Fleur Johns

This article started life as the Dean’s Lecture delivered at University of Edinburgh Law School in November 2024 & is indebted to the generosity of colleagues there as well as to the work of many scholars working on time in the international law field, as both a timeless and most urgent concern.

It's an attempt to write a way out of the rather desolate place that I took readers to in a recent piece in EJIL (on the kinds of presentism propagated by digital tech) through engagement with recent work of @mariepetersmann.bsky.social Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change & others.

How do we, how can we, how might we, think about the 'right now' in international legal work?

I just shared on SSRN a preprint of an article forthcoming in the Edinburgh Law Review entitled 'International Legal Critique Now: Neo-Presentism in International Law'. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

If you end up reading it, feel free to get in touch. As always, I couldn’t have done this work without the support, prior work, and generous engagement of many people — too many to thank here, but acknowledged in the notes. End.

However, this is not the only register of presentism that international lawyers may imbibe in connection with digitalization. An abundance of creative and scholarly resources for thinking about the present offer alternatives, this article concludes.

Using the above-mentioned examples, I show how the digitally assembled emergency no longer interrupts time (as in many prior international legal conceptions of crisis) but rather invites waiting and watching — vigilant attentiveness to present conditions and sufferance of their inevitability.

In other words, this article asks whether the presentism of some ICT might be helping to foster a palliative orientation in international legal work – towards incrementally addressing symptoms of global deterioration and exploitation without attempting, ambitiously, to arrest them.

The article asks whether, insofar as international lawyers incline towards hand-wringing temporizing in the face of death and devastation, this might be a matter (in part) of their internalizing the logic of digital interfaces through which they are invited to engage with these phenomena.

The article focuses on the temporal implications of this shift, situating it amid recent humanities and social sciences literature on presentism, and scrutinizing it through a close reading of two exemplary interfaces developed by IOs: VAMPIRE and HungerMap LIVE.

It starts from the observation that international organizations are having growing recourse to digital technologies in emergency response. Digital interfaces, such as online earning warning tools, are informing how humanitarian emergencies are perceived and analysed, and in what time frame.

Palliative Presentism and Its Alternatives: International Legal Emergencies via Digital Interfaces Abstract. International organizations (IOs) are having growing recourse to digital technologies in emergency response. Digital interfaces, such as online e

Hello all. My OA article “Palliative Presentism & Its Alternatives: International Legal Emergencies via Digital Interfaces” has been published in the European Journal of International Law. It is about time, technology, humanitarian emergencies & international law.
academic.oup.com/ejil/advance...

Data Entry and Decision Chains: Distributed Responsibility and Bureaucratic Disempowerment in the UK’s Universal Credit Programme Abstract. Digitalising public programmes creates new accountability challenges, many of which are under-theorised. Using Universal Credit to illustrate its

How does the design of digital govt infrastructure impact decision-making & accountability? @jenraso.bsky.social & I argue that data-sharing arrangements underlying digital govt programs are dispersing responsibilities within decision-making, generating what we call 'bureaucratic disempowerment' 1/4

To the extent that Trump’s foreign policy has a coherent logic, that logic — the accompanying conception of state territory & national interest etc — is best understood through the historical & legal lens of consular internationalism rather than diplomatic relations www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

There is a false dichotomy drawn between "the ivory tower" and "the real world," and I'm here to report that in a post-industrial society, your real-world economy absolutely hinges on the university.

University towns are factory towns. Universities drive economic activity, not the other way around.

Great hybrid-conversation at the Law & Society conference about our book (co-ed by Gavin Sullivan, @dimitrivdm.bsky.social & me) Global Governance by Data: Infrastructures of Algorithmic Rule, f’coming open access with @cambridgeup.bsky.social. 🙏to Gavin & to @mattcanfield.bsky.social for comments.

🔥🔥🔥 Excited to share this collection in @ejiltalk.bsky.social: International Law and Technology as a Critical Project: A Collective Reading.

👇 This piece draws the contours of a critical approach to IL and technology by introducing five wonderful review essays.

t.co/bd0DOcbXKp

Thanks to the editors of @verfassungsblog.de for publishing this new short essay, somewhat bleak, but it did give me the privilege of linking to work by my better half.

verfassungsblog.de/in-the-grave...

For anyone thinking about doing a PhD in Law, expressions of interest for Pitch-a-PhD at The University of Sydney Law School are now open for international applicants. Please share widely. Submission link: lnkd.in/gcibSc9g Scholarships info here: www.sydney.edu.au/scholarships...

The Frightening Precedents for Trump’s ‘Legal Abyss’ The ‘dual-state theory’ explains how authoritarians bend the law to their will.

Ernst Fraenkel’s work is worth revisiting but the “dual state” as a diagnosis of contemporary authoritarianism (A) is misguided insofar as it maintains the separability of a “zone of legality” from a “legal abyss”, absolving the former of responsibility for A’s rise

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/w...

In this OA article in the Leiden Journal of Int’l Law, I argue that the distinctive logic of consular internationalism can aid analysis of entanglements of imperial & commercial power & grappling with unofficial actors’ role in shaping international law www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

AJIL Unbound's latest symposium "International Criminal Law's Critical Aftermaths: Abolitionism, Redistribution, and Transformational Pedagogies" is now available to read and features and incredible line-up of scholars. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Introducing the Second Seasons of Digital Echoes

📢 Out now! #DigitalEchoes: Season 2 – 'Listening to New Normativities' New episodes 📼 every second Monday on Völkerrechtsblog & Spotify!
Read the introduction by @dogot.bsky.social, Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi, @minorjurisprudent.bsky.social & Anna Sophia Tiedeke.
voelkerrechtsblog.org/introducing-...

Geopolitical Change and the Antarctic Treaty System This book explores all aspects of geopolitical considerations between key states of the Antarctica Treaty System (ATS) and lessons that can be gained.

Our edited collection on 'Geopolitical Change and the Antarctic Treaty System' will be out in January 2025.

A big thanks to co-editors Shirley Scott and Jeff McGee and to the contributors for making this project possible.

link.springer.com/book/9789819...

Reducing unhealthy food and beverage advertising to children: a framework for strengthening performance, transparency and enforcement Food and beverage multinationals spend vast sums of money marketing unhealthy foods and drinks to children, using an integrated array of advertising techniques and media platforms. Countries have resp...

New publication alert ⚠️

We evaluated controls on food marketing in six different jurisdictions, producing recommendations for effective, transparent, and accountable regulation.

Key takeaway: good regulatory design is just as important as regulatory tool choice.

Full version: shorturl.at/ky4fp

Interested in competing ideas of "gender" in international criminal law? I'll be chatting next week on this with the brilliant Akila Radhakrishnan, Valerie Oosterveld, Lily Kather, Juliana Santos de Carvalho & Lena Holzer. Tune in on Monday 3 February at 10am, Cambridge time.

Check out @louravn.bsky.social's wonderful interview with @fleurjohns.bsky.social in Critical Humanities - it's OA and is of interest to anyone interested in critical data studies, humanitarianism and interdisciplinary legal perspectives to datafication @tgammeltoft.bsky.social #DALOSS #MOBILE

I’m so grateful to @louravn.bsky.social for the opportunity to talk about some of the arguments in my @oxfordunipress.bsky.social book ‘#Help: Digital Humanitarianism and the Remaking of International Order’ in the Critical Humanities journal 👇

The paper seeks to contribute to broader questions about global data/infrastructure governance. The final version of the paper will be published in a volume on governance by data edited by @fleurjohns.bsky.social @dimitrivdm.bsky.social and Gavin Sullivan.

I have a new article forthcoming in the European Journal of International Law (@ejiltalk.bsky.social): 'Palliative Presentism and its Alternatives: International Legal Emergencies via Digital Interfaces'. It is available via SSRN pending publication: ssrn.com/abstract=505...
Below is an abstract:

I am especially grateful to @nannathylstrup.bsky.social & @tgammeltoft.bsky.social hansen for hosting the visit at which this conversation started.