Laws and Political Economies of the South

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Room 609, Level 6, Mebourne Law School

IILAH is excited to announce an early career workshop with three field-changing scholars of international law, Professors Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah (NUS), Antony Anghie (NUS, Utah) and Donatella Alessandrini (Kent). This intimate workshop is an opportunity for early career scholars to develop work in progress that engages with relationships between international laws and political economies, and specifically with patterns of legal and economic arrangement that perpetuate contemporary global inequality.

We invite PhD candidates and Early Career Researchers working in international law, history, economics, postcolonial studies, and related fields to apply. Our three guest professors will read and comment on the work of up to 7 presenting participants. Up to 10 non-presenting participants who wish to participate in the discussion will also be accepted for attendance. The workshop will be preceded on Wednesday 22 February with an evening event, ‘Originating a Field - The Law of Foreign Investment: In Conversation with Professor Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah’.

How To Apply - Presenting Participants

Applications are due by February 7 2017. 

In their one page application letter, Presenting Participants should include:

  1. your research interests;
  2. the project on which you would like our guests to comment;
  3. why you would like to participate in this workshop;
  4. whether you would like to attend as a non-presenting participant in the alternative;

If appropriate, applicants may also attach a short CV (max 2 pages) that details current academic and employment status and lists any publications, however this is not compulsory.

On acceptance, presenting participants will then be asked to submit up to 3,000 words of writing by Friday 17 February. The writing submission could be part of a thesis chapter, article, book proposal, grant application or other piece that addresses the workshop theme.

Applications should be submitted here

How To Apply – Non-Presenting Participants

If you are interested in attending as a Non-Presenting Participant, please submit one paragraph explaining your research interests, current status, and why the workshop is of interest to you.

Applications are due by Friday 10 February 2017

Applications should be submitted here

If you have any questions, please address them to Professor Sundhya Pahuja.


Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah is CJ Koh Professor at the Faculty of Law of the National University of Singapore. He is Visiting Professor at the Centre for Human Rights, London School of Economics, and has previously served as the Tunku Abdul Rahman Professor of International Law at the University of Malaya at Kuala Lumpur, and the Head of the Law School of the University of Tasmania, Australia. His extensive body of publications includes The Pursuit of Nationalized Property (Martinus Nijhoff, 1986); International Commercial Arbitration (Longman, 1992); The Law of International Joint Ventures (Longman, 1994); The International Law on Foreign Investment (Cambridge University Press, 1996, with a fourth edition in 2015); The Settlement of Foreign Investment Disputes (Kluwer, 2001) and Resistance and Change in the International Law on Foreign Investment (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Professor Sornarajah was the Director of the UNCTAD/WTO Programme on Investment Treaties, Pretoria and New Delhi. He is a member of the Advisory Boards of the International and Comparative Law Quarterly, the Indian Journal of International Law and several other international journals. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Columbia Centre Sustainable Investment. He is a Fellow of the Australian Centre for International Commercial Arbitration.

Antony Anghie is Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore. Professor Anghie is the author of Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and a leading figure in the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) movement.

Donatella Alessandrini is Co-Director of Postgraduate Studies at Kent Law School. Her publications include Developing Countries and the Multilateral Trade Regime: The Failure and Promise of the WTO's Development Mission (Hart, 2010) and Value Making in International Economic Law and Regulation (Routledge, 2016). Dr Alessandrini’s research lies at the intersection of law and political economy, with a particular interest in development studies, critical trade and development literature, feminist political economy and political theory. Her earlier work has focused on the political economy of ‘development’ in multilateral trading relations, with an emphasis on the World Trade Organisation. Dr Alessandrini has served on the Editorial Boards of Feminist Legal Studies and Law and Critique, and is a member of the International Association of Feminist Economics and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.