EJIL: The Podcast!

Since returning to power in 2021, the Taliban has sought to reverse Afghan women’s hard-won progress toward gender equality. Through dozens of decrees, policies, and statements, it has targeted the autonomy and rights of women and girls, barring them from public life and severely restricting their basic freedoms. Yet, Afghan women have refused to accept their political, social, and economic erasure. Both inside the country and within the Afghan diaspora, they have protested the Taliban’s edicts in domestic and international fora, often at great personal peril. In this episode of the EJIL Podcast, Afghan activist, researcher, and filmmaker Sahar Fetrat and University of Michigan Law Professor Karima Bennoune join hosts Neha Jain (Northwestern University) and Michal Saliternik (Netanya Academic College) to discuss Afghan Women’s fight for justice and accountability on the global stage. The conversation highlights the potential and limitations of various international legal processes, mechanisms, and strategies—including current and anticipated proceedings against the Taliban at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court—for reclaiming Afghan women’s rights. It also explores ways to strengthen international action against gender persecution and gender apartheid in Afghanistan and beyond.

Christina Voigt, Andrew Lang and Mona Ali Khalil join Megan Donaldson to reflect on the present moment in international law from the perspectives of the climate, trade and security regimes. The conversation brings out divergent senses of the history of the present; perceptions of how deep the current dissensus is; and views on the avenues open to lawyers today. (For context, and as if to underline the rapidity of geopolitical shifts at present, the window between the start of recording and the end of editing saw the US initiation of withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, announcements of major tariffs, and advocacy of forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.)

In this episode, Paola Gaeta and Roger O’Keefe join Marko Milanovic and Philippa Webb to discuss recent developments at the International Criminal Court. The Court has now issued arrest warrants, or arrest warrants have been sought by the Prosecutor, for several serving heads of state or government of states that are not parties to the ICC Statute. Both states parties and non-states parties are now reacting to these warrants, with varying degrees of support or condemnation. The hosts and their guests discuss these developments, focusing on the Court’s jurisprudence on whether high-ranking officials of non-states parties can benefit from immunities that they are otherwise entitled to under general international law.

In this EJIL:The Podcast! Luíza Leão Soares Pereira, Fabio Costa Morosini and Artur Simonyan join Editor-in-Chief Sarah Nouwen. Inspired by their articles on Brazilian textbooks as Markers and Makers of International Law and on International Lawyers in Post-Soviet Eurasia, the conversation explores how students encounter international law during their studies, whether a study of textbooks in Brazil and Post-Soviet Eurasia leads to similar findings as Anthea Roberts’s pathbreaking study on how international law is taught in the states that are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and whether international lawyers in Brazil and Post-Soviet Eurasia feel part of what Oscar Schachter once called an invisible college of international lawyers. The gender citation gap also comes up.

We asked three distinguished Palestinian lawyers on to the podcast to discuss the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion. They had views.Hosted by Nehal Bhuta, Professor of International Law at the University of Edinburgh and featuring Professor Ardi Imseis, Queen’s University, Dr Nimer Sultany, SOAS, and former PLO negotiation team member and lawyer, Diana Buttu.

In this episode, Dapo Akande, Marko Milanovic and Philippa Webb are joined by Yuval Shany, and discuss the recent advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. The hosts and their guest explore the Court’s reasoning on how violations of international law in the occupied Palestinian territories rendered unlawful Israel’s continued presence there. They also examine various ambiguities in the Court’s opinion and what drove them, on matters such as apartheid in the territories and the occupation of Gaza.

We need to talk about hunger. After seven decades of a decline in mass death from starvation, starvation is now a reality for millions of people. And most of this starvation is not due to natural disasters but man-made. In this episode of EJIL: The Podcast, EJIL Editor in Chief Sarah Nouwen speaks with Michael Fakhri, the UN Rapporteur on the Right to Food and professor at the University of Oregon, and Alex de Waal, a leading thinker on humanitarian issues and Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation. Together, they discuss the strength and weaknesses of various areas of international law and, especially, how that law can be used politically to address famine and starvation. They go from human rights to international economic law, from individuals to corporations, from the World Food Programme to the world humanitarian system, from Gaza to Sudan and from food as a weapon of war to the slow violence committed by the international food system.

What is the Alpha and Omega of Climate Control discourse? Surely it is Intergenerational responsibility. Our responsibility towards future generations. Yet, in January 2023 EJIL published Against Future Generations, by Stephen Humphreys, which challenges this comfort zone. Needless to say, the article created a climatic disruption. Listen to the Podcast, moderated by Editor in Chief Joseph Weiler, in which Humphreys engages with three of his critics, Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh, Ayan Garg and Shubhangi Agarwalla (For their written reply, see here).

Does the decision of the International Court of Justice with respect to Gaza illustrate the influence of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL)? Has TWAIL perhaps become ‘mainstream’? And how germane are some of the critiques that have been levelled against TWAIL? In this 24th episode of EJIL:The Podcast!, Antony Anghie, one of TWAIL's founders, discusses the rise and critiques of Third World Approaches to International Law with the authors of three Afterwords to his already classic EJIL Foreword ‘Rethinking International Law: A TWAIL Retrospective’: Andreas von Arnauld, Arnulf Becker Lorca and Ratna Kapur. Podcast host is EJIL Editor in Chief Sarah Nouwen.

Dapo Akande, Marko Milanovic, Philippa Webb, and Mike Becker analyze the oral hearings on provisional measures in the South Africa v. Israel genocide case. They explore recent trends in international litigation and discuss the recent strikes in Yemen by the US and UK.