Announcements: Conference, What Room for Military Assistance on Request in the International Legal Order; Lecture, On Data – Givens of Global Law

Conference: ‘What Room for Military Assistance on Request in the International Legal Order?’ On Thursday 5 and Friday 6 December 2019, the Journal on the Use of Force and International Law (JUFIL, Routledge) and the Ghent Rolin-Jaequemyns International Law Institute (GRILI) will host an international conference focusing on ‘military assistance on request’. Having regard to recent third-State interventions in Yemen, Syria and elsewhere, the conference seeks to explore the legal framework governing such interventions, including relevant uncertainties and shortcomings as well as proposals de lege ferenda. Separate expert panels will be devoted e.g. to the ‘authority’ to invite outside intervention on the one hand, and the permissibility of third-State intervention in situations of civil war on the other hand. The conference programme and registration link are available here.

Lecture: On Data – Givens of Global Law. On 20 November The Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context (GLGSC) will host its Annual Lecture, to be delivered by Professor Fleur Johns. The title of the lecture is On Data: Givens of Global Law. This talk focuses on a medium in which people, places and things are being connected, divided, aggregated and distributed juridically on the global plane: digital data. It will explore how, to whom, under what conditions and in what formats digital data are being given in certain practices of contemporary international law: specifically, in aspects of international development and humanitarian work in which the adoption of digital data and data science techniques is being encouraged. More precisely, it will consider some ramifications of the growing digitization of two key knowledge formats for international law: facts and populations. It will ask what givens may be constituted or reconstituted – or what may be established, or re-established, about international law, legal actors, institutions and operations – in the process of this shift in knowledge practice. And it will touch, finally, on what might be at stake in these changing practices with regard to the CLGSC’s three, current thematic concerns: time and place; power and capital; aesthetics and materiality. More details can be found here.