EJIL: The Podcast!

• Episode 35: Human Mobility and International Law

  Migration has become a defining issue of our time, visibly shaping political discourse, legal systems, and public imaginaries. Yet for all its salience, international law’s capacity to respond to the complexities of human mobility remains fractured, fragile, and often inadequate. In this episode, we take a hard look at the international legal architecture surrounding migration: where it comes from, where it fails, and what alternative frameworks might exist beyond the dominant focus on non-refoulement and transnational criminal law. We begin with a frank assessment: despite landmark treaties like the 1951 Refugee Convention, international law provides no comprehensive regime for facilitating – much less fostering – human mobility. Instead, migrants are increasingly subject to carceral and criminalizing legal responses, while international legal regimes defer to the sovereignty and discretion of receiving states.Joining us for this episode are three experts in global migration law and governance: Jaya Ramji Nogales (Temple Law School in Philadelphia), Noora Lori (Boston University), and Amanda Bisong (European Center for Development Policy Management). Together, they offer critical insights on how legal scholars and practitioners might better understand, challenge, and reimagine the role of international law in regulating – and enabling – mobility across borders.Scholarship mentioned includes Bina Fernandez’s ‘Traffickers, Brokers, Employment Agents, and Social Networks: The Regulation of Intermediaries in the Migration of Ethiopian Domestic Workers to the Middle East’ (2013) 47 International Migration Review 814–43 and Petra Molnar’s The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2024).

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• Episode 34: In the Family: Family Tropes in International Law

  Susan Marks’ EJIL 36(1) Foreword asks ‘If the World is a Family, What Kind of Family Is It?’. It’s a provocative question for international lawyers, as the trope of the family runs through the discipline in all kinds of complex, even contradictory, ways. In this episode, Janne Nijman (Graduate Institute & University of Amsterdam) interviews Susan Marks (LSE) about her Foreword and the larger project it inaugurates. Their conversation ranges across the three ‘cases’ featured in the Foreword—the human family in human rights law, the ‘family of nations’, and the child as future in climate change debates—and beyond. What are the stakes of employing these familial tropes? What do they offer and what might they mask? What alternative discourses or imaginaries might be available?The exchange moves through visual as well as textual languages of family, in the form of photography exhibitions (for a glimpse: New York Museum of Modern Art’s ‘The Family of Man’ (1955); the deliberate counterpoint and tribute, Fenix’s ‘The Family of Migrants’ (2025); as well as World Press Photo’s ‘Ties that Bind: Photography and Family’ (2025)). Other scholarship mentioned includes Ariella Azoulay’s analysis of the Family of Man exhibition as ‘A Visual Universal Declaration of Human Rights’; Stephen Humphreys’ ‘Against Future Generations’ (from EJIL 33(4), Nov 2022); Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004); Jodi Dean’s Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (2019); and Janne Nijman’s ‘Grotius’ Imago Dei Anthropology: Grounding Ius Naturae et Gentium’ in Koskenniemi et al (eds), International Law and Religion: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (2017).

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• Episode 33: Owning the Future? International Law and Technology as a Critical Project

  International law operates in a world of rapid technological transformation. From the battlefield to the border, from online content moderation to open-source investigation, from humanitarianism to development, from counterterrorism to migration management, practices of central concern to international lawyers are progressively altered by the introduction of new technological tools. Many of these developments are troubling. The use of advanced algorithmic targeting tools used by Israel in Gaza instantiates both the tremendous civilian harm that data-driven technologies amplify and inflict, as well as the limitations of our existing legal repertoire in registering the nature, depth and scale of such harms. These injustices are layered onto the entrenched hierarchies, inequalities and sanctioned forms of violence in international law, but they also take on novel shapes as power and authority are routed along digital paths. In this episode, Dimitri Van Den Meerssche (Queen Mary University of London) is joined by Angelina Fisher (Guarini Global Law and Tech initiative, NYU) and André Dao (Laureate Program in Global Corporations, Melbourne Law School). Their conversation, drawing on a recent EJIL book review symposium, spans the co-constitutive relations between international law and technology, the limits of human rights, and new avenues for legal critique and resistance that reclaim a shared, collective future against its algorithmic appropriation.Other scholarship mentioned in the course of the episode includes: Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (translated by B. Wing) (1997); Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence – Translating International Law into Local Justice (2005); Fleur Johns, Non-Legality in International Law: Unruly Law (2013); Ratna Kapur, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights – Freedom in a Fishbowl (2020); Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (2021); Henning Lahmann, ‘Self-Determination in the Age of Algorithmic Warfare’ (2025) European Journal of Legal Studies 161–214.

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• Episode 32: No Country for Women: Lawyering for Gender Justice in Afghanistan

  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.

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• Episode 31: Gradually, then Suddenly - Climate, Trade and the Charter Order in Precarious Times

  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.)

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