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Friday, 9 February 2018 - 1.00pm
Location: 
Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, Finley Library

Lecture Summary: For international lawyers, the twentieth-century history of the right of self-determination is, traditionally, a tale of two halves:  a period of legal ascendance (Paris 1919; San Francisco 1945; Cairo 1964) followed by a post-Cold War decline into legal indeterminacy (secession) and moral crisis (ethnic cleansing in the Balkans). In this lecture, I will sketch an alternative history in which the principle of self-determination is consistently called up in the service of international legal projects of demographic engineering and the forcible transfer of minorities. This alternative legal history leads to an alternative geography: Turkey and Greece (1920s); Central Europe (1940s); and India and Palestine (1947-48).  

Dr Catriona Drew teaches public international law in the School of Law and the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS University of London. Before joining SOAS, she taught for many happy years at the University of Glasgow. She holds a LLB from the University of Aberdeen and a PhD from the London School of Economics. She has been a visiting fellow at the Human Rights Program, Harvard Law School (1999–2000) and at the Hauser Global Law School, New York University School of Law (2006–2007). She is co-director of the Centre for the study of Colonialism, Empire and International Law at SOAS, and managing editor of the London Review of International Law. She is currently completing a book, Self-determination: the Untold Story of Population Transfer, to be published by Cambridge University Press. Her most recent publication is ‘Remembering 1948: Who’s Afraid of International Law in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?’ in R Gaita & G Simpson (eds), Who’s Afraid of International Law? (Monash University Press, 2017).   

 

The Lauterpacht Centre Friday lecture series is kindly supported by Cambridge University Press.

Numbers are limited so please arrive early to avoid disappointment.

Please note the lecture programme is subject to revision without notice.

 

Lauterpacht Centre for International Law

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