How, Where and for Whom? Interrogating Law's Forms, Locations and Purposes: Inaugural Lecture, Kinggs College London, 28 April 2016

Abstract

This inaugural lecture, delivered at The Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London, on 28 April 2016, followed a day after the official launch symposium of the Transnational Law Institute. While the launch brought to London a selection of legal scholars, anthropologists, political scientists and historians to underscore the multi- and inter-disciplinarity of transnational legal theory through examples of post-colonial historiography, labour law and climate change governance, sex work, trade and corporate responsibility, the lecture focused on what Thomas Nail has called the ‘figure of the migrant’. In reflecting on the precariousness of migrant workers’ lives in a city such as London, notions of ‘home’, ‘belonging’ and ‘membership’ point to the fleeting nature of the human condition. As the European refugee crisis is increasingly seen as a challenge for problem management and emergency administration, it becomes part of global ‘problem solving’, albeit driven by ambiguous motivations and on the basis of selective knowledge. The ‘datafication’, the numerical counting of economic, political, social and even cultural ‘facts’, which finds expression in a seemingly irreversible turn to computable “indicators” creates the illusion of there being a ‘way out’, a ‘right answer’, a ‘promising approach’. Meanwhile, desperate people board hand their and their dependants’ lives to traffickers in order to board unreliable vessels in the hope to arrive in a better, safer place. A place that might never be ‘home’, but one in which lives that were set adrift in the seas of global monetary expansion, ‘structural adjustment’, privatization and foreign direct investment, might be rearranged, re-assembled, for the time being. What can “law” do in this context beyond operationalizing state practice under the labels of ‘refugee’, ‘asylum’ or ‘immigration’ law? Can law serve as a critical lens to transform helplessness into political agency, exploitation into autonomy, despair into collective action?