The workshop Informed, ignorant, or indifferent? Knowledge of international and European law since 1945 examines the historical dynamics through which knowledge of international and European law has been produced, transmitted, and contested in the postwar era and how they have been received in national legal orders.
Considering both knowledge and ignorance as important phenomena in the shaping of legal orders, the workshop will explore how authority, expertise, and precedent are constructed, how legal concepts circulate across linguistic and institutional boundaries, and how law is institutionalized in education, administration, and professional practice.
Programme
18 June
8:45 – 9:15 Welcome
9:15 – 9:45 Intro
9:45 – 11:45 Panel 1
Teaching International Law in Colonial Context: the Rechtshoogeschool in Batavia as a Site of Mutual Influence (Wiebe Hommes, University of Amsterdam)
From Philological Research to International Law: The Greater India Society and the Roots of Sovereign Perpetuity (Arnab Dutta, University of Groningen)
Making Human Rights Legal Knowledge: Pen-Chun Chang, Confucian Ethics and the Invisible Networks behind the UDHR (Yanwen Wang, Sapienza University of Rome)
11:45 – 12:45 Lunch
12:45 – 14.15 Panel 2
Disciplining “Terra Incognita”: Academic Reconstruction, International Legal Studies, and the US Philanthropy in the Age of Anti-Colonial Legalism (1950s-1970s) (Soheil Ghasemi, Geneva Graduate Institute)
“Sovereign but Uninformed?” International Law, Economic Sovereignty, and the Neocolonial Condition in Postcolonial States (George Forji Amin, York St John University)
14:15 – 14.30 Break
14:30 – 16:00 Panel 3
Paving the Way for Incorporating the ECHR: Epistemic Mobilization among elites in Scandinavia (Johan Karlsson Schaffer, University of Gothenburg)
Between Activism and Authority: Women’s legal Networks and the Circulation of International Law (Emanuele Monaco, University of Bologna)
19 June
9:15 – 11:30 Panel 4
Producing, Disseminating, and Mobilising Knowledge on the European Common Market through Private Organisation: The Union Douanière Européenne as the Epistemic Community in the 1930s (Jiaxin Li, Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt)
Cognitio Irus Prodest: Making the law Work for Profit (Lola Avril, Sorbonne University, Paris, and Emilia Korkea-aho, University of Eastern Finland)
Geopolitics of Legal Knowledge: Production and Reception of International law in the Post-Soviet Global East (Lucia Leontiev, European University Institute, Florence)
11:30 – 12:30 Lunch
12:30 – 14:00 Panel 5
EEC Social Security Regulation in the 1960s: Spreading New Rules through Old Migrant Aid Networks (Madeleine Dungy, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim)
Administrative Translation of Refugee Rights: Bureaucratic Reinterpretations of International Law in European Migration Governance (Ekin Deniz Uzun, Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University)
14:00 – 14:30 Conclusion
Registration
Please register by 10 June.
Call for papers
The deadline for submissions was 1 December 2025. Read the full call for papers here.