The IILAH Podcast

In this episode, public health physician Tilman Ruff AO (University of Melbourne), journalist Nic Maclellan, historian Toshihiro Higuchi (Georgetown University), and human rights activist Aigerim Seitenova join Professor Margaret Young (Melbourne Law School) to explore how nuclear harm becomes known, documented and recognised, and whether recognition leads to repair.

Toshihiro Higuchi, author of 'Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis', examines how Cold War politics and scientific institutions shaped what counted as evidence of nuclear harm. Tilman Ruff, co-founder of ICAN and former co-president of IPPNW—organisations awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 and 1985, respectively—revisits his research published in The Lancet, “Ciguatera in the Pacific: a link with military activities”. He explains how military activities that disturbed coral reef ecology, including nuclear test explosions and associated infrastructure, contributed to outbreaks of fish poisoning, broadening the understanding of nuclear harm beyond radiation exposure. Aigerim Seitenova, a third-generation survivor of Soviet nuclear testing, discusses her documentary 'JARA—Radioactive Patriarchy: Women of Qazaqstan', which foregrounds women’s experiences of health, caregiving, memory, and resistance across generations. Finally, Nic Maclellan, author of 'Grappling with the Bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-bomb Tests', draws on archival research and survivor interviews to bring the experiences of Pacific Island communities and test-site workers into the historical record. Together, the speakers ask whose knowledge is heard, who controls the records, and how international law can respond to communities seeking recognition and reparations.

Professor Margaret Young chaired the conversation, which formed part of Counterarchives: International Law, Nuclear Testing and the Pacific, a project developed through Dr Ann-Sophie Levidis’s McKenzie Fellowship at the University of Melbourne. We are grateful for the support of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH), Melbourne Law School.

In this episode, writers and activists Ali Cobby Eckermann, Vanessa Griffen, Titaua Peu and Mariko Nagai come together to explore memory, testimony and the long afterlives of nuclear harm across Australia, the Pacific and Japan — and to ask what these experiences mean for international law. International law has increasingly confronted the consequences of nuclear weapons through questions of state responsibility, human rights, environmental harm, disarmament and reparations. Yet legal processes depend heavily on particular forms of evidence: official documents, scientific studies, military records and state archives. This conversation asks what happens to the experiences that those records cannot easily capture — poisoned Country and oceans, damaged bodies, fractured families, reproductive harm, fear, grief, anger, silence and memories transmitted across generations. Through poetry, photography, personal histories and lived experience, each speaker offers a different way of recording nuclear harm.

Ali Cobby Eckermann reflects on Country, family, the Stolen Generations and the legacies of British nuclear testing at Maralinga and Emu Field. Vanessa Griffen returns to her poem White Ashes and more than fifty years of Pacific anti-nuclear activism, connecting personal experience with a continuing struggle for disarmament and accountability. Titaua Peu speaks about writing against the silence surrounding French nuclear testing and colonialism in Tahiti, and about the consequences that continue to shape Polynesian society. Mariko Nagai explores the fragmented, intimate and sometimes contradictory memories that remain in the aftermath of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima. Together, they ask a larger question: how do we remember — and seek justice for — what nuclear violence has tried to erase?

The conversation considers literature not simply as art, but as testimony and a counter-archive: a way of preserving experiences that may never appear in government files or satisfy conventional legal categories of proof. It asks whether international law can recognise these other forms of knowledge, what counts as evidence of nuclear harm, whose voices enter the legal record, and what is lost when responsibility is reduced to what official archives can document. At its heart, the episode is about the relationship between memory and justice. It asks whether law can respond adequately to harms that cross borders and generations, whether reparations can account for emotional, cultural and environmental loss, and how literature and testimony might expand our understanding of what nuclear justice requires.

Dr Anaïs Maurer chaired the conversation, and Dr Ann-Sophie Levidis convened it at Melbourne Law School. The event was organised as part of Dr Ann-Sophie Levidis’s McKenzie Fellowship project at the University of Melbourne.

A visual excerpt to accompany Professor Mariko Nagai's presentation can be viewed here: https://law.unimelb.edu.au/centres/iilah/news-and-events/events-2026/after-the-test-literature,-memory-and-nuclear-legacies

This webinar discusses a paper reflecting on a Law and Humanities approach to customary international law, and how it shifts our understanding of “international custom”. On this approach, instead of enquiring into the rules of international law generated by general practices accepted as law, the focus is on general practices that give authority to a claim of international lawfulness. This treats international custom as the repeated cultural techniques that help to generate and sustain the authority of international law. While there are potentially very many general practices of this kind, the article considers two in particular: geography and historiography. In order to examine these practices as instances of international custom, the paper undertakes a close reading of International Court of Justice judgments, as well as a series of maps that were involved in European colonisation. The analysis draws out three ways in which geographic and historiographic practices can give authority to claims of international lawfulness: (1) by representing a “background” world history that helps to naturalise and universalise claims of international lawfulness; (2) by providing an “inherent” technical authority that can acquire the force of law; and (3) by projecting an “imaginary” international legal order that justifies, and thereby authorises, its realisation.

Please join Professor Melinda Cooper (Australian National University), Dr Richard Joyce (Melbourne Law School), Dr Adil Hasan Khan (Melbourne Law School) and Professor James Martel (San Francisco State University) as they discuss Silicon Valley billionaires and apocalyptic thinking. This discussion was chaired by Dr André Dao (Melbourne Law School).

The current concentration of financial, technological, military and political power in the billionaires of Silicon Valley is unprecedented. US government support, both in terms of policy and contracts, is essential to the sector. Relatedly, technology billionaires have become key actors within the Trump administration (most famously, if relatively briefly, Elon Musk as head of ‘DOGE’, and Marc Andreesen as a key advisor to the President). The current controversy over Anthropic’s attempt to impose terms of use on the US Government concerning domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons, and its designation as a ‘supply chain risk’, demonstrates how much power is concentrated in these corporations – and the significance of their relationship to the state.

Meanwhile, many of these billionaires appear to hold views that would have once been described as extreme and certainly niche, if not outright weird. Palantir founder (and US Vice-President J.D. Vance’s key benefactor) Peter Thiel, has a long-standing obsession with end-times and the Antichrist (and related fear of world government) which led him most recently to embark on four lecture series on the topic in San Francisco, with a follow-up in Rome. More broadly, right-wing accelerationism, and its rejection of humanism (and, in some more extreme forms, humans), has provided a ground for technology billionaires to explore the possibilities of a technology-enabled future freed from democracy and social obligation.

There appears to be a dangerous feedback loop between the conditions being exacerbated by technology’s mobilisation of capital and power (environmental and geopolitical catastrophe), and the relevance and explanatory force of apocalyptic thinking. At the same time, political leaders explicitly ascribe eschatological meaning to their military actions, in part to deny the relevance of international legal constraints.

In this episode, the panel considered the impact of apocalyptic thinking on the way technology billionaires amass and exert power, and the way the current moment and our futures are being shaped by their end-times fantasies.

This event formed part of the Laureate Research Program in Global Corporations and International Law, and the Discovery Project ‘International Law and the Challenge of Populism’, both funded by the Australian Research Council. We are also grateful for the support of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities, Melbourne Law School.

In this episode, Associate Professor Tanzil Chowdhury (Queen Mary University of London) discusses his latest book project, examining the transformation of the British Constitution over the last century. Tanzil’s argument is that we cannot understand significant changes to the British constitution without understanding the broader historical developments in capitalist social relations and the significant social antagonisms that have occurred throughout the last 100 or so years. Capitalism is a totality of different social relations and processes oriented around the value form; different social relations (economic, but also political, legal, cultural, moral etc) which are all important to the reproduction of that social totality. Contrary to heteronomous theories of constitutional change (including some Marxist ones), this project seeks to understand constitutions (the different institutional combinations of state and social power, subject formations, forms of mediation and characterisations of legality) as having an internal relation with capitalist social relations. In that sense, constitutions cannot be abstracted from capitalist social relations and are in fact, as Tanzil argues, historically specific to capitalism. However, even though constitutions are internally related to capitalist social relations, that does not mean that capitalist societies are not fraught with all manner of tensions, contradictions and ruptures. This is not therefore a rigid economistic and deterministic theory of constitutional development, but one which takes seriously the historical distinctness of the legal form, constitutionalism, and the specific work they do (or not) in the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Constitutionalism operates at different levels within the contradictory totality of capitalist social relations. Changes to the British constitution are the results of specific forms of struggle over the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Tanzil sets out some examples of this theoretical approach, periodises the last century of the British constitution, and connects it to distinct historical forms of capitalist constitutionalism.

This seminar was chaired by Dr Martin Clark.

The Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH) in collaboration with the Melbourne Doctoral Forum on Legal Theory (MDFLT/Forum) were pleased to host a launch of 'Beyond Doctrine: Alternative and Critical Approaches to Law' at Melbourne Law School.

'Beyond Doctrine' provides an authoritative and thoughtful introduction to different legal methodologies and situates those methodologies in an Australian context. Edited by Harry Hobbs and Jeremy Patrick, it includes contributions from an impressive array of Australian scholars covering theories that ask us to think more deeply about law and what it means.

On the evening of 24 November 2025, Earn Asanasak was joined by chapter authors Professor Heather Douglas, Professor Ann Genovese, Dr Claerwen O’Hara and Dr Alice Palmer to discuss their contributions to 'Beyond Doctrine' and insights into the collaborative venture of an edited volume on legal theory.

Speakers in order of appearance: Dr Alice Palmer, Earn Asanasak, Dr Claerwen O'Hara, Professor Ann Genovese and Professor Heather Douglas.

This event happened in parallel with the launch of 'Beyond Doctrine' in Sydney at the UNSW Legal Education Research Conference also in November 2025.

In this episode, Dr Ellycia Harrould-Kolieb (Faculty of Science, University of Melbourne) Professor Karen N Scott (University of Canterbury) and Professor Margaret Young (Melbourne Law School) shared reflections on their experiences at the 2025 United Nations Oceans Conference (UNOC3).

The United Nations Oceans Conference in Nice, France, was a five day event in June involving more than 60 heads of states and governments and over 15,000 participants. Its published outcome, the ‘Nice Ocean Action Plan’ comprises a political declaration (A/CONF.230/2025/L.1) and voluntary commitments which seek to address the grave state of ocean health. Calls to expand marine protection, curb pollution, regulate the high seas, and unlock financing for vulnerable coastal and island nations were advanced in this third summit, dubbed UNOC3, which followed previous conferences in New York (2017) and Lisbon (2022). Alongside the ‘blue zone’ of government delegations and the ‘green zone’ of civil society engagement were side-events in universities and other organisations. The three speakers of this episode – academics in Australia and New Zealand – attended UNOC3 in various research capacities and present their reflections and critical perspectives.

This event was organised by the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH), Melbourne Climate Futures (MCF), the International Law Association (Australian branch) and the Oceans and International Environmental Law Interest Group (OIELG) of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law (ANZSIL).

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered its long-awaited Advisory Opinion on the obligations of States in respect of climate change on 23 July 2025. In this episode, Melbourne Law School experts Dylan Asafo, Rohan Nanthakumar, Professor Jackie Peel and Professor Margaret Young discussed the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion and its implications for international law.

The ICJ is expected to provide legal clarity on two questions: (a) the obligations of States under international law to ensure the protection of the climate system from greenhouse gas emissions, for States and for present and future generations; and (b) the legal consequences of these obligations for the States that have caused significant harm to the climate system, especially with respect to (i) injured or particularly vulnerable States such as small island developing states; and (ii) current and future generations.

This event was co-hosted by IILAH, the Melbourne Centre for Law and the Environment (MCLE), Melbourne Climate Futures (MCF), the Laureate Program on Global Corporate Climate Accountability and the Oceans and International Environmental Law Interest Group (OIELG) of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law (ANZSIL).

In this episode of the IILAH Podcast, Professor Karin van Marle (University of Western Cape) presents on five concepts and explores how they relate to each other and how they could contribute to a jurisprudence beyond law. This seminar was chaired by Professor Ann Genovese.

As legal scholars/ academics engaged with legal issues, or to follow Shaun McVeigh and Ann Genovese, as jurisprudents, we work with many concepts, ideas and traditions. Professor Karin van Marle is currently trying to bring five concepts (linked to ideas and traditions) that she has worked on over three decades together in a short monograph. There concepts are slowness; refusal; limit(s); transformation and space(s). The aim of Karin's presentation is to unpack the five concepts mentioned above, how they relate to each other and how they could contribute to a jurisprudence beyond law.

In this episode, Dr Daniel McLoughlin (UNSW) presents on Giorgio Agamben’s Covid Critique and the Homo Sacer Project. This seminar was chaired by Dr Richard Joyce.

On the 26th of February 2020, Giorgio Agamben published a short piece on his personal website, entitled ‘Invention of an Epidemic,’ which argued that the Italian state was exploiting the appearance of COVID-19 to govern by emergency decree. Over the following year, he went on to criticise the use of masks, compared the “Green Pass” to the Yellow Star, and argued that academics teaching online were the “perfect equivalent” of Nazi collaborators. Agamben’s work has been enormously influential in critical legal theory over the past two decades. However, these interventions generated a great deal of criticism, with commentators accusing him of peddling “critical-cum-conspiracy theory,” and urging us to “forget about Agamben.” This paper analysed Agamben’s interventions around the pandemic and their relationship to his philosophical critique of law and politics. It argued that they illustrate limits to his analysis of sovereignty and his concern with the politics of totalitarianism, as they have the potential to play into a politics that presupposes a virtuous liberal status quo that has been lost and needs to be restored. There are, however, two aspects of Agamben’s thought in the Homo Sacer project that mitigate against this conceptual danger: his deconstruction of the concepts that underpin the legitimacy of the modern democratic state; and his analysis of the relationship between liberal democracy, biopolitics, and governmentality. Daniel McLoughlin’s claim is that these issues, taken together, have generated the much-noted proximity between Agamben’s critique of the response to COVID, and that of the far right.