Hybrid | Aggression, Capitalism, and International Law

This lecture will be delivered by Dr Ntina Tzouvala, as part of the Current Legal Problems Lecture Series 2023-24

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Hybrid | Aggression, Capitalism, and International Law

30 Nov 2023, 13:00 – 14:00

Aggression, Capitalism, and International Law: Missed Opportunities or Structural Constraints?

Speaker: Dr Ntina Tzouvala (ANU College of Law)
Chair: Professor Christine Chinkin (LSE)

About the lecture

This talk is preoccupied with the following question: how can we understand international law’s permissiveness vis-a-vis the vast economic and financial infrastructure of modern warfare? Oth-erwise put, I will explore how and why international law ended up having very little to say about the existence and constant expansion of economic structures that directly facilitate warfare, such as gigantic ‘defence’ budgets, the entanglement between modern finance and war, or the militarisation of an ever-increasing number of industries. In particular, I intend to examine if this was a contingent development or whether it tells us something more profound about the inability of international law to conceptualise coherently questions of force, coercion, and cau-sation under capitalism. To answer this question, I will revisit the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. This period witnessed ambitious efforts to outlaw and criminalise the en-tanglement between capitalist economic power and aggressive war. Brazil and Bolivia attempted to introduce expansive conceptualisations of ‘force’ in the US Charter in an attempt to outlaw the weaponisation of asymmetrical economic power between states. Their efforts were defeated. Similarly, the ambitious (and controversial) decision to charge German bankers and industrial-ists with crimes against peace in front of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) and Nurem-berg Military Tribunal (NMT) were also largely unsuccessful. Drawing from these examples, my lecture will show that international law-as all modern, liberal systems, is structurally incapably of grasping, and therefore regulating, the mechanisms that transform the ‘ordinary’ functions of capitalism into militarised economies and, ultimately, into open war.

About the speaker

Dr Ntina Tzouvala is an Associate Professor at the ANU College of Law and a Global Fellow at the NUS Centre for International Law. Her work focuses on the history, theory and political economy of international law. Her first book, Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law, was awarded the 2022 ASIL certificate of Merit for a preeminent contribution to creative scholarship and the Australian Legal Research book award. She is currently working on two pro-jects, one on dollar hegemony and the international legal order and another on political econo-my, war and international law.

About Current Legal Problems

The Current Legal Problems (CLP) lecture series and annual volume was established over fifty five years ago at the Faculty of Laws, University College London and is recognised as a major reference point for legal scholarship.