Rethinking the nexus between legality and violence in (il)liberal democracies

Zusatztext

This book explores how legalityoften hailed as the cornerstone of democracies, late capitalism, and the liberal international orderis mobilized within International Relations. Law is frequently viewed as a resource to pacify an anarchical international environment, a means to end war, reduce migrant deaths, combat bad governance, or prevent global warming. In this edited volume, we invert the assumed relationship between legality and injustices by asking to what extent law enables violence: from migrant deaths to lives lost in the name of freeing populations under a socalled global rule of law. While critical scholars have highlighted how law can produce violence, they have typically focused on discriminatory practices or the instrumentalization of law, without fully examining how these practices are maintained through appeals to laws formal structures and the legitimacy they confer. This edited volume brings together empirical and theoretical contributions that interrogate how legality is used to justify and enable violence and domination in international politics.

Autorenportrait

Shoshana Fine is Associate Professor of Political Science at the European School of Social and Political Sciences at Lille Catholic University and a Fellow at the Institut Convergences Migrations. She is co-author, with Thomas Lindemann, of La Violence au nom de la loi (Presses de Sciences Po, 2026) and author of Borders and Mobility in Turkey (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Her work on migration, borders, and the politics of law has appeared in Security Dialogue, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, American Behavioral Scientist, Cultures & Conflits, and Politique Européenne.   Sara Dezalay is Professor of International Law and International Relations at ESPOL (Université catholique de Lille). Her research explores the entanglements between law, violence, and global capitalism. She is the author of Lawyering Imperial Encounters: Negotiating Africas Relationship with the World Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2024/2025), which traces the role of law in shaping Africas position in global capitalism. Her recent work also investigates asylum justice and the everyday production of legal violence, building on her experience as an adjunct judge at the French National Court of Asylum (CNDA) and on an ethnographic research project on asylum adjudication funded by the Institut Robert Badinter.   Thomas Lindemann, Agrégé in Political Science, is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin and at École Polytechnique. He has published numerous books and articles on political violence and recognition in journals such as Political Psychology, Review of International Studies, International Political Sociology, International Theory, International Relations, as well as Culture et Conflits and Revue Française de science politique. He is currently conducting research on the algotithmic mindset as a source of international violence.

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