IILAH Reading Group Semester 1, 2025: Imperialism

2024 Semester 2 Reading Group image of the world
Photo by Lightcome on iStock

The reading group will be co-convened by André Dao, Richard Joyce, Haris Jamil and Michael Bader.

The theme for the IILAH Reading Group in Semester 1 is ‘Imperialism’. In anticipation of Professor Tony Anghie’s visit to MLS for his Turner Lecture (5 August 2025), a PhD Roundtable (6 August) and a conference celebrating the 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking book Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (7-8 August 2025), the texts will cover a range of approaches to imperialism, from critical international law, post-colonial theory, decolonial practice, post-structural theory and in the Marxist tradition. All welcome. (For more details on the Anghie events see here.

Meetings will be held in-person at Melbourne Law School.

Sessions will commence Wednesday 26 March 2025, 1:00pm – 2:00pm in the Level 10 Boardroom unless specified.

Register your attendance here!

Semester 2, 2024

Wednesday 26 March 2025
Level 10 Boardroom

International Law and Imperialism I

Antony Anghie, ‘Imperialism and International Legal Theory’ in Anne Orford and Florian Hoffmann (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2016) 373.

BS Chimni, ‘Capitalism, Imperialism, and International Law in the Twenty-First Century’ [2012] Oregon Review of International Law 14(17).

Wednesday 9 April 2025
Level 10 Boardroom

International Law and Imperialism II

Maïa Pal, ‘Colonial Practices of Jurisdictional Accumulation’ in Jurisdictional Accumulation: An Early Modern History of Law, Empires, and Capital (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

Susan Marks’s ‘Empire's Law’ (2003) Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 10(1), 499-465.

Wednesday 23 April 2025
Level 10 Boardroom

Imperialism and Post-structural Theory

Peter Fitzpatrick, ‘Imperialism’ in Modernism and the Grounds of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Wednesday 7 May 2025
Level 10 Boardroom

Decolonisation, Third World thinkers, and Imperialism I

Norman Girvan, ‘Expropriation and Compensation from a Third World Perspective’ in Corporate Imperialism: Conflict and Expropriation - Transnational Corporations and Economic Nationalism in the Third World (Routledge, 1976).

Walter Rodney, ‘Colonialism as a system for underdeveloping Africa’ in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications, 1972).

Wednesday 21 May 2025
Level 10 Boardroom

Decolonisation, Third World thinkers, and Imperialism II

Mohammed Bedjaoui ‘Normative action: favours and suspicions’ in Towards a New International Economic Order (UNESCO, 1979).

Salvador Allende, ‘Address by H.E. Dr. Salvador Allende, President of the Republic of Chile, to the General Assembly of the United Nations’ (Speech, 4 December 1972).

Wednesday 4 June 2025
Room G01, Ground Floor

Dollar Hegemony and Imperialism

Ntina Tzouvala: Sanctions, Dollar Hegemony, and the Unraveling of Third World Sovereignty | Yale Journal of International Law (2024).

With these two short general background pieces:

Herman Mark Swartz, The Dollar and Empire: Available here.

Mona Ali, Regime Change: The evolution and weaponization of the world dollar: Regime Change? | Phenomenal World