Latin American Studies Lunch Talk: Mestizo International Law - A Global Intellectual History 1842-1933

Join us for our first lunch talk of the semester with Arnulf Becker Lorca on Mestizo International Law. Becker Lorca is a Visiting Faculty at the International Relations Program at Brown University. He received his SJD from Harvard Law School. He was a lecturer in public international law at King’s College London and a Pembroke Center Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University. His book, Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History, 1850–1950, was published in 2014 by Cambridge University Press.

The development of international law is conventionally understood as a history in which the main characters (states and international lawyers) and events (wars and peace conferences) are European. Mestizo International Law demonstrates how non-Western states and lawyers appropriated nineteenth-century classical thinking in order to defend new and better rules governing non-Western states' international relations. By internalizing the standard of civilization, for example, they argued for the abrogation of unequal treaties. These appropriations contributed to the globalization of international law. With the rise of modern legal thinking and a stronger international community governed by law, peripheral lawyers seized the opportunity and used the new discourse and institutions such as the League of Nations to dissolve the standard of civilization and codify non-intervention and self-determination. These stories suggest that the history of our contemporary international legal order is not purely European; instead they suggest a history of a mestizo international law.

Lunch provided. Open to BU community and others with a research interest the topic. RSVP to Elizabeth Amrien by September 28.

LAS faculty meeting will precede the talk from 12 to 12:30 PM.