Aesthetics And Counter Aesthetics Of International Justice

In recent years, growing attention has been paid to the relationship between international law and aesthetics. This collection situates this relationship within its wider political context, demonstrating that the question of aesthetics in not neutral but rather connected to the social, economic, and political relationships in which international justice is deeply embedded. The first part of the collection is an invitation to reflect on what we see and register in international justice, in particular in representations of those who suffer violence, including the violence of law. The second part of the collection uses different forms to reflect on how aesthetics can be turned against the dominant aesthetics and politics of international law, in the form of 'counter-aesthetics' through cartoons, interviews, parables, and a screenplay. This collection is the first of its kind to make visible the dominant and normalized aesthetics of violence and justice through a political economy lens; and to take seriously the limitations of the aesthetic forms that give violence and justice their expression.

International law is a fundamentally modern phenomenon. Tracing its roots to nineteenth-century pronouncements on the 'law of nations,' the discipline took shape in the elaborate treaty structures of the post-First World War era and in the institutions and tribunals established after the Second World War. International law as scholars know and study it today is a product of modernism. In The Aesthetics of International Law, Ed Morgan engages in a literary parsing of international legal texts. In order to demonstrate how these types of legal narratives are imbued with modernist aesthetics, Morgan juxtaposes international legal documents and modern (as well as some immediately pre- and post-modern) literary texts. He demonstrates how the same intellectual currents that flow through the works of authors ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to James Joyce to Vladimir Nabokov are also present in legal doctrines ranging from the law of war to international commercial disputes to human rights. By providing a comparative, interdisciplinary account of this modern phenomenon, Morgan's work highlights the ways judges, lawyers, and state representatives artfully exploit the narratives of international law. It demonstrates that just as modernist literature developed complex narrative techniques as a way of dealing with the human condition, modern international law has developed parallel argumentative techniques as a way of dealing with international political conditions.

In the past twenty years, international criminal law has become one of the main areas of international legal scholarship and practice. Most textbooks in the field describe the evolution of international criminal tribunals, the elements of the core international crimes, the applicable modes of liability and defences, and the role of states in prosecuting international crimes. The Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law, however, takes a theoretically informed and refreshingly critical look at the most controversial issues in international criminal law, challenging prevailing practices, orthodoxies, and received wisdoms. Some of the contributions to the Handbook come from scholars within the field, but many come from outside of international criminal law, or indeed from outside law itself. The chapters are grounded in history, geography, philosophy, and international relations. The result is a Handbook that expands the discipline and should fundamentally alter how international criminal law is understood.

The Critical Legal Pocketbook provides the tools for law students to uncover the hidden intricacies of law. Law creates an ethical and rational facade for itself, but beneath the surface you will find that it has its monsters; the leviathan of the state, the golems of racism and misogyny, the hydra of coloniality, the vampire of capitalism. These roam throughout law's subterranean structures. At the same time, law is often painted as a heroic defence of the innocent against these terrors. Legal education likes to forget the ways that law was essential in generating structures of domination and subjection. The Critical Legal Pocketbook casts a different light on the law, illuminating some of the ways in which law (and legal education in particular) nourishes its monsters - and sometimes works to make these monsters look tame and docile. Drawing on recent developments in critical legal theory, it considers other dimensions of law: its ambiguity, susceptibility to capture, and its potential as a site of rupture. Edited by students at the University of Warwick, and written by expert critical legal researchers and practitioners, the Critical Legal Pocketbook is essential reading for law students in the UK and other common law jurisdictions. The Pocketbook includes twenty five substantive chapters on traditional legal subjects from Contract Law to Human Rights, and from Mooting to Property Law. Interspersed among these are fifteen key concept notes that aim to help students grasp the complexity and plurality of critical analyses of law.

How aesthetics—understood as a more encompassing framework for human activity—might become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. These essays make the case for a reignited understanding of aesthetics—one that casts aesthetics not as illusory, subjective, or superficial, but as a more encompassing framework for human activity. Such an aesthetics, the contributors suggest, could become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. Departing from the “critical” stance of twentieth-century artists and theorists who embraced a counter-aesthetic framework for political engagement, this book documents how a broader understanding of aesthetics can offer insights into our relationships not only with objects, spaces, environments, and ecologies, but also with each other and the political structures in which we are all enmeshed. The contributors—philosophers, media theorists, artists, curators, writers and architects including such notable figures as Jacques Rancière, Graham Harman, and Elaine Scarry—build a compelling framework for a new aesthetic discourse. The book opens with a conversation in which Rancière tells the volume's editor, Mark Foster Gage, that the aesthetic is “about the experience of a common world.” The essays following discuss such topics as the perception of reality; abstraction in ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics as the “first philosophy”; Afrofuturism; Xenofeminism; philosophical realism; the productive force of alienation; and the unbearable lightness of current creative discourse. Contributors Mark Foster Gage, Jacques Rancière, Elaine Scarry, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Ferda Kolatan, Adam Fure, Michael Young, Nettrice R. Gaskins, Roger Rothman, Diann Bauer, Matt Shaw, Albena Yaneva, Brett Mommersteeg, Lydia Kallipoliti, Ariane Lourie Harrison, Rhett Russo, Peggy Deamer, Caroline Picard Matt Shaw, Managing Editor

This book assesses the role aesthetic factors play in shaping what forms of mass violence are viewed as international crimes.

Restrictive border protection policies directed toward managing the flow of refugees coming into neoliberal democracies (and out of failing nation-states) are a defining feature of contemporary politics. In this book, Verónica Tello analyses how contemporary artists-such as Tania Bruguera, Isaac Julien, Rosemary Laing, Dinh Q. Lé, Dierk Schmidt, Hito Steyerl, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green-negotiate their diverse subject positions while addressing and taking part in the production of images associated with refugee experiences and histories. Tello argues that their practices, which manifest across a range of contexts including Cuba, the United States, Australia and Europe, represent an emergent, global paradigm of contemporary art, 'counter-memorial aesthetics'. Counter-Memorial Aesthetics, Tello argues, is characterized by its conjunction of heterogeneous signifiers and voices of many times and places, generating an experimental, non-teleological approach to the construction of contemporary history, which also takes into account the complex, disorienting spatial affects of globalization. Spanning performance art, experimental 'history painting', aftermath photography and video installation, counter-memorial aesthetics bring to the fore, Tello argues, how contemporary refugee flows and related traumatic events critically challenge and conflict with many existing, tired if not also stubborn notions of national identity, borders, history and memory. Building on the writings of such thinkers as Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, this book offers a useful concept of 'counter-memory' for the twenty-first century. It shows how counter-memorial aesthetics is not only central to the nexus of contemporary art and refugee histories but also how it can offer a way of being critically present with many other, often interrelated, global crises in the contemporary era.

In this influential sequence of linked interviews, Ranciere explores the interplay of art and politics.