Essex Public International Law Lecture: Passion and International Law of War Scholarship

Please join us for the latest instalment of the Essex Public International Law Lecture Series.

The Essex Public International Law Lecture Series welcomes you to the latest instalment presented by Professor Naz Khatoon Modirzadeh, Harvard Law School and chaired by Dr Emily Jones from the School of Law at the University of Essex.

Abstract

In this lecture, I will explore how international legal scholarship about war, written at a time of war, ought to be read. Can and should we demand doctrinal rigor and analytical clarity, while also expecting that scholarship makes us feel something, that it connects us to the author, that it captures the intimacy and emotion that human beings experience in relation to war? I use two eras of international legal scholarship on war, namely, the Vietnam era and the War on Terror to illustrate key moments in the field that were typified by very different kinds of writing and the corresponding differences in thinking and feeling. I argue, in part, that in contradistinction to Vietnam era scholarship a particularly influential strand of contemporary scholarship on the United States’ War on Terror adopts a view that is aridly technical, a contextual, and a historical. In short, it lacks passion. This lecture will draw upon my article, Cut These Words: Passion and International Law of War Scholarship.

Speaker 

Professor Naz Khatoon Modirzadeh is the Founding Director of the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict and is Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School.