The role of international law – and international lawyers – in managing environmental problems is understood to be very new. This lecture reveals its deeper history, showing how international law was mobilized to address environmental challenges in the era of the two world wars. In particular, it uncovers the pivotal role of the League of Nations in determining an emergent environmental agenda in the 1920s and 1930s.

Scholars who seek to understand how individuals differ in their scope of moral regard have typically focused on variations in the total number of entities that are ascribed moral standing. However, this focus leaves important questions unanswered about the nature of people's moral capacity. For example, two people may be equally morally expansive but differ substantially in the degree to which they value strangers over animals.

When discussing the contemporary environmental crisis, it is difficult to overstate the impact our food system has on the planet. We are eating in ways that might cause our own extinction, with monocultures, genetically modified seeds, and food that travels too far, causing an incomparable carbon footprint. Historians have long discussed how empires transformed food into a global commodity through innovations such as steamships, breeding techniques, and trade networks that spanned the globe.

As communities lose their native language they often also lose cultural traditions that are tied to that language, such as songs, myths, poetry, remedies, and particular ecological and geological knowledge. Furthermore, the social structure of one’s community is often reflected through speech and language behaviour. This seminar will address the correlation between minority languages and dialects, and the deep structure of human identity and community cohesion.

Endangered languages have become an issue of political contestation in many countries in South-East Asia. As they work to promote a single national culture, states often seek to limit the opportunities for using minority languages in the public sphere, schools, the media, and elsewhere, sometimes even prohibiting them altogether. Sometimes ethnic groups are forcibly resettled, or children may be removed to be schooled away from home, or otherwise have their chances of cultural and linguistic continuity disrupted.

UN SDG 1 aims to “end poverty in all its forms everywhere”. To what degree does the disappearance of minority spoken languages provide an index for material poverty and related factors? And to what degree might the conservation and flourishing of endangered languages contribute to the broader task of ending poverty and material exclusion around the world?

To what degree can we say that endangered languages have intrinsic value in today’s global economy? What is the purpose of preserving and curating them? How might we determine the value of languages spoken by fewer than 10,000 people in the world? This seminar will address these questions by means of comparison with the ethics of animal conservation and the conservation of “charismatic” species such as polar bears and orangutans.

Through the voices of survivors, human rights activists, judicial actors, and experts, The Condor Trials unravels the secrets of transnational repression masterminded by South American dictators between 1969 and 1981. Under Operation Condor, the regimes of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay closely monitored hundreds of exiles and kidnapped, tortured, murdered, or forcibly returned them to their countries of origin. This cross-border network designed to silence opposition in exile transformed South America into a borderless zone of terror and impunity.

African states have been in flux since long before colonial powers carved up the continent into bite-sized chunks at the end of the 19th century.

In the 60 years since most became independent, new trends have emerged. Some have reflected history, both colonial and pre-colonial, from ethnic rivalries and migrating populations to authoritarian structures, extractive institutions and irrational borders.