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P.h.D Candidate, Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University Ireland, Galway
NUI EJ Phelan Fellow in International Law

Lecturer (part-time), School of Law & Government, Dublin City University

E.MA Teaching Fellow in International Law, European Inter-University Centre, Venice 2012-2013
Government of Ireland Scholar 2009-2012
National University of Ireland Travelling Scholar 2009-2010
LL.M International Human Rights Law (National University of Ireland, Galway, 2006)
Bachelor of Business and Law (University College Dublin, 2004)

Email: john.j.reynoldsgmail.com

PhD Thesis:

EMPIRE AND EMERGENCY: COLONIALISM, STATES OF EMERGENCY AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

Supervisor: Dr. Kathleen Cavanaugh

The fundamental thrust of this project is a critical appraisal of the doctrine of emergency in international and constitutional law from the perspective of a third world approaches to international law (TWAIL) school of thought. It takes as its point of departure one of the core tenets of TWAIL: the centrality of colonialism and colonial legal concepts to an understanding of the historical composition and continuing development of international legal structures and doctrine.

Much has been written since 2001 in the fields of legal theory, philosophy of law and political science on the ’state of exception’. The overwhelming majority of this scholarship has adopted a binary approach to the question of exceptional measures, pitting sovereign executive power on one hand against legality/rule of law on the other. A review of the literature quickly reveals a renaissance of interest in the work of Carl Schmitt, invoked typically as a foil to liberal conceptualisations of the rule of law. His framing of sovereignty through the notion of the decision on the exception—namely, the sovereign capacity to suspend law during times of crisis—is quoted ad nauseam. On the basis of sometimes simplistic interpretations of Schmitt’s model, spatial boundaries are drawn whereby the discharge of sovereign power must be classed as either inside or outside of the juridical order.  An overly narrow focus on the theses of Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben in the state of exception discourse results in often circular debate as to whether a given practice or policy is understood as constrained by the principle of legality, or as an act of exceptional executive power beyond the pale of a rule of law.

Notably absent in much of this debate are questions of race and colonial history, and an understanding of the temporal dimension of emergency rule as an embedded feature of the ’prosaic politics’ of colonial governance. This project attempts to move beyond the legality/extra-legal dichotomy in the context of the state of exception, and to instead place what I term ’emergency legalities’ in their historical and socio-political context. To what extent does emergency law manifest itself as a racialised and imperial component of sovereignty? The framing of this question stems from an understanding of sovereignty itself as an historically racially subordinating concept, and a detection of the widespread use of emergency powers in a racially contingent manner, whereby the sovereign classifies its enemy ’other’ and enacts essentially discriminatory measures on that basis. Such powers were integral to the machinery of the European colonial project and its management of native populations. States of emergency were codified and legislated for by colonial authorities concerned with the ’lawfulness’ of their actions. Amidst the panoply and matrices of emergency regulations promulgated by the British colonial state in particular, the colonies emerge as zones saturated by law; emergency law albeit, but law nonetheless. This implies a need to critically engage with common impulses of postcolonial theory that conceptualise the colonies as lawless spaces of exception, zones of anomie in which the native is dehumanised through a process of exclusion from the law. Did the deployment of emergency legalities serve, rather, as a technology of colonial governance that inscribed the native within the law, and effected control accordingly? In this reading, emergency law operates to bridge a divide that deepened over the course of colonial history between the unfettered violence of conquest (in the colony) and an increasingly liberal idealising (in the metropole) of the rule of law as empire’s gift.

Having traced the evolution and consolidation of the doctrine of emergency in occidental law, the thesis moves to demonstrate, in reading the archive and the travaux, the direct influence of colonial legal traditions on the normative structures of contemporary international law, most notably the derogations regime in international human rights law. If it is accepted that colonial legal concepts have underpinned the formation of contemporary norms (domestic and international) relating to national security threats and socio-economic crises, this implies questions that speak not just to the application of or derogation from a rule of law, but to the nature of law itself. In certain settings framed as states of emergency, to what degree does the law remain inherently constitutive of racialised hegemonic control? On a more panoramic level, is the paradigm of a racially contingent emergency implicated in the broader (imperial) project of globalised neoliberalism? It is these questions that the thesis wishes to address, using a methodology of theoretical inquiry and socio-legal critique with reference to relevant cases in practice.

Publications

[Selected publications available here]

Books

Beyond Occupation: Colonialism, Apartheid & International Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (V. Tilley ed., London: Pluto, 2012) (co-author)

Journals

’Of Humanity and the Law’ (2013) 9(1) Journal of International Law & International Relations

’Apartheid, International Law, and the occupied Palestinian territory’ 2013 24(3) European Journal of International Law (with John Dugard)

’The Political Economy of States of Emergency’ (2012) 14(1) Oregon Review of International Law 85-130

’The Use of Force in a Colonial Present, and the Goldstone Report’s Blind Spot’ (2010) XVI  Palestine Yearbook of International Law 55-77

’The Long Shadow of Colonialism: The Origins of the Doctrine of Emergency in International Human Rights Law’ (2010) 6(5)  Osgoode Comparative Research in Law and Political Economy 1-51

’An Enduring Occupation: The Status of the Gaza Strip from the Perspective of International Humanitarian Law’ (2010) 15(2) Journal of Conflict and Security Law 211-243 (with Shane Darcy)

’International Law from Below: Development, Social Movement and Third World Resistance’ (2009) XV Palestine Yearbook of International Law 433-438    

Chapters

’Palestine, and the Politics of International Criminal Justice’, in William Schabas et al. (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to International Criminal Law: Critical Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013) (with Michael Kearney)

’Third World Approaches to International Law and the Ghosts of Apartheid’ in David Keane & Yvonne McDermott (eds.), The Challenge of Human Rights: Past, Present and Future (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2012)

Selected Conference Papers

Taking Stock of Third World Perspectives on International Criminal Law
Harvard Law School – Institute for Global Law and Policy: New Directions in Global Thought
Harvard University, 3 June 2013

Mapping Emergency Legalities in Colonial Kenya
Law & Society Association – Power, Privilege, and the Pursuit of Justice
Boston, 31 May 2013

Settler Colonialism and the Surface of Law
Birzeit Institute of Law – Law and Politics: Strategies of International Law for Palestine
Birzeit University, 8 May 2013

States of Emergency and Political Economy
Harvard Law School – Institute for Global Law and Policy
Harvard University, 4 June 2012

Governmentality and Emergency in the Arab World
Birzeit University / University of Windsor – Beyond Apology and Utopia in the Middle East University of Windsor, 26 November 2011

Emergency, Capitalism and the Common Good
Third World Approaches to International Law – Capitalism and the Common Good
University of Oregon, 22 October 2011

The State of Exception: The Vanishing Point of Human Rights?
International Studies Association – Global Governance: Political Authority in Transition
Montréal, 16 March 2011

Forgotten, but not Forsaken?: The Ghosts of Apartheid in International Law
Irish Centre for Human Rights – Forgotten Rights, Forgotten Concepts
National University of Ireland Galway, 20 November 2010

The Colonial Origins of the Doctrine of Emergency in International Law
Toronto Group for the Study of International Law – Disturbing the Minds of States
University of Toronto, 29 January 2010
 
Sovereignty, Colonialism and the 'State' of Palestine under International Law
Human Sciences Research Council – Re-envisioning Israel/Palestine
Cape Town, 13 June 2009

Litigating International Human Rights Law in Domestic Courts
Harvard Law School – International Human Rights Series
Harvard University, 27 October 2008

The Fog of Occupation: The Local Relevance of International Humanitarian Law
University of Antwerp – The Local Relevance of Human Rights
Antwerp, 18 October 2008

Peace and Human Rights: Palestine as a Case Study
University of Antwerp – The Local Relevance of Human Rights
Antwerp, 17 October 2008
   
The Use of Force by the Occupying Power as a “Counter-terrorism” Measure
International Commission of Jurists – Eminent Jurists Panel, Counter-terrorism & Human Rights
Ramallah, 24 August 2007

Online Publications

“Intent to Regularise”: The Israeli Supreme Court and the Normalisation of Emergency’, Adalah, May 2013

' Bertrand Russell’s Legacy’, Jadaliyya, 2 November 2011

' The Spectre of South Africa’, Jadaliyya, 29 October 2011

' Palestinian Statehood: To Recognise, or Not To Recognise?’, Politico, 15 September 2011

' Emergency, Governmentality, and the Arab Spring’, Jadaliyya, 10 August 2011

' The Trials and Travel Bans of Shawan J.’, Human Rights in Ireland,  24 November 2010

' Five Years after the ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Wall: Barriers to Enforcement’, Adalah Virtual Roundtable, 9 July 2009

' Seeking to Uphold Third State Responsibility: The Case of Al-Haq v. UK’ (2009) 41 al-Majdal 12

Photography Books

Human Rights Through the Lens (Galway: Irish Centre for Human Rights, 2010)  

 

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