Seminar: If the World Is a Family, What Kind of Family Is It?

Hosted by the Non/Human Law Research Group, you are invited to join us for this seminar by Professor Susan Marks. 

In this paper, Professor Susan Marks will discuss the trope that figures the world as a family. What ideas about the family inform, and are informed by, it? What effects does it have on the way global issues, relations and contexts are understood? In the course of exploring those questions, consideration will be given, in turn, to evocations of the human family, references to the family of nations and discussions of the need to take action for the sake of our children. This paper will illustrate something of the variety of family types that have been mobilized in representations of the world as a family, and will show how the effects produced have been mixed. While familial language has a venerable place in emancipatory discourses, it also works to install a false notion of unity rooted in biological filiation that helps to preserve divisions, sustain hierarchies and promote depoliticized approaches to political problems.

This paper will be based upon Professor Marks’ recent article in EJIL. See: https://doi.org/10.1093/ejil/chaf006

Bio

Professor Susan Marks joined LSE in 2010 as Professor of International Law. She previously taught at King’s College London and, prior to that, at the University of Cambridge, where she was a fellow of Emmanuel College. Her work attempts to bring insights from the radical tradition to the study of international law and human rights. Susan is a Fellow of the British Academy.