Global Law Lab Seminars (2017-2018)
Local Practices – Transnational Solutions?
The Role of Host-Cities in the Cyclic Process of Environmental Regulation in the Context of Sports
Dr. Rebecca Schmidt, University College Dublin
Wednesday 29 November
11:00-12:30, M020
The paper examines the role of local government actors as innovators in the creation of transnational regulation. The basis for this research is an in-depth case study of the environmental protection and sustainability framework implemented within the Olympic Movement. The local, host city level has been at the forefront of innovating this framework. Developments made there were later taken up by the IOC and became mandatory for future host cities – a dynamic the paper terms ‘cyclical regulation’. Two aspects of these processes are particularly analysed: First, in how far host cities and their local organizers ratchet-up standards by going beyond the existing regulatory framework in their bid and thereby initiating an expansion of the former. Secondly, whether the local level really provides a platform from which various other types of actors impact the regulatory process by being co-opted into the preparation of the Games.
The Global History of Human Rights
Dr. Marco Duranti, University of Sydney
Tuesday 14 November
11:00-12:30, M020
‘This paper reflects on the recent wave of historical scholarship on the origins of international human rights norms. It argues against essentialism in favor of greater attention to the wide range of cultural and political contexts in which these norms emerge. Of late, historians have debated whether human rights have deeper or more recent origins, without acknowledging that changes in the linguistic and technical forms by which these norms manifest themselves can conceal historical continuities. While ‘critical’ scholars have productively challenged the reductive and teleological character of older accounts, their tendency to sharply differentiate between ‘authentic’ human rights discourses and related discourses, such as humanitarianism, is equally problematic. So, too, can the new insistence on the contingent and instrumental character of human rights obscure the underlying structures, moral ambiguities, and cultural sensibilities that have long shaped the international order. New scholarship, rather than reinforce an essentialist conception of human rights, should embrace the multiplicity of genealogies, functions, and meanings embedded in different categories of international human rights phenomena. Historians should pay more attention to the work of legal scholars and philosophers of rights who have stressed the sharply divergent ways in which “rights” and the “human” are conceptualized. Recognition of complexity and attention to empirical detail will assist in the emergence of broader paradigms for thinking differently about how international human rights norms are articulated and safeguarded over time and place.’