On 18 May, the IILJ’s History and Theory of International Law Workshops and NYU’s Gallatin School held a virtual meeting on Covid 19 and the Scripts of Emergency Powers. Emergency measures enacted across the planet make it vital that scholars, administrators, and journalists grapple with multiple forms of emergency and the implications for executive power. The scholars convened are experts in emergency and crisis in the context of pronounced inequalities. These include past and contemporary colonial, settler colonial and imperial settings, as well as many others. A historical, transnational and relational perspective that highlights the problematique of ‘the routinization of emergency’ in peacetime, allows for critical questions in the current context, and to closely examine, and where warranted contest, long-term institutional changes enacted now in the wake of the pandemic. Convened and moderated by Vasuki Nesiah, Yael Berda and Karin Loevy.

The IILJ History and Theory of International Law Workshops are presented with the support of the NYU Global Institute for Advanced Study, Project on International Legal Orders and their Histories.