The Instability of Opportunism: A History of the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam

The PIL hub lunch-time seminar series aims to provide an opportunity to discuss and debate leading research on contemporary, theoretical and historical issues of international law.

On 4th March 2026, Sjors Polm will present a talk titled ‘The Instability of Opportunism: A History of the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam’  This session will take place in Moot Court Room, please see venue information below.

The Russell Tribunal on Vietnam was animated by a belief that international law had something to offer the antiwar movement. This belief was shared among the tribunal’s participants; the reasons underlying it were not. Based on extensive archival research, this paper presents the tribunal as a forum where different ideas about international law as a resource for activism were put into action and clashed. It is a story of these ideas, but more than that it is a story of the forum: of how different ideas about international law and activism gained or lost traction when they were enacted in the tribunal. The paper argues that while the tribunal was created as an opportunistic device to oppose the Vietnam War, it gradually came to revolve around improving the law. Opportunism proved unstable because it was difficult to separate law’s language and rituals from its values and objectives.

Speaker: Sjors Polm is a PhD Researcher at the European University Institute. His thesis, ‘Doing Politics by Pretending to Do Law’, is a history of informal performances of law. Before coming to the EUI, Sjors studied law (LLB, LLM), philosophy (Ba, Ma), and social sciences (BSc) at the University of Amsterdam, where he also worked as a junior researcher and lecturer. He was a visiting student at NYU Law and is a visiting student at LSE.