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Sustainable Global Economic Law SGEL

Call for applications

Towards a Sustainable Global Economic Law? Shifts, Ruptures and Social Justice

31 October 2021

What should a ‘sustainable global economic law’ (SGEL) look like, in a context of looming ecological catastrophe, wild levels of inequality and wealth concentration, continuous technological disruption, and strong demands for social, racial, gender and environmental justice? On Dec. 17, within the Sustainable Global Economic Law project’s two-day conference, we are organizing a workshop during which each scholar will have the opportunity to present and get feedback on their research. A wonderful group of scholars agreed to act as discussants: Anna Beckers (Maastricht), Isabel Feichtner (Würzburg), Julia Dehm (La Trobe) Hans Lindahl (Tilburg) and Usha Natarajan (Columbia University).

The goal of the workshop is to interrogate the role of global economic law--the myriad of intertwining international, EU, public, private, domestic, transnational, ‘soft’ rules, codes of conduct--in enabling and reproducing accelerating environmental and social crises in the present global neoliberal context, and to reflect on what a ‘sustainable’ global economic law may look like within current global unequal contexts. 

Some of the broad questions that we are interested in are the following: 

  • How does global law construct notions such as "economic" and "sustainability"? What are their relationships with equality and social justice? How do the different meanings distribute wealth, power and privileges? How should they be understood in light of pressing demands for social and environmental justice in a global neoliberal contexts?
  • What is/are the legal framework(s) that help account for global economic law's simultaneous (re)production of environmental crises, social, racial, gender and other forms of inequalities? 
  • What might a "sustainable global economic law" look like in terms of institutions, rules, actors, and modes of governance to address accelerating ecological and social crises?  What are the new (legal) vocabularies of a “sustainable global economic law”? 

We invite contributions from scholars (PhD researchers, early career, as well as more senior colleagues) working on these and other issues broadly related to the above questions, and in particular those that use insights from postcolonial, gender, critical race theories and adopt a cross-disciplinary approach. If you are interested in participating, please send your 15-page draft by Dec. 4th to i.isailovic@uva.nl and 500-word text about you and your work. 

About the format of the workshop: participants will have 5 minutes to present their main argument(s) and the questions that they are struggling with. We will then have 25-30 min for feedback and quick responses from the author. All the participants in the workshop will be expected to read and comment on selected drafts. 

The hybrid in person/online conference is hosted by Ivana Isailović (UvA) & Phillip Paiement (Tilburg).

For more information, you can reach out to Ivana (i.isailovic@uva.nl) or Phillip (P.M.Paiement@tilburguniversity.edu).