The UN and its Infra-Law: Legalization and Lawishness

Speaker: Isobel Roele (QMUL)
Chair: Devika Hovell (LSE)

Drawing from her book, Articulating Security: The United Nations and its Infra-Law (CUP, 2022), Dr Roele will talk about how managerial governance initiatives – in this case the UN’s Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy – can be seen as a form of law that is uncanny in the Freudian sense. Critics of the managerial modes global governance frequently takes often draw a strict separation with juridico-political governance, which is sometimes idealized in the process. Seeing managerial forms as uncanny versions of juridical forms is a way of preserving the distinction without romanticising traditional, juridical Public International Law.

Bio

Isobel is Senior Lecturer in Law at Queen Mary University of London. She works on the United Nations, with particular focus on collective security, organizational governance, and the visual arts. The first two of these are discussed in her monograph, which will be the subject of her talk. Articulating Security: The UN and its Infra-Law (Cambridge University Press, 2002) examines the place and the placing of law in the UN’s Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy. Isobel has recently completed an MA in Art History and her current research project, The UN and its Viewing Public, investigates the UN’s use of the visual arts in its public outreach work.

This seminar is organised by the Public International Law Research Hub.