Debt as Site and Struggle of Global Dis/Ordering
Rather than focusing only on how (sovereign) debt is formally recognised and regulated in international law, this episode foregrounds the material structures of global ordering and disordering that debt generates. This entails an attentiveness to the histories of violence that are thereby enacted or amplified, as well as a focus on practices of resistance and expressions of political subjectivity that emerge in relation to the construction and circulation of debt. How is this fabrication of debt implicated in the profoundly unequal configurations of global ordering that emerged after the formal end of empire? Which legal forms and institutions shaped and were shaped by these formations of debt and the uncommon wealth they sustained? Inversely, which practices of redistribution and reparation can be articulated in relation to the unpayable debt thereby accrued?
The speakers:
Vasuki Nesiah is Professor of Practice in Human Rights and International Law at the Gallatin School, NYU. Vasuki’s work on debt and reparations as politics of refusal brings together critical legal theory, decolonial thinking, Black feminist theory, and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) – a school of thought and of practice of which she is a founding member. Vasuki’s current focus is on her book project Reading the Ruins: Slavery, Colonialism and International Law, as well as a co-edited Handbook on TWAIL under contract with Edward Elgar.
Kojo Koram is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck University of London. He is the author of Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire (John Murray, 2022) – which was nominated for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing – and editor of The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line (Pluto Press, 2019). Alongside his academic work, Kojo regularly writes for the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, Dissent, and the New Statesman.
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