Annual Lecture 2018: International law and the far right - Reflections on law and cynicism

Professor Martti Koskenniemi will deliver the Fourth Annual T.M.C. Asser Lecture this year on International Law and the Far Right: Reflections on Law and Cynicism. 

In his lecture, Prof. Koskenniemi will address the role of international law in dealing with the rising far right, as the backlash against global rule and the international institutions of the liberal 1990s continues. Prof. Koskenniemi believes greater openness is needed, “not to populist leaders, but to problems of global inequality” to protect international law from “falling into irrelevance.”

Prof. Koskenniemi is one of the great critical minds in contemporary scholarship of international law with over 110 publications under his belt. From serving as a Finnish Diplomat to working as the legal adviser to the Finnish Delegation to the UN Security Council (at the time of the First Gulf War), he also has extensive experience in the field.

Biography
Martti Koskenniemi is Professor of International Law at the University of Helsinki and Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights. He was a member of the Finnish diplomatic service in 1978-1994 and of the International Law Commission (UN) in 2002-2006. He has held visiting professorships in, among other places, New York University, Columbia University, University of Cambridge, London School of Economics, and Universities of Brussels, Melbourne, Paris, Sao Paulo and Utrecht. He is a member of the Institut de droit international and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has a doctorate h.c. from the Universities of Uppsala, Frankfurt and McGill. His main publications include From Apology to Utopia; The Structure of International Legal Argument (1989/2005), The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960 (2001) and The Politics of International Law (2011).  He is currently working on a history of international legal thought from the late medieval period to the 19th century.

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