1st Edition
Home and International Law Dispossession, Displacement and Resistance in Everyday Life
This book is about home and international law. More specifically, it is about the profound, and frequently devastating, transformations of home that are happening almost everywhere in the world today and what international law has to do with them.
Through three stories of home – the desert home, the lake home and the city home – this book traces how the everyday operations of international law shape the material, affective and imaginative experience of home. It argues that international law’s ‘homemaking work’ is characterised by acts of domination, practices of resistance and the production of unhomely spaces. However, the book also considers whether and how the liberatory potential of international law could be unlocked through the metaphor of home. This book draws from fieldwork conducted by the author in Palestine, Cambodia and the United Kingdom. It takes a global socio-legal approach to home and international law, informed by feminist political theory, feminist geography, home studies and contemporary critical approaches to international law. It is the first academic work to examine the relationship between home and international law.
This book’s global socio-legal approach to home and international law will be of interest to those teaching and studying in international law, socio-legal studies, legal pluralism and legal geography.
Acknowledgements viii
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Ambitions beyond functionality 1
1.2 Purpose of this book 3
1.3 International law and home 5
1.4 Why home? 6
1.5 Key claims and structure of this book 9
1.6 A global socio-legal approach to international law 11
1.7 The need for a global socio-legal perspective 12
1.8 What counts as ‘law’ in a global socio-legal view of the world? 13
1.9 Global legal pluralism, translocal and transnational legalities 15
1.10 A global socio-legal perspective on home and international law 15
2 The concept of home and international law 30
2.1 Introduction 30
2.2 Unravelling home 31
2.3 The ‘ideal home’ and other meanings of home 33
2.4 Towards a multidimensional understanding of home 37
2.5 Connecting home and international law 39
2.6 Home and state 40
2.7 Home, homeland and territory 43
2.8 Home and sovereignty 44
2.9 Home and privacy 46
2.10 Home and order 48
2.11 Home and preservation 49
2.12 Home and the universal 51
2.13 Conclusion 54
3 Desert home 72
3.1 Introduction: at Bayt Amīn 72
3.2 Ba’it/bayt تيب 74
3.3 The law of occupation 77
3.4 Home in Area C 79
3.5 The duty towards ordinary life 80
3.6 The jurisdictional space of home 81
3.7 Demolition 84
3.8 Siege 88
3.9 Surveillance 91
3.10 Invasion 94
3.11 Conclusion 98
4 Lake home 119
4.1 Introduction 119
4.2 Home and the World Bank at Boeung Kak Lake 121
4.3 The development project 124
4.4 Titling 127
4.5 Mapping 128
4.6 Relocation 130
4.7 Home and the global land grab 132
4.8 The World Bank and land grabbing 138
4.9 Human rights and homemaking in the development context 139
4.10 Home and resistance at Boeung Kak Lake 140
4.11 Conclusion 142
5 City home 156
5.1 Introduction 156
5.2 The Heygate Estate 158
5.3 Regeneration 161
5.4 Slow violence in the global city 164
5.5 Home at the Heygate 167
5.6 The financialisation of housing and international law 172
5.7 Beyond brick-and-mortar: rethinking the right to housing 176
5.8 International law and everyday life in the city 180
5.9 Conclusion 182
6 International law and the metaphor of home 200
6.1 The immanence of home 200
6.2 Home as horizon 201
6.3 The concept of home and international law’s encounters with home 202
6.4 The role and value of metaphor 207
6.5 Metaphor in international law 209
6.6 Home as a metaphor for international law 212
6.7 International law as home: limits of the metaphor 214
6.8 Conclusion 216
Index 224
Biography
Henrietta Zeffert is Lecturer in Law in the School of Law, University College Cork, Ireland.
