Matilda Arvidsson

This article avails an autoethnography of the authors’ attempt to construct a post hoc intervention machine learning (ml) system responsive to the problem of discrimination in asylum law decisions. In the article we revisit the conjunction of law as a slow hermeneutic, against the fast-paced pull of ai and commercial imperatives to ask whether a ml-driven post hoc intervention system such as the one set up in the research project reduces the overall risk of discrimination emerging from human discretion in legal decision making on asylum. We conclude that a ml-driven ‘anti-discrimination machine’ will displace rather than reduce that overall risk. We warn that similar attempts at using ml as part of legal decision making, decision support, and post hoc interventions, in international law and beyond, may need to take seriously the risks of human discretion embedded in ml design and data selection.

In this article the authors build on Masahiro Mori’s 1970s essay “The Uncanny Valley”, psychoanalysis and critical legal pluralism, to analyse how the uncanny in international law is exposed through law’s encounter with the a-human, non-human and more-than-human phenomena challenging legal subjecthood in cyberspace. Discussing autonomous decision-making, dwellers and encounters in international law’s uncanny valley the article proposes that international law needs to cater to a spectrum of non-human subjectivities, entities, laws and normativities. In short, international law needs to ‘get over itself’ and its constant anxiety in the face of the plurality of laws and Others.

This text considers Hélène Cixous’ écriture feminine (‘writing
feminine’) as one way to do feminist legal translation. It discusses the
importance of ‘writing one self’ as legal scholars in our own time as a reflection
both on what law as well as what the self is or can be. To write one self through
écriture feminine is a feminist act in contestation to the ‘phallocentric’ search for
the law’s (phallo-)‘originary first term or logos’. Drawing on Yoriko Otomo’s
feminist legal scholarship, I show that écriture feminine writes the world
differently through the writing of the self; something which is urgently needed in
a time of, as Anna Grear puts it, ‘necrotic, predatory imperative of Euro-centric
petro-capitalism and rampant industrial consumerism’. Legal scholarship has
often considered Cixous’ work in the context of ‘the linguistic turn’ – a turn that
has been out of vogue for some time now. Hence, Cixous’ écriture feminine is
rarely explicitly part of contemporary critical legal scholars’ efforts. In this text,
however, I argue that Cixous’ scholarship, and her écriture feminine, is necessary
to contemporary legal scholarship in its turn to new materialism, tech and AI:
The feminist translation, transformation, transgression and translactation in
écriture feminine interrupt the phallocentric predatory imperative embedded in
the world such legal scholarship tries to make sense of and rework.

This paper examines how the International laws of, in and after war are, as a Schmittian political theology, instructed by a Christian eschatological concept of time. The paper uncovers how Christian remnants are present in both international law and in our Nordic societies, suggesting that we ought to consider carefully how our understanding and narration of time is furthering the eschatological problem of coming out of the “Messianic time”, and what part we want, or indeed expect, law to play in that transformation. The “now” of the paper is the Iraq war of 2003, and how the eschatological narration has been furthered in both international law and the Nordic societies during this “now”.

Employment integration is a cornerstone of migrant integration into host society. Though many AI initiatives targeting migrants have been initiated, research is limited on the design, outcomes and effectiveness of such initiatives. Today, there is a lack of effective implementation protocols and opportunities to assess whether these technologies constitute successful intervention tools and actually contribute to migrant integration. This four-year interdisciplinary research project seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities that artificial intelligence (AI) entails for facilitating migrant employment integration and workplace inclusion. We address the following research questions: 1. How is AI used by migrants, their co-workers and the actors involved in their employment integration process? 2. How does AI enhance migrant professional competences? and 3. What are pathways to success of AI interventions for integration and inclusion purposes? A combinati...

This chapter considers who the human of international humanitarian law (IHL) is or can be. Traditionally IHL treats the human as its point of departure as well as its ultimate telos. The human is identified and categorized as either civilian or combatant, placing the various ways in which one can pass as human in focus of the targeting process. Moreover, the lawfulness of the targeting process has been made dependent on a 'human in the loop' who can be held accountable for warfare acts. In this chapter I show how IHL invites a gender bias and fails to take into account how military targets are identified through emerging technologies in practice, including artificial intelligence (AI), in contemporary intelligent warfare. Finding that the law fails to take into account how military targets are identified and killed through processes that are only to a limited degree controlled by human actors, the call I make for an international posthumanitarian legal ordering of the laws of war is an urgent one.

What might a political demography of international law entail? Administration, governance, citizenship, the city, demos, people: but also the act of writing - inscribing; the act of inscription, of the making and unmaking of boundaries, of the binding together and keeping apart, of the making of peoples and the making of relations of subordination and bonds: demoi and sovereigns. And not the least – the makings of and through law, nomos, and the international.

In the wake of the war and occupation of Iraq, 2003–2004, international legal scholars struggled to understand and adequately describe the event and the law surrounding it. This study takes that situation of uncertainty as its point of departure, and it unfolds through an analysis of the material conditions and linguistic–rhetoric and affective–psychic registers through which the Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) of occupied Iraq emerged as a legal subject in response to the international law of belligerent occupation and related law and policy. While pursuing the broader aim of theorizing the subject in international law, the study tells the story of how the Administrator of the CPA formulated a position for itself within the contemporary international law of belligerent occupation: the Lieber Code position. A historical source of law – domestic legislation regarding warfare and occupation originating from 1863 and the American Civil War – thus resurfaced a...

Over the last fifty-odd years the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) has launched programs aiming at emulating and incorporating insect technologies in military technology. The US Army Unmanned Aircrafts Systems Roadmap 2010–2035 has specified insect swarming as a field of development for Unmanned Aviation Systems. While legal scholarship has paid substantial attention to drones, autonomous weapons systems and artificial intelligence (AI), developments based on insect swarming technologies have been largely ignored. This article takes emerging AI swarming technologies in military warfare systems as its starting point and asks about the significance of the swarming insect in and through contemporary International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and warfare. Taking up Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notions of ‘the swarm’ and the ‘war machine’, and drawing on critical environmental legal scholarship, the article argues that rather than dispersing the human from its cen...

Call for papers: “Artistic and cultural praxes in the transitional and contested territory of urban public space”. A stream at Critical Legal Conference, 5-7 September 2013 in Belfast. Conveners: Peter Bengtsen & Matilda Arvidsson (Lund University, Sweden) In their presentation of the “Reconciliation & Reconstruction” theme of this year’s Critical Legal Conference, the organisers suggest that a pertinent topic of discussion might be the role of art and culture in contested political territories. While the notion of political territory may immediately bring to mind a specific contested geo-political location, this stream proposes a take on the theme that invites submissions which specifically consider the urban public space as a contested territory. Where people meet, so do conflicting interests and ideas: in cities, which are characterised by – among other things – a high population density, this invariably leads to incompatible spatial claims and on-going clashes between diverging agendas of a political, commercial, legal, moral, social, cultural, and artistic nature. This is reflected in, for instance, people’s everyday praxes on city streets, where legislation, social norms, and notions of spatial justice help regulate interaction in – and with – urban public space. While in this sense constricting, these elements of social control also constitute a nexus of creativity as they continuously incite individual agency, as people seek to circumvent them. While laws, regulations, and norms play an important role in maintaining the relative openness of urban public space (by limiting what any one agent – an individual, organisation, a company, or other legal entities – can legitimately do there and lay claim to), this space is arguably also constituted by the individual and collective agency which takes place within this cross-field of diverging interests. The collaborative or conflicting acts, resulting from the multiple agendas and visions of the nature and purpose of urban public space, leaves it in a state of constant transition and contestation. This can be seen in for instance authorities’ removal of graffiti writing, which not only restores urban public space to its intended (material, visual, and legal) state, but also leaves a blank canvas for someone else to engage with. In thinking about urban public space as a contested political territory, this stream invites participants to discuss a range of topics including, but not limited to: - the transitional nature of urban public space and the artistic and cultural expressions found within it - artistic and cultural praxes which investigate, problematise and/or actively challenge urban public space and its dominant uses - artistic and cultural praxes as a means of regenerating urban public space - the materiality and agency of artworks and their potential to address and/or resolve conflicts in urban public space - the strategies and voice(s) of the marginalised in urban public space - personal appropriations of urban public space and their (positive or negative) contribution to the publicness of urban public space - the role of critical legal theory in investigating and understanding artistic and cultural praxes within urban public space - the effects of legislation, legal decisions, and law enforcement on individual praxis in urban public space and/or the effects of individual praxis in urban public space on law enforcement, legal decisions, and legislation The stream welcomes traditional papers/presentations as well as formats which transgress or transform the traditional framework of an academic paper presentation. Participants are thus encouraged to actively combine academic reflection and commentary with alternative ways of finding, presenting and representing findings and ideas (e.g. presenting – or creating/conducting – an installation, a performance, or other artistic or cultural praxes).

One way of making sense of what is happening in international law today is to read it as a political theology; and as such a continuation of secularized Christian theological institutions. This paper is a reading of jus ad bellum (and just war tradition), jus in bello, and jus post bellum as an eschatology of international law. In order to illustrate my argument I will use the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq in 2003 and onwards. I the paper I argue mainly two things: (1) International law is, and should consequently correctly be read as, a political theology. (2) Read as political theology jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post bellum correspond to a Christian eschatology of the messianic time, the 1000 year kingdom, the Judgment Day, and the new kingdom to come. Thus, my argument is that jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post bellum are and should consequently correctly be read as an eschatology of international law. As I develop my arguments, I will make use of Carl Schmitt's political theology and the Apostle Paul's eschatology which he develops in the letters to the Romans, the Corinthians and the Thessalonians in the New Testament of the Bible. I scrutinize the concept of time which jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post bellum moves by, and by doing that I identify the political theology – the secularized theological institutions – which operates within the law. What can be learnt from such a reading is both how to understand the law and how to pose a critique against it.

Based on an autoethnographical study of the office of the tingsnotarie this article questions the relation between the ethical self and the act of taking up a judicial office, employing the question of how I can live with (my) law. While the office and the ethical self are kept apart, often by recourse to persona, I make a case for the attendance to the self in examinations of ethical responsibility when pursuing an office of law. I propose that the garden, and in particular the practices and notions of (en)closure, (loss of) direction, cultivation, (dis)order, authorship and care-for-the-other which are all part of the gardener’s everyday life and vocation, offers critical insights when thinking through the embodiment of law and the relationship between the ethical self and the office

Our Gardens of Justice special themed issue of the Australian Feminist Law Journal grew out of the 2012 Critical Legal Conference in Stockholm and its theme of Gardens of Justice, a conference organised by Matilda Arvidsson, Merima Bruncevic, Leila Brannstrom and Leif Dahlberg. We issued a Call for Papers early in 2013 in which several conference theme questions were repeated. We called for papers devoted to thinking about law and justice as a physical as well as a social environment. The theme suggested a plurality of justice gardens that may function together but at times also may be at odds with each other. We invited authors to think freely and critically about both the concrete and the metaphorical garden, and invited articles that addressed questions of law and justice as spatial and spatializing structures, as social topography and geography, as political cartography on a global scale, as places where symbolic orders and disorders become visible and may be acted out, as mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, as masculine and feminine and as social utopia. Later in 2013 we re-issued the Call for Papers emphasizing the metaphorical and the juridical linking of gardens and justice: Gardens and Justice have been joined as figurae, genres and topoi in the classical writings of Virgil, in the Old Testament text of Genesis and the Garden of Eden, in Milton's epic of Paradise Lost, in Blackstone in Commentaries on the Laws of England, and not the last, in Neil Young's lyrics 'After the Garden', in his 2006 album Living with War. These and numerous other texts are peopled by figures who live at home, and others who depart from home. Together, and apart, they invite us to continue their genre of living and writing in a world of imperfection, suffering and violence, while maintaining other possibilities and other beginnings. The AFLJ invited articles which investigated the use of garden narratives, whether in jurisprudential writings, in film, in literary works, in political theory, or postcolonial theory, amongst other disciplinary conventions and media. Amongst the numerous questions which could be pursued, we posed the following: How do garden narratives and their figures structure an understanding of Justice, and for what purposes have gardens and justice been linked in national and international law? Are gardens our images of utopia, heaven, peace, or simply a homecoming from the deserts of life? Do gardens help us understand nations and territory? Are gardens ever secular? Are there historic forms of governance encoded in garden narratives? In what ways do Justice narratives in the 21st century understand the figure who leaves the garden as having a persona as stranger, serf, refugee or simply human, or nothuman?

• MONDAY, MAY 12, 2003 Baghdad was burning. As the Air Force C–130 banked above the curve of the Tigris River, I twisted in the sling seat and stared out the circular window of the cargo bay. The capital of Iraq stretched north beneath the right wing, dusty beige, ...

Join My Mailing List. Matilda Arvidsson. Lund University. ... Contributions to Books «Previous. Shari'a from behind the bench: Court culture, judicial culture and a judge-made discourse on Shari'a at a Swedish district court. Matilda Arvidsson, Lund University. Suggested Citation. ...

The epitome of this article is the reflection upon the question of “How long is now?” This question is interpreted within the context of the Iraq war, 2003 and onwards, as the enduring now specified. Drawing on parallels from the European World War II experience and the use of ...

Expanding now familiar debates about the impact of the ‘historical turn’ upon the field of international law, this article considers some of the different ways in which ‘turn to history’ scholars have confronted the methodological and theoretical tensions arising from the central, yet paradoxical, role occupied by the sources doctrine in international law. We suggest that the anxiety over the sources of international law as the basic methodological precepts of the discipline has been a catalyzing element for a radical reengagement with the canon of international law, one with a significant impact on the field’s existing parameters and doctrinal limits. Within the three streams of scholarship we explore here, history has become a site of creative engagement for scholars in opening up the discipline to diverse ends, one in which a new doctrinal universe can be created, and new issues, sources, subjects, and approaches can be explored. Yet, by opening up international law’s sources doc...

This chapter considers who the human of international humanitarian law (IHL) is or can be. Traditionally IHL treats the human as its point of departure as well as its ultimate telos. The human is identified and categorized as either civilian or combatant, placing the various ways in which one can pass as human in focus of the targeting process. Moreover, the lawfulness of the targeting process has been made dependent on a 'human in the loop' who can be held accountable for warfare acts. In this chapter I show how IHL invites a gender bias and fails to take into account how military targets are identified through emerging technologies in practice, including artificial intelligence (AI), in contemporary intelligent warfare. Finding that the law fails to take into account how military targets are identified and killed through processes that are only to a limited degree controlled by human actors, the call I make for an international posthumanitarian legal ordering of the laws of war is an urgent one.

This text considers Hélène Cixous’ écriture feminine (‘writing feminine’) as one way to do feminist legal translation. It discusses the importance of ‘writing one self’ as legal scholars in our own time as a reflection both on what law as well as what the self is or can be. To write one self through écriture feminine is a feminist act in contestation to the ‘phallocentric’ search for the law’s (phallo-)‘originary first term or logos’. Drawing on Yoriko Otomo’s feminist legal scholarship, I show that écriture feminine writes the world
differently through the writing of the self; something which is urgently needed in a time of, as Anna Grear puts it, ‘necrotic, predatory imperative of Euro-centric petro-capitalism and rampant industrial consumerism’. Legal scholarship has often considered Cixous’ work in the context of ‘the linguistic turn’ – a turn that has been out of vogue for some time now. Hence, Cixous’ écriture feminine is rarely explicitly part of contemporary critical legal scholars’ efforts. In this text, however, I argue that Cixous’ scholarship, and her écriture feminine, is necessary to contemporary legal scholarship in its turn to new materialism, tech and AI: The feminist translation, transformation, transgression and translactation in écriture feminine interrupt the phallocentric predatory imperative embedded in the world such legal scholarship tries to make sense of and rework.

Over the last fifty-odd years the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) has launched programs aiming at emulating and incorporating insect technologies in military technology. The US Army Unmanned Aircrafts Systems Roadmap 2010–2035 has specified insect swarming as a field of development for Unmanned Aviation Systems. While legal scholarship has paid substantial attention to drones, autonomous weapons systems and artificial intelligence (AI), developments based on insect swarming technologies have been largely ignored. This article takes emerging AI swarming technologies in military warfare systems as its starting point and asks about the significance of the swarming insect in and through contemporary International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and warfare. Taking up Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notions of ‘the swarm’ and the ‘war machine’, and drawing on critical environmental legal scholarship, the article argues that rather than dispersing the human from its central position in the ‘targeting loop’, the increased interest in insects for commercial and warfare purposes is an intensification of transhumanist desires and an acceleration of late capitalism. As a counter-move, and as a contribution to a posthumanist turn in IHL, the article calls for becoming-insect, swarm and minoritarian as an epistemological practice and ontological shift in IHL and its critical scholarship, resulting in a posthumanitarian legal ordering of becoming.

Expanding now familiar debates about the impact of the 'historical turn' upon the field of international law, this article considers some of the different ways in which 'turn to history' scholars have confronted the methodological and theoretical tensions arising from the central, yet paradoxical role occupied by the sources doctrine in international law. We suggest that the anxiety over the sources of international law as the basic methodological precepts of the discipline, has been a catalysing element for a radical reengagement with the canon of international law, one with a significant impact on the field's existing parameters and doctrinal limits. Within the three streams of scholarship we explore here, history has become a site of creative engagement for scholars in opening up the discipline to diverse ends, one in which a new doctrinal universe can be created, and new issues, sources, subjects and approaches can be explored. Yet, by opening up international law's sources doctrine reactionary causes and unjust ends may equally well be the result. This account is an attempt at diversifying the narrative surrounding the causal relationship between history and the ongoing changes to the field of international law, along with the differential practices, techniques and epistemological foundations behind the history of international law as an evolving discipline, and of the different scholarly motivations of its specialists.

The laws of war focus on humans as entitled to special protection if civilian and lawful to kill if combatants. In this article I show that the law has a gender bias and fails to take into account how military targets are identiied through emerging technologies, including artiicial intelligence, in contemporary high-tech warfare. Why is it important? Finding that the law fails to take into account how military targets in contemporary high-tech warfare are identiied and killed through processes that are only to a limited degree controlled by human actors, the call I make for a reworking of the laws of war is a urgent if we are to ooer adequate protection to those made vulnerable by new technologies in warfare. I hope that this article invites its readers to think about what the "human" described in the current laws of war is or can be. Can we think of a digital body as a legitimate target and can we accept that an artiicial intelligent entity decides what and whom to target and kill in wars?

Focusing on targeting law and practice in contemporary high-tech warfare, this article brings international humanitarian legal scholarship into conversation with posthumanist feminist theory for the purpose of rethinking international humanitarian law (IHL) in terms of the posthuman condition. I suggest that posthumanist feminist theory – in particular Rosi Braidottis scholarship – is helpful to the IHL scholar for understanding and describing high-tech warfare that recognises the targetable body as both material and digital. Posthumanist feminist theory, moreover, avails us of a much-needed critical position from which to reframe the question of what the humanitarian aim in IHL is: who, and what, can the human of this humanitarianism be? This article sets out the framework for a posthumanitarian international law as an ethical-normative order worthy, as Braidotti puts it, of the complexity of our times.

Conference, 20-23 June 2017, Helsinki

Recent social and political developments, including the Brexit referendum result, the presidential elections in the United States, antidemocratic state policies in Hungary and Poland, as well as the political climate in the rest of Europe and beyond, have all underlined the topicality of the relationship between democracy and popular sovereignty. What is ‘the people’? What is the popular sovereignty that supposedly underlies all democratic regimes? When does democratic politics become ‘populistic’? Is ‘populistic’ politics always necessarily anti-democratic, and if so, why? Is a ‘progressive’ variant of populism possible? How does one oppose anti-democratic populistic tendencies with democratic means? Is democracy a value that can even justify exceptional means? ‘The People’: Democracy, Populism, and the Constituent Popular Sovereign, addresses these and related questions on the troubled relationship between democracy and ‘the people’ from the
angels of constitutional theory, political philosophy, history and law.

This panel session is dedicated to inquiring into the converging fields of artificial intelligence, war and law. Bringing together international humanitarian, intellectual property, posthumanist and feminist legal thinking the panel aims to bring forth new questions, better descriptions, and above all an opportunity to think together about our lives and deaths in and with contemporary war and law. Abstract: In this paper, I wish to focus on the interaction of human and artificial intelligence in complex targeting system. The question I ask is if, and how, the lawfulness under the laws of war of conduct resulting from AI-human interaction can be assessed. One important facet of this question is whether such systems can be tested in a way that allows the commander to know outcomes. I will present a model that facilitates our thinking about the normative processes necessary for the application of the laws of war, and show that the normative process operating in AI-human interaction is so different that it cannot be subjected to the law. I shall then explain why targeting systems based on AI-human interaction cannot be tested in the conventional sense, undermining the possibility to apply conventional law to their use. This raises the question whether a radically new form of law could cope with this regulatory challenge. Merima Bruncevic, Department of Law, University of Gothenburg Title: The Dark Web and AI – a question of jurisdiction and legal subjectivity Abstract: Crypto-anarchists, transhumanists and camgirls. Journalists and activists. Drug dealers, criminals, and terrorists. These are some of the categories of people lurking in the deepest corners of internet often referred to as the Dark Net or the Dark Web. This largely anonymous sphere that can only be entered via special browsers has now also become a question for law. What is it? Is it a jurisdiction, a territory that law can reach? How in that case? Are there real people that exist there or avatars? What kind of legal subjectivity is fostered there? Driven by crypto currency and operated through decentrilised systems – the paper explores the role of the law in the Dark Web, the activities that happen there and the potential/threat of AI within those spheres. Abstract: Focusing on targeting law and practice in contemporary warfare this paper brings international humanitarian legal (IHL) scholarship into conversation with posthumainist feminist theory for the purpose of thinking more carefully about an IHL responding to contemporary warfare and life. I suggest that posthumanist feminist scholarship is helpful for describing how contemporary warfare is already conducted and how the targetable body known through the IHL framework is both material and digital.

This panel session is dedicated to inquiring into the converging fields of artificial intelligence, war and law. Bringing together international humanitarian, intellectual property, posthumanist and feminist legal thinking the panel aims to bring forth new questions, better descriptions, and above all an opportunity to think together about our lives and deaths in and with contemporary war and law.

Convenor: Matilda Arvidsson
Chair: Markus Gunneflo
Discussant: Ioannis Kalpouzos

In the wake of the Iraq war the US-UK headed Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was set up to govern Iraq for the duration of the occupation. Although it is not an obligation under the international law of belligerent occupation to set up a separate administrative body for governance during occupation it is, as Yoram Dinstein puts it, ‘a sensible step’. Resulting from a largely functional approach to governance during occupation the legal and political configuration of the CPA raised a number of fundamental questions regarding the sources of its authority to exercise judicial, legislative, and executive authority in Iraq for the duration of the occupation. While it is clear that ‘coalition’ refers to the shared responsibilities of the two countries heading the occupation – the US and the UK – and ‘provisional’ refers to the temporal aspect of governance, it is less clear what ‘authority’ denotes in the given context. Previous research on the CPA has focused primarily on the failure of success and the legality of the largely transformative CPA legal acts, reviewing these as exceeding what the international law of belligerent occupation permits an occupying power to do.
My contribution to this discussion is a shift in focus from this particular kind of ‘legality’ (as only refereeing to the contemporary IHL framework) to instead consider the authority exercised by the CPA within the broader context of right and legitimate authority. To this effect I ask what kind of provisional authority the CPA exercised in Iraq, on which grounds, pursuant to which criteria, and to what ends?

The international law and practice of occupation between transformation and preservation: the occupation of Iraq and the American Lieber Code Contrary to the common understanding that transformative occupations are innovations of our own times contemporary scholars of international law and history have pointed to the historical, interdependent, and continuant prevalence of transformation and preservation as key legal notions and practices during occupations (Bhuta 2005; Benvenisti 2012; Stirk 2009; Arvidsson 2016). The techniques, sources, and arguments through which the relation between the two notions and practices have been worked out and put to action have, however, shifted over time and in relation to the specific context of each occupation. This paper departs from the occupation of Iraq 2003–2004 and asks about the use of the American General Orders no. 100 of 1863, known as the Lieber Code, as a way to consider the encounter between the past and the present of transformation and preservation in the laws and practices of occupation. The Lieber Code was drafted for the purpose the American Civil War and, as Helen Kinsella has noted, has been put to contemporary use almost exclusive within the context of international armed conflicts (as opposed to non-international armed conflicts) (Kinsella 2011). Drawing on the recent turn to history in international law (Craven et al 2007; Fassbender & Peters 2012; Orford 2017) the paper aims to explore the problems and potentials of turning to the laws and practices of the past (in this case the Lieber Code) in order to consider the conditions of law, war, and occupation in our own present time. How and to which effects did the Lieber Code enter into legal argument and practice during the war and occupation of Iraq, and what can we learn from it for the purpose of thinking about our current conditions? The paper identifies the use of the Lieber Code within the US administration as well as within the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) of Iraq. In particular, the paper attends to the ways in which the Lieber Code figures in US and CPA legal memos concerning the laws and practice of occupation, as well as in the Regulations, Orders, and Memoranda through which the CPA reconfigured the legal, political, and economic fabric of Iraq. The Lieber Code, the paper contends, was used as a source that exceeded (or rather, through which the administrations sought to exceed) contemporary IHL, invoked as part of an US " national common law of war " (Ohlin 2016), and as conveying " the laws and usages of war " (Arvidsson 2017). The recourse to the Lieber Code sought to underpin the exceedingly transformative occupation as lawful, and it served to de-emphasize the status quo principle. Based on the Lieber Code's configuration of occupation (predating the modern IHL distinction between international and non-international armed conflicts, and specifically designed to cater to the idea that occupation of enemy territory does not include recognition of that territory or the enemy as sovereign) its formulations and previous uses allowed for a legal oscillation by the occupying powers in Iraq between, on the one hand, a strict separation between the sovereignty of the occupying power and that of the occupying people and territory (as reflected in contemporary IHL), and, on the other hand, the understanding of occupied territory and people as always-already within the

Vi som växte upp under kalla kriget, som minns Berlinmuren – och dess fall – och vi som minns precis var vi var och vad vi gjorden den 11 september 2001, vi var många som såg ännu ett nytt kapitel i världsordningen växa fram under det tidiga 2000‐talet: vi såg nya typer av internationella militära interventioner. Det innebar en internationell våldsanvändning, användning av militära medel, på ett sätt som inte sanktionerats av FN:s säkerhetsråd. Jag tänker här, idag, särskilt på den USA‐ledda militära interventionen i Iraq med början under våren 2003. Vi var många som då, i början av 2003 eller redan 2002 när argument för en väpnad intervention – folkrättsliga argument såväl som andra argument – kände att vi inte riktigt förstod nödvändigheten i att intervenera militärt för att säkra en demokratisk framtid i Irak. Med andra ord var det för vissa av oss svårt att omfamna logiken i att bomba för fred. Många av oss som specialiserat oss inom den internationella rätten – folkrätt – och speciellt den delen av folkrätten som reglerar användandet av militärt våld, hade svårt att se eller hålla med om den rättsliga grunden för USA:s handlingar: med USA agerade handlade flera länder i 'the Coalition of the Willing': Storbritannien, Polen, och Danmark, för att nämna några. Om något kort ska sägas om dessa handlingar så kan det sammanfattas i fem ord: det som skedde var olagligt. Men vad gör vi med ett sådant konstaterande? Vad kan jag göra? I min forskning har jag tagit med mig den frågan: vad kan jag göra? och den relaterade frågan om vilket ansvar jag har för den rätt som jag kan och känner så väl, som jag undervisar i och berättar om på universitet och för allmänheten i olika sammanhang. Vad har jag för ansvar för den rätt som jag som forskare är med och skapar, återskapar och omskapar genom den forskning som jag gör: de böcker som jag skriver, de artiklar jag publicerar, de konferenspresentationer eller debattinlägg jag, som folkrättsexpert, gör. Folkrätt är, precis som all annan rätt, inget som en gång för alla är givet. Det finns ingen rätt tolkning eller tillämpning utan snarare mer eller mindre tungt vägande argument för att en tolkning är mer riktig, rimlig eller god än en annan. Utan människor som engagerar sig i rätten, i dess tolkning, i dess användning, och dess utveckling, stannar allt liksom bara av. Rätten är inte – den görs, och den görs av oss människor.

This seminar revisits the occupation of Iraq 2003–2004 to ask about the use of the 19th century Lieber Code during its time. Why did an antiquated American Civil War code resurface in the wake of the international armed conflict in Iraq, and to what effect?
Often referred to as a historical predecessor to contemporary international humanitarian law the Lieber Code has received little attention as a prevailing source of the laws and practices of international armed conflicts of today. However, in this seminar, the Lieber Code is read as the legal framework through which the occupying powers in Iraq sought to frame the legality of its oscillation between exercising sovereign authority and acting as a non-sovereign authority of occupied territory in Iraq. Moreover, the Lieber Code’s prevalence in American military handbooks and literature as both the origins of the international laws of armed conflict and as a source of the contemporary law and practice of warfare indicates that the Lieber Code is far from an antiquated code primarily interesting for historical purposes. Drawing on recent debates on the ‘turn to history’ in international law the seminar puts Anne Orford’s argument on international law’s anachronism to use, an argument well received for its potential as we revisit international law and its histories for critical ends. Few scholars, however, have examined how anachronism appear in contemporary international legal practice: this, in contrast, is a task for this seminar.
Based on Matilda Arvidsson’s close readings of the laws and policies of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) of occupied Iraq and contemporary international law and practice of belligerent occupation the seminar foregrounds how the normative force of international law’s many pasts continues to operate in our present times and conditions.

While contemporary international law is often understood as teleological, encompassing notions such as progress, development, and prosperity for all of human kind, in this essay the field of the international law of belligerent occupation is read as katechonic, as embodying the figure of the katechon within international law's eschatology. The essay considers Carl Schmitt's political theology through his employment of the figure of the katechon, as well as Schmitt's brief notes on international law of belligerent occupation. The reading that follows is an attempt to put Schmitt's famous claim that 'all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts' to use and to point to the contemporary relevance of Schmitt's scholarship.

This essay traces my work in co-developing a pedagogical framework for PhD supervision together with Gregor Noll, as I worked pursuant to a doctoral degree in international law. It draws on French psychoanalytic scholar Jean Laplanche and argues that the notion and practice of transference in the psychoanalytical situation - as part of psychoanalytical theory and practice - may be helpful as a pedagogical tool for PhD supervision in international law and beyond.