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Friday, 21 October 2022 - 1.00pm
Location: 
Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, Berkowitz/Finley Lecture Hall

Professor Pahuja was recently awarded an ARC Laureate Fellowship for her project The Corporate Challenge to Democracy: Harnessing International Law.

The starting point for the project is a widely shared intuition: that the rising power of global corporations poses a serious challenge to democratic rule within nation-states. Corporations have gone global, but the mechanisms to ensure they serve the public interest, pay tax and comply with national laws have not. Efforts are frustrated by a mismatch between the global operational structure of multinational corporations, and their national legal form. 

The intuition sparking the project is that international law - not corporate governance or national laws – is central to creating this disjuncture. And so, the essence of the research program is to understand the rise and influence of global corporations as a question of international law.

To do this, the team will take a long historical approach, framed through the lens of authority, and rival forms of law, to consider how the mobility of corporations has been and is facilitated, how rights are created, and how corporate power is produced and made effective through and by law. The overall aim of the project is to produce a new historical, theoretical and conceptual understanding of the relationship between corporations, states, state law and international law from the early modern period to the present day.

In this informal seminar, Prof Pahuja will outline the project, possibly map existing approaches, and describe its key elements with the intention of starting a conversation with Lauterpacht Centre researchers, to launch future collaboration.

Sundhya Pahuja is ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Professor, Director of the Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International law, and Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at the Melbourne Law School.  She is currently Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Cambridge.  She is known for her work on the encounter between plural forms of international law, the legal, historical, political and economic dimensions of the relations between Global South and North.  

In July 2022, Sundhya began an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship for a multi-year collaborative project on Global Corporations and International Law.   Her other current projects include an interdisciplinary project on Populism and International Law with Richard Joyce, James Martel, Andrew Benjamin and Rose Parfitt and Cold War Histories of International Law with Gerry Simpson and Matthew Craven.  Sundhya is the author of the prize-winning book Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality (Cambridge 2011). Her other books include The Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities (2021) edited with Shane Chalmers, International Law and the Cold War (2019) edited with Gerry Simpson and Matt Craven and The Oxford Handbook on International Law and Development (forthcoming) edited with Luis Eslava and Ruth Buchanan.  

 

Chaired by: Associate Professor Andrew Sanger

 

 

Lauterpacht Centre for International Law

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