In the past several years political will has turned away from global interests and has increasingly concerned itself instead with the special interests of the nation state. With this, law appears to have retreated once again within the territorial limits of the independent and sovereign nation state, and we have witnessed erosion of some of the hard-won legal institutionalisation of global norms in the last fifty years (such as protection of the natural environment, universal human rights, or peace and disarmament). However, despite the surge of popular support it has enjoyed, this new nationalism remains highly contested at both the national and the global level, and has even triggered and empowered new global normative movements.

This symposium will address the impact of growing nationalism on the global normative order. What happens when global norms, though widely held, now categorically fail to find positivisation in law and politics? What function can law still play in relation to global norms under these conditions? And what of the apparent paradoxical co-dependent relationship between political division and the increasing formulation of global norms through social movements and social media? Do these reflect the evolution of a global legal system, capable of giving positive formulation to global norms? Or are they functional equivalents that signify the final exhaustion of law at the global level? The programme is now available for download.

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The symposium will bring together scholars from a range of different perspectives and jurisdictions to address these questions, and others, on the theme of global norms in a divided world:

Professor Hans Lindahl – Tilburg University, Chair of Global Law at Queen Mary, University of London

Keynote Speech

Global Entwinements: On the Unification and Pluralization of Emergent Global Legal Orders

Dr Kimberley Brayson – Leicester Law School, University of Leicester

Quantum Rights, Parallel Lives

Dr Matthew Nicholson – Durham Law School, Durham University

On Division, Globalism and Solutions

Dr Letizia LoGiacco – Faculty of Law, Universiteit Leiden

The Rise of ‘Global Law’: An International Law Perspective

Dr Petra Gümplova – Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Universität Erfurt

Global Constitutionalisation of Sovereignty over Natural Resources

Dr Mark Hanna – School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast

Brexit, Northern Ireland and Globalisation

Dr Luca Siliquini-Cinelli – School of Law, University of Dundee

On Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Fatal Irony’: Normative Expectations and the Impossibility of an Inoperative Form-of-Life

Mr Edvaldo Moita – Faculty of Law, Universidade de Brasilia – Universität Bielefeld

From the Law ‘Beyond the State’ to the Law ‘Inside the State’: Legal Pluralism or Lack of Social Efficacy? The Case of Street Vending in Brazil

Dr Kathryn McNeilly – School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast

Beyond the Time of the State Alone: International Human Rights Law Monitoring and Competing Temporalities

Dr Ekaterina Yahyaoui – School of Law, NUI Galway

On the (Im)possibility of Global Norms in a Divided World: Lessons from the Seventeenth Century

Dr Robert Herian – School of Law, The Open University

Rituals of Verification