The School of Law & Criminology at Maynooth University and the Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute are pleased to invite you to a keynote lecture by outgoing UN Special Rapporteur on Racism, Professor E. Tendayi Achiume on ‘Race, Justice and International Law’.
The School are happy to be hosting Professor Achiume in Maynooth and this will be a welcome occasion for the campus community and for scholars, students and civil society organisations in Ireland to hear from and engage with her.
The event will take place from 9:00 to 11:00am on Friday 21 April 2023 in TSI Building (Room 028) in Maynooth University, followed by a tea & coffee reception. Please register here to attend.
About the speaker:
E. Tendayi Achiume is the Alicia Miñana Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, University of California. Professor Achiume’s work has been at the forefront of international law scholarship globally on questions of race and racial justice, borders and migration. Her current research focuses on the global governance of racism and xenophobia, and the legal and ethical implications of colonialism for contemporary international migration. Amongst other writings, her articles on ‘Migration as Decolonization’ (2019) and ‘Racial Borders’ (2022) have made ground-breaking contributions to the field of migration studies and to our understanding of border regimes and migration governance. In 2017, the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed Professor Achiume to the position of UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. She has just completed her 6-year term and was the first woman to serve in this role. During a momentous period for racial justice movements around the world, Professor Achiume made a profound contribution as Special Rapporteur through her engagement with states and her interventions and reports on climate justice, reparations for colonialism and slavery, digital border regimes, natural resource extractivism, and more.
‘Race, Justice and International Law’:
What is the place of race in the pursuit of global or international justice, especially from the perspective of international law? How have transnational movements in the past and more recently conceptualized these relationships, and what has happened when the UN and its member states have been confronted with movement perspectives and demands? Drawing on the experiences of her recently-ended term as U.N. Special Rapporteur on Contemporary forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, Professor Achiume’s lecture will address these and related questions. The lecture will consider in particular, the potential, if any, of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) to contribute meaningfully to mobilizations for racial justice on a transnational scale.
Professor Achiume’s lecture is the keynote session for a symposium on ‘International Law and Global Justice: Third World Approaches and Transnational Conversations’ being hosted by the School of Law & Criminology. Details and separate registration for the other symposium sessions can be found here.
The event forms part of the ‘TWAIL 2023: Democratizing International Law' project, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in conjunction with the University of Windsor Law School, la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad de Los Andes, Maynooth University School of Law & Criminology, and the TWAIL Review journal.
Please register here to attend.