Critical Legal Conference

Theme: Catastrophe

Ten years ago, the so-called ‘Invisible Committee’ urged that ‘It is useless to wait…. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.’ Over a decade before, Leonard Cohen had written; ‘This is the darkness, this is the flood. The catastrophe has already happpened and the question we now face is what is the appropriate behaviour.’ The 2017 Critical Legal Conference thus calls for streams, panels and papers that reflect upon ‘catastrophe’; on the catastrophes of our time and upon their interrelations; upon the questions of appropriate behaviours that might emerge and sides that might be taken. In particular we hope to encourage streams on:

• Increasing brutality and violence of the carceral and security state;

• War, migration, and refugee crises;

• Racism, xenophobia, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia and countless forms of day to day violence;

• On the atmospheres of violence under regimes of Modi, Temer, Trump, Brexit or Erdogan

• Natural disasters and the effects of climate change in the anthropocene;

• Forms of colonialism, neocolonialism and economic imperialism driven by capitalism and neoliberal ideologies;

• Crises of care and depletion of the social reproductive capacities under global capitalism;

• Rampant fear-mongering and the political exploitation of deprivation.

• Catastrophe, disaster and crisis as modes of biopolitics, governance or accumulation