The Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights at the University of Helsinki has announced a call for papers for the Conference “Law Between Global and Colonial: Techniques of Empire,” to be held from 3-5 October 2016.

The conference proposes to discuss the legal languages and techniques through which colonial powers ruled non-European territories and populations throughout the modern age. The aim of the conference is to examine in detail the juridical practices and discourses of colonial powers when they exercised their supremacy over colonial subjects and disciplined them. Although the focus of the conference is historical, its theme resonates in the present. With the great numbers of people moving about in Europe, Asia and Africa as migrants, guest workers, refugees and displaced persons, territorial states have often used methods and techniques that resemble those with which colonial populations once were treated. With research showing a sharp rise in world inequality, the conference poses the question whether legislative techniques and institutions inherited from the imperial past, once again see the light of day in the present.

The conference will close the four and a half-year period of the Finnish Academy research project on “International Law, Religion and Empire” at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, University of Helsinki. Members: Martti Koskenniemi, Paolo Amorosa, Mónica García-Salmones, Manuel Jimenez and Walter Rech.

Abstracts are due by March 1. For more information, see the full Call for Papers at http://www.helsinki.fi/eci/Events/Call_for_Papers_Colonial_Law_2016.pdf.