Global Norms, Regional Courts (Public Lecture)
Last month, Queen Mary University of London asked me to prepare an lecture for over a hundred incoming Law students. My lecture was made available online on Aug 5. I would like to express my gratitude to Queen Mary for this opportunity to engage with the student community amid a global pandemic. A recording of the lecture is available in the watch section of this website. The full title as well as an abstract are available below.
Global Norms, Regional Courts: International Law and the (De)Centralization of World Order
Abstract: Law is becoming an increasingly popular tool for dispute resolution while emerging local courts employ markedly diverging practices. We therefore live in a world governed by a globalization of norms and a regionalization of courts. What are the causes of this paradoxical trend and how can it be theorized? This lecture approaches this question from the perspective of Ivo Ganchev’s original grand theory of social sciences, structural materialism. First, this lecture contends that regional courts are most likely to rise in areas which have a strong sense of international society and exhibit weak tendencies towards anarchy and hierarchy. Second, it examines regional integration from a non-Eurocentric perspective to showcase its organizational and material achievements. Third, it explains the rising demand for regional private law through shifts in social structures and demand for greater regulation in business. This results in the globalization of law as a method and to the regionalization of law as practice, simultaneously contributing to the centralization and decentralization of world order. The dialectic argument of this lecture is embodied in the logic of an underpinning theoretical framework which explains long-term global trends through tracing the roots of their causal mechanisms in structural and material changes.
