[Apr 30] A Civilizational Theory of International Law

Date: April 30, 2026 (Thu)

Time: 17:30-19:00

Venue: CRT-5.41

(5/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU)

China's and Russia's permanent seats on the UN Security Council are a direct legacy of their alliances with the liberal western powers in World War I! - a fact which is increasingly obscured in late-liberal discourse. Both China and Russia base key aspects of their contemporary self-understanding in that shared history, and both are formally committed to the fundamental principles of international law as it developed from the First Hague Convention in 1899 to the signing of the UN Charter in 1945. It is evidently tempting, today, for western politicians to reject the dictates of international law in toto. This hostile attitude is due, in part, to many westerners' associations of international law with post-Cold War interpretations of it. But westerners who spurn international law are in fact abandoning a key element of their own civilizational inheritance. A more coherent move would be for the collective west to critically reinvest in its historic traditions of international law.

This would not only reconnect the west to centuries of its own jurisprudence, but would help to reopen a genuinely realistic conversation with Beijing and Moscow. In short, a civilizational theory of international law might help to restore the basic legal principles of the post-1945 order.

This talk will be presented by Dr. David Lloyd Dusenbury and its respondent will be Prof. Ryan Martinez Mitchell. Prof. Mitchell is an Associate Professor of Law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His work on international and comparative law, legal history, Chinese law, as well as legal and political thought has appeared in leading scholarly journals. He is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo and a Council on Foreign Relations / Hitachi International Affairs Fellow in Japan.

For enquiries, please contact Prof. Stefan Auer (stefauer@hku.hk).