Moritz Koenig

Moritz Koenig

@moritzkoenig.bsky.social

Legal historian: colonial law, critical theory, land tenure, Indonesia. PhD from SOAS. Currently land rights at Oxfam.

100 Followers 105 Following 18 Posts Joined Dec 2024
3 months ago
Project MUSE - Turkish Anticolonialism and Muslim Southeast Asia, 1923–1949: Vernacular Diplomacy “Under the Yoke of 3 and a Half Dutchmen”

Our take on the facile binaries of colonialism v anticolonialism through an exploration of the contradictions of anticolonial discourses among intellectuals in the early Turkish republic muse.jhu.edu/pub/5/articl...

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3 months ago
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Makerere University, where dream weavers are born. Tracing the footsteps of Ngugi wa Thiongo, Ali Mazrui, Mahmood Mamdani, Sylvia Tamale and many more.

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4 months ago
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An Archaeology of Land Tenure in Colonial Minangkabau This article investigates juridical engagement with land tenure in Minangkabau (West Sumatra) in the late colonial period. I argue that the scholarly encounter with adat (customary) land tenure was...

Just published this article in which I show how an oscillation between the frames of legal ‘contraction’ (model contracts, textual forms) and ethnographic ‘expansion’ (‘the art of observation’) constituted colonial legal knowledge in Sumatra. For free access click www.tandfonline.com/eprint/9UQNG...

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7 months ago

Good news: chatgpt does not understand the difference between Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical phase yet. Bad news: thanks to pure pedantry and my inability to let things go, I think I just taught it to.

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11 months ago

Excellent points on how the mathematisation of economics as a discipline since the advent of neoliberalism hides its ideological work.

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11 months ago

Becoming a “thank you for your service” guy for a car dealership is the logical endpoint of American conservatism

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11 months ago
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International Law and its Others Cambridge Core - Public International Law - International Law and its Others

This one is pretty famous and has a nice collection on the topic: www.cambridge.org/core/books/i...

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11 months ago
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Can Democrats Learn to Dream Big Again? In “Abundance,” Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson prod fellow liberals to think beyond their despair over Trump’s return to power.

There’s a cohort of lib American podcasters desperate to be seen as intellectuals(incessantly referring to their ramblings as intellectual labour) but who display a first year undergrad’s grasp of theory (misappropriating concepts such as genealogy or cultural anthro) www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/b...

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11 months ago

Being ignorant about Marx’s writing while happily opining about it (and using it synonymously for whatever you happen to hate in contemporary culture) has become a virtue for many in the US. The Peterson-Zizek debate surely didn’t help.

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11 months ago

If you’re being told for decades by the entire political mainstream that it cannot possibly be neoliberalism or the capitalist system that makes your life so difficult (and vilified if you dare suggest it might be) then ofc an imaginary past and alternative scapegoats fall on fertile ground.

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1 year ago
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Is this couch purposefully designed to make everyone sitting on it look really weird?

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1 year ago
PhD candidate in Transnational Labour Mobilities in Southeast Asia PhD candidate in Transnational Labour Mobilities in Southeast Asia

vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric...

new phd post in my research program, please share!

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1 year ago

Why put Trump in quotation marks? Does he consider his own existence fake news?

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1 year ago
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The term card is out for our Peace Histories Seminar Series! Students, colleagues, and anyone interested in the history of peace movements, please join us at @leidenhumanities.bsky.social for three amazing speakers AND a film screening! Details here: www.staff.universiteitleiden.nl/events/serie...

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1 year ago
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The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History Over the last half-billion years, there have been five …

One revelation in this book that blew my mind: the very idea of species extinction (chaos, radical change) was only made possible by the fervour of the French Revolution. That’s why Britons (Darwin, Lyell) panned the idea and insisted on gradual adaptation www.goodreads.com/book/show/17...

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1 year ago
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12 February (16-18h) at the Maastricht Centre for Law & Jurisprudence in @lawinmaastricht.bsky.social at @maastrichtu.bsky.social: Colloquium with Eva Bernet Kempers: (U of Antwerp). Title: Do rights of nature include animal rights?
On-site and online. Register here: aanmelder.nl/159956/subsc...

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1 year ago
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Too Close for Comfort | Caitlin Zaloom Why are economists are in the US today uniquely able to exercise such sway over the state?

Great review of recent books on economism and how economics came to posture as an objective science: ‘When citizens and their representatives oppose received economic wisdom, they can count on being dismissed as ignorant, irrational, or silly.’ www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

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1 year ago
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How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms Podcast-Folge · Matter of Opinion · 17.01.2025 · 1 Std. 1 Min.

Marc Andreessen is the perfect representative of one of the most pernicious ideas capitalism has produced: taking an anthropology class in college is dangerous radicalism while believing in unfettered untaxed capitalism is apolitical human nature. podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/m...

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1 year ago
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How Shanghai’s ‘western food’ became a cuisine all of its own Europeans have come and gone from China’s most populous city, but their food has gone local

I wrote about classic Shanghainese western food for the FT! (Article will be in this weekend’s magazine) www.ft.com/content/20ab...

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1 year ago

It's bonkers that successive governments have taken one thing the UK was genuinely very good at and simply trashed it, destroying thousands of livelihoods, weakening teaching, and gutting cultural life in the process, all out of self-destructive obedience to the paranoid fantasy of marketization

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1 year ago

Same but I wouldn’t quote them in detail in a review just to chastise the author for conversing with the wrong/too many people.

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1 year ago

I generally enjoy the anecdotal style of their reviews but in this case it was really distractive or even outright intrusive.

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1 year ago
Call for Abstracts - Law & Marxism Spring School

😻 DEAR ACADEMIC ACTIVISTS/COMRADES 😻
The second edition of our Law & Marxism Spring School will be held at SOAS from 8 to 10 May 2025! Deadline 10/2!
We look forward to receiving your applications and cannot wait for the best days in May!
✊Help us to spread the word to reach all the comrades we can✊

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1 year ago
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Susan Pedersen · Slim for Britain: Solidarity Economy No one who has lived in Britain would contest that Oxfam (and Save the Children, War on Want, Live Aid and the other big...

is it just me or is Susan Pedersen’s close reading of @tsasson.bsky.social personal acknowledgements in The Solidarity Economy a bit creepy? Also, opening paragraphs rambling about her pet peeve, current conventions in titling books, are quite self-indulgent and tedious www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

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1 year ago
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About | The African Society of International Law The African Society of International (AfSIL) is a network of practitioners, scholars, technocrats and students engaging with international law as practiced, implemented, and forged in Africa. The Society seeks in particular to...


The African Society of International Law has issued a call for papers for its 14th Annual Conference, to take place October 17-18, 2025, in Maputo. The theme is: "Africa, Culture, and International Law." The call is here 👇🏾

www.afsilsadi.org

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1 year ago
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a man with glasses and a mustache is wearing a white shirt that says finally on it ALT: a man with glasses and a mustache is wearing a white shirt that says finally on it

Humbled to see many new followers here! Normally I am rather quiet but today I have exciting news:

Just signed the book contract for a Cambridge Handbook on the League of Nations and International Law (co-edited with Haakon Ikonomou and Morten Rasmussen).

Pls bear with us until early 2026..

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1 year ago
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Law & - The Centre for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Law & an encyclopedia of interdisciplinarylegal studies Contribute. If you would like to contribute an entry to “Law &” please contact us at cils@hku.hk. Entries on any aspects of interdisicplinary le...

Interested in writing a short paper on interdisciplinary legal studies? Centre for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies at HKU is creating a digital encyclopedia covering topics related to interdisciplinary legal studies. 👇 cils.law.hku.hk/law-and/

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1 year ago
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A Microcosm of the World | C.L.R. James, Stuart Hall, Phoebe Braithwaite In May 1976, the Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall sat down in the BBC’s studios in West London to interview the Trinidadian-born intellectual

I recently saw Hall’s conversation with James on YouTube. Incredible to think Channel 4 in the 80s was happy to fill an hour of prime time TV with them discussing Trotsky’s account of the Russian revolution, Trinidadian labour leaders, and The Black Jacobins. www.nybooks.com/online/2024/...

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