IR471      Half Unit
Critical International Law

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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This taught graduate seminar introduces students to the theory and history of international accountability. Focusing on justice mechanisms from the Nuremberg, Tokyo, and Eichmann trials to the Waitangi Tribunal and international commissions of inquiry, and from the UN ad hoc tribunals to—especially—the International Criminal Court, the course inquires deeply into the violence of international law. Bringing critical international theory to bear, it blends methodological approaches from law, the social sciences and the humanities. By thinking critically about international law, the seminar raises––and answers––pertinent theoretical and empirical questions about the power—and pathologies—of international organizations. Paying special attention to the ICC’s ongoing investigations and prosecutions––its so-called Situations––the course exemplifies the politics of international law in the context of one of the most embattled international organizations in the international system.

20 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

Students are required to research and write one formative essay (1,000 words) due in Week 7 of Autumn Term. Essays must be fully - and carefully - referenced using one of the major conventions consistently.

Andrea Bianchi, International Law Theories: An Inquiry into Different Ways of Thinking (2016).

Clarke, Kamari Maxine, Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

Richard Devetak, Critical International Theory: An Intellectual History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Alexander Laban Hinton, The Justice Facade: Trials of Transition in Cambodia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Martti Koskenniemi, To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power 1300–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Anne Orford, International Law and the Politics of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Kim Christian Priemel, The Betrayal: The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Judith Shklar, Legalism: Law, Morals, and Political Trials (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964).

Benjamin N. Schiff, Building the International Criminal Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Prabhakar Singh and Benoît Mayer, eds., Critical International Law: Postrealism, Postcolonialism, and Transnationalism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Essay (100%, 4000 words) in January

Essay of 4000 words (100%)) in the January assessment period. Essays must be fully - and carefully - referenced using one of the major conventions consistently.