Evening Lecture: 'The End (and Future) of States' - Prof Monica Hakimi, Columbia Law School

Lecture and Q&A: 5 pm - 6 pm 

Please note this event is in person only. No registration required.

Lecture summary: This talk draws attention to—and offers a theory that ties together and explains—two globally transformative trends. First, states across the world are facing extraordinary threats, ranging from interstate aggression to violent nonstate groups to internal legitimacy crises and climate change. Second, international law is ill-suited to help them manage these threats.

For centuries, international law has prioritized the project of statehood. As states established themselves, they created an intricate web of legal concepts, doctrines, processes, and institutions to support their statehood—specifically, by fixing their borders and validating the authority of each in its borders. With time, their attention shifted, and international law shifted with them. It came to address a  broader range of issues and to penetrate more deeply into each state’s internal affairs than it had previously done. To be clear, the statehood project remained foundational to international law. But international law increasingly also advanced what might be called a “justice project,” focused less on supporting states as states and more on defining universal standards against which each could be assessed, and deviants, held responsible. The justice project exposed contradictions in, reduced the relative import of, and at times directly undercut the statehood project. The consequence is that, as international law has developed, it has become structurally misaligned to help states address their most basic needs and priorities. Tracing the evolution and erosion of the international legal project on statehood helps to explain how the above two trends intersect, why both international law and many of the states that have been constituted with it have become so unstable, and what the realistic prospects for the future might be. 

Prof Monica Hakimi's scholarship draws on both doctrine and legal theory to understand the operation of international law. She focuses on public international law, the use of force, U.S. foreign relations law, human rights, and national security. She was recently elected co-editor in chief of the American Journal of International Law.

She was the Nathaniel Fensterstock Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia Law School during the 2022 spring semester and was appointed professor of law on July 1, 2022. She was previously the James V. Campbell Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, where she was also the associate dean for faculty and research and the associate dean for academic programming. She has held visiting appointments at Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, University of Tokyo, and Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. 

Prior to entering the academy, Hakimi spent four years as attorney-adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser in the U.S. Department of State; she counseled policymakers on nuclear nonproliferation, efforts to reconstruct Iraq immediately after the 2003 war, international investment disputes, and international civil aviation. Hakimi has also served as counsel before the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal and worked on cases before the International Court of Justice and U.S. federal courts and agencies. She clerked for Judge Kimba M. Wood on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Hakimi’s scholarship has appeared in publications including the American Journal of International Law, Michigan Law Review, and Yale Journal of International Law, among others.

Chair: Dr Lena Holzer