human mobility intensifies? Traditional international law defining and settling borders will not suffice to answer these questions. Instead, the lectures explore a different approach that views international borders as institutions that obligate states to manage the tensions that territorial governance implies in an interdependent world.

6 pm Thursday 14 March 2024

Lecture 3: Where Cooperative Border Governance (Should) Lead: Interstate Borders as Though People Mattered
The lecture culminates by addressing ways forward in the light of Lectures 1 and 2. First, it explores the ways that border unilateralism has had some results that are inconsistent with international human rights. Second, it suggests possibilities for addressing rights violations committed in the name of “border sovereignty.” While international law is not equipped to address all of the injustices and anxieties associated with international borders, it does offer cooperative levers and lenses that can help address and arrest some of its worst consequences.

Chair: Eyal Benvenisti

The Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lecture is an annual three-part lecture series given in Cambridge to commemorate the unique contribution to the development of international law of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht. These lectures are given annually by a person of eminence in the field of international law. This year's lecture was given by Prof Beth Simmons, University of Pennsylvania.

Summary: The Golden Age of globalization has reached an end in the popular and political imagination. In its place has arisen growing anxiety about state borders. What is the evidence of such a shift? What are the causes and consequences? What answers does international law have for how international borders should be governed, especially as human mobility intensifies? Traditional international law defining and settling borders will not suffice to answer these questions. Instead, the lectures explore a different approach that views international borders as institutions that obligate states to manage the tensions that territorial governance implies in an interdependent world.

6 pm Wednesday 13 March 2024

Lecture 2: Treaties and Neighbors: Recovering the Cooperative Roots of International Bordering

Territorializing political authority was a violent affair. Borders are implicated in that violence. But this lecture foregrounds their cooperative international legal roots as well. In theory, borders divide by agreement. That is their purpose. Any border worth its salt impacts relationships between states, communities and individuals. The obligation, then, is to address that impact. This lecture explores international legal resources for cooperative border management, which is subject, as always, to international legal obligations.

Chair: Surabhi Ranganathan

The Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lecture is an annual three-part lecture series given in Cambridge to commemorate the unique contribution to the development of international law of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht. These lectures are given annually by a person of eminence in the field of international law. This year's lecture was given by Prof Beth Simmons, University of Pennsylvania.

Summary: The Golden Age of globalization has reached an end in the popular and political imagination. In its place has arisen growing anxiety about state borders. What is the evidence of such a shift? What are the causes and consequences? What answers does international law have for how international borders should be governed, especially as human mobility intensifies? Traditional international law defining and settling borders will not suffice to answer these questions. Instead, the lectures explore a different approach that views international borders as institutions that obligate states to manage the tensions that territorial governance implies in an interdependent world.

6 pm Tuesday 12 March 2024

Lecture I: Setting the stage: Border Anxiety in an Interdependent World

Even as interstate territorial aggrandizement has waned over the decades, border anxiety around the world is on the rise. A rich array of physical and rhetorical evidence from satellite imagery to discourse analysis supports this point. International borders have become a flashpoint for political demands and policies that insist on unilateralism. Yet “sovereign borders” misconstrue the very purposes – and consequences – of bordering. Can an International Law of borders move from its traditional focus on border fixity to border management? That will be the focus of Lecture 2.

Chair: Sandesh Sivakumaran