Neocolonialism and International Law

This talk tells the story of how contemporary international law facilitates neo-colonialism in, around, and through Palestine. The international legal system silences resistance to neo-colonialism through its doctrines on sovereignty, state violence, and genocide. More importantly, contemporary international law tells stories about the world that contribute to epistemic neo-colonialism and hinder epistemic decolonization.

Background reading:

1. “Comparing Islamic and international laws of war”
2. “Demystifying the neo-colonialism of international law”

Lena Salaymeh is a scholar of law and history specialising in critical theory. She uses interdisciplinary and critical methods to ask historical, historiographic, and jurisprudential questions about Islamic law and Jewish law in the late antique, mediaeval, and modern eras. Her first book, The beginnings of Islamic law: late antique Islamicate legal traditions, offers a historically grounded understanding of Islamic law. The beginnings of Islamic law received the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Textual Studies. At Oxford, she is concurrently researching two projects. The first project focuses on the contemporary genre of revolutionary Islamic jurisprudence, which argues for or against revolution based on Islamic legal principles.The second project investigates decoloniality in specific forms of resistance. Salaymeh also co-direct, at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and Private International Law (Hamburg), a research project on decolonial comparative law, which merges her background in comparative law and decolonial theory. Her research has been supported by a Guggenheim fellowship, an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography, and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. She has held visiting positions at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Sciences Religieuses), Princeton University (Davis Center, Department of History), and the Max Planck Institute (Hamburg). She received her PhD in Legal and Islamic History from UC Berkeley and her JD from Harvard. Salymeh is an inactive member of the California Bar.

Event organised by OMAM and REPI as part of the SMMAC seminar series.

This event will be held in english and is open to the public.

Wednesday, May 8th 2024, from 12pm to 2pm

Université libre de Bruxelles
Institute for European Studies (IEE Kant room)
Avenue F. Roosevelt 39
1000 Bruxelles