In-Person | Ronald Dworkin’s Philosophy of International Law and Postcolonial Criticisms
This event is organised by the UCL Institute for Laws, Politics and Philosophy (ILPP) ‘Dworkin Colloquium’
In-Person | Ronald Dworkin’s Philosophy of International Law and Postcolonial Criticisms
20 May 2025, 16:00 – 18:00
Please note that the time allocated for this colloquia will be devoted to discussion.
Speaker: Prof Seyla Benhabib (Yale University)
About the Session: Dworkin’s “A New Philosophy for International Law” was published posthumously in 2013. After rejecting the dominant view of international law as a form of “neo-Hartian positivism,” Dworkin develops two principles which he believes would serve to give a more normatively adequate account of international law. Following his “interpretative” account of law, he asks: “How far can we treat international law as a part, but a very distinct part, of what morality and decency require of states and other international bodies in their treatment of one another?.” Dworkin states the first interpretive principle as the “duty or responsibility of mitigation.” The second principle is named “the principle of salience.”
After a consideration of Dworkin’s account in the light of Kantian cosmopolitanism, I turn to the critiques of international law developed by postcolonial theorists such as Anthony Anghie, Tendayi Achiume and Adom Getachew and ask what light their contributions shed on Dworkin’s project.
Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy Emerita at Yale University where she taught from 2001 to 2020. She is currently Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Law Adjunct at Columbia University, and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Philosophy. She is also a Senior Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. She has previously taught at the New School for Social Research (1991-1993) and Harvard Universities, where she was Professor of Government from 1993-2000 and Chair of Harvard’s Program on Social Studies from 1996-2000.
She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1985, a corresponding honorary fellow of the British Academy (2018), and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2024. Professor Benhabib is the recipient of the Ernst Bloch prize for 2009, the Leopold Lucas Prize from the Theological Faculty of the University of Tubingen (2012), the Meister Eckhart Prize (2014), and the Theodor Adorno Prize of the City of Frankfurt (2024). A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient (2011-12), she has been research affiliate and senior scholar in many institutions in the US and in Europe including Berlin’s Wissenschaftskolleg (2009), NYU Strauss Center for the Study of Law and Justice (2012), the European University Institute in Florence (Summer 2015), Center for Gender Studies at Cambridge University ( Spring 2017), Columbia University Law School (Spring 2016; Spring 2018); Center for Humanities and Critical Theory, Humboldt University Berlin (Summer 2018). She was Albert Hirschman Fellow at the Institute for the Human Sciences in Vienna in November 2023.
Professor Benhabib holds Honorary Degrees from the Universities of Utrecht (2004), Valencia (2010), Bogazici University in Istanbul (2012), Georgetown University (2014), the University of Geneva (Fall 2018), the Center of Latin American Studies in Chile (Summer 2021) and the Université Catholique de Louvain and University of Louvain (jointly awarded) (2024).
Her work has been translated into 15 languages and she has also edited and coedited 10 volumes on topics ranging from democracy and difference to the rights of migrant women and children; the communicative ethics controversy and Hannah Arendt. Her books include: The Claims of Culture. Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, (2002); The Rights of Others. Aliens, Citizens and Residents (2004), winner of the Ralph Bunche award of the American Political Science Association (2005) and the North American Society for Social Philosophy award (2004); Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations, with responses by Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig and Will Kymlicka (Oxford University Press, 2006); Dignity in Adversity. Human Rights in Troubled Times (UK and USA: Polity Press, 2011); Gleichheit und Differenz. Die Würde des Menschen und die Souveränitätsansprüche der Vőlker (Mohr Siebeck, 2013); Exile, Statelessness and Migration. Playing Chess with History form Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin (Princeton 2018); Kosmopolitismus im Wandel. Zwischen Demos, Kosmos und Globus (Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag 2024).
She has edited together with Volker Kaul, Toward New Democratic Imaginaries. Istanbul Seminars on Islam, Culture, and Politics (Springer 2016), and with Ayelet Shachar, Lawless Zones, Rightless Subjects: Migration and Asylum New Border Regimes. (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Her most recent book, At the Margins of the Modern State: Critical Theory and Law is forthcoming in 2025 (Cambridge UK: Polity Press).
The Institute brings together political and legal theorists from Law, Political Science and Philosophy and organises regular colloquia in terms 2 and 3. Read more about the Institute's work.
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