Law and Distributive Struggle in Global Political Economy

Speaker: Professor David Kennedy (Harvard Law School)

Admission: Free

About this talk

The Global Governance Institute in collaboration with the UCL Centre for Ethics and Law will host Professor David Kennedy who will talk on the subject of ‘Law and Distributive Struggle in Global Political Economy’.

Politicians, citizens and policy specialists alike inhabit a technocratic world of irresolvable argument and uncertain knowledge.

As they argue and struggle with one another, a world of astonishing political and economic inequality is born. Legal experts in particular have developed a sophisticated vocabulary for global management strangely detached from its distributive consequences.

Professor Kennedy proposes tools  to model and contest expert work drawing on his experiences with international lawyers, human rights advocates, policy professionals, economic development specialists, military lawyers, and humanitarian strategists.

About the speaker

Professor David Kennedy is Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School where he teaches international law, international economic policy, legal theory, law and development and European law.

He is the author of numerous articles on international law and global governance. His research uses interdisciplinary materials from sociology and social theory, economics and history to explore issues of global governance, development policy and the nature of professional expertise.

He has been particularly committed to developing new voices from the third world and among women in international affairs.

As a practising lawyer and consultant, Professor Kennedy has worked on numerous international projects, both commercial and public. A member of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, he is past Chair and Member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Advisory Council on Global Governance. 

Global Governance Institute

The UCL Global Governance Institute undertakes cross-disciplinary study of crucial governance ‘deficits’ in order to explore the nature of the problem, the processes, structures and institutions involved, and potential solutions.

The Institute brings to bear the distinctive strengths of UCL on such an enterprise: namely, our ability to integrate disciplines that draw from both a material base (from disciplines such as engineering, clinical medicine, and the physical and natural sciences) and a social sciences and humanities perspective.

Click here to read more about the Institute and its work. 

How to register

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