Helsinki Summer Seminar program

The 25th Helsinki Summer Seminar in International Law is an intensive 11 day seminar directed towards junior scholars – post-doctoral, doctoral and advanced masters students alike – with a keen interest in either the political economic side of international law or the international legal aspect of the global political economy.

With global economic governance, the sovereign debt- and Eurozone crises, and their ramifications occupying the imagination of nigh all contemporary legal, political and economic commentators this summer seminar seeks to provide its participants with a forum for thinking about the intellectual tools by which we are able to understand and explain the world around us. In other words, the aim of seminar is to push critical international enquiry into the realm of explanatory theory, with a view to fostering and developing the contemporary academic debate concerning the analysis of the juridico-economic structure of the contemporary state of international affairs.

The Format of the 25th Helsinki Summer Seminar in International Law:
To establish its aim the Seminar will revolve around its central theme International Law and Capitalism by way of three distinct lines of inquiry:

1. Why Study International Law Differently (Convened by Dr. Akbar Rasulov);
2. Theories of Capitalism (Convenor TBA);
3. Sites of Capitalist Governance;

A) The State (Convened by Professor Günter Frankenberg);

B) International Economic Law (Convened by Judge Dennis Davis);

C) The Political Economy of Reconstruction and Development (Convened by Professor Anne Orford)

In addition to attending lectures given by the visiting staff of the seminar, these lines of enquiry will be explored through writing workshops where participants will be given a sixty (60) minute period to present their own work and receive feedback on these lines of inquiry in a smaller group setting. These discussions will be based on pre-written papers of between 2,000-6,000 words of length addressing one of the three distinct lines of inquiry of the Summer Seminar. Maximum length of eventual submission is 10,000 words.

All lectures, seminar sessions and writing workshops will be held in English.