International Law and the Spectre of Inequality

High levels of inequality within, between and across countries are in significant parts the result of how the global economy is legally structured. In his inaugural lecture, International Law and the Spectre of Inequality, Ingo Venzke exposes the role that international law and its institutions have played, both by design and failure, in relation to inequality. Drawing attention to possibilities in the past, he also argues that it could possibly have been otherwise. Exploiting productive contradictions within the international legal order can support emancipatory politics in pursuit of greater levels of freedom. Those contradictions offer reason to believe that the future will have been open. Engaging with the spectre of inequality in international law turns out to be much less daunting than what might otherwise become.