MOBILE – Mobility Law Open Lab with Fleur Johns

Consular Internationalism

When COVID-19 brought international travel to a near standstill, consular officers around the world scrambled to assist their millions of nationals living, working, fleeing, or travelling abroad. In this talk, Fleur Johns explains the international legal relations pertaining to consular operations, and in turn how consular relations have helped shape the development of international law.

Guest presenter: Fleur Johns is Professor of Law at UNSW Sydney, Visiting Professor at University of Gothenburg, and Australian Research Council Future Fellow. She is a leading voice on legal theory, and her research spans international law, law & development, and law & technology

Fleur Johns has published five books the most recent of which is #Help: Digital Humanitarianism and the Remaking of International Order (Oxford University Press, 2023). She has a further book forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, co-edited with Gavin Sullivan and Dimitri Van Den Meerssche, entitled Global Governance by Data: Infrastructures of Algorithmic Rule. She serves on a range of journal editorial boards including those of the American Journal of International Law and the journals Science, Technology & Human Values, the Journal of Cross-disciplinary Research in Computational Law, and Technology and Regulation, and is a Fellow and Executive Council member of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

Presentation: National governments’ efforts to assist and answer to pleas from their nationals living or travelling abroad have long shaped international law. States’ attempts to rescue or protect nationals extraterritorially have been central to developments in international law concerning the use of armed force (the jus ad bellum). Concerns of this kind have been at the heart of legal disputes between states surrounding the treatment of incarcerated foreign nationals. And states’ support for diasporic and expatriate nationals, or lack thereof, has significantly shaped global human mobility, and influenced developments in the international legal protection of migrants’ rights. Some portion of the work involved in states’ assistance (or dereliction) of their nationals abroad involves high-level diplomacy and international lawyering among heads of state, foreign ministries, and senior state officials: the typical preserve of international legal scholarship. Much of it, however, does not. A great deal involves the work of consular officials, including some serving in honorary capacities on the fringes of officialdom. Consular officials are often cast as the most workaday of envoys on the international legal plane, in contrast to diplomats and foreign ministers, and scholars of international law have paid relatively little heed to consular work. Against this heedlessness, this article foregrounds those distinctive modes of international legal relation conducted by and through consular offices and officials to which it gives the moniker consular internationalism. As this article will show, consular internationalism propagates views of the international legal plane, its key actors, and relations among them that are quite distinct from, and yet entangled with, those propagated by diplomacy and international law as traditionally conceived.  

In this talk (and related draft article), I foreground consular internationalism for two main reasons. First, I do so by endorsing observations—made by a range of scholars working in diplomatic history and international relations—that consular internationalism is on the rise. Demand for consular services and assistance is mounting in the face of climate change-related and other kinds of global tumult, as well as increased human mobility and an expanding array of communication channels potentially connecting states to their nationals and vice versa while those nationals are outside their home state. At the same time, in-country economic inequality is intensifying globally along multiple axes, meaning that capacities for self-help that some mobile, diasporic, or expatriate communities have been expected to rely on in the face of peril are demonstrably falling short. Scholars’ and policymakers’ (varying level of) attention to inequality has also engendered greater awareness of the plight of those people and communities that have never enjoyed much self-help capacity at all. Second, I pursue a hunch that there may be unrealised possibilities for thinking about international law, and grappling with its effects and dilemmas, from a vantage point “[s]ituated at the interface between the international system and global society”, as consular work is imagined to be. 

The argument that I will advance is that genealogies of consular internationalism reveal a great variety of individuals and sub-national or transnational communities playing a juris-generative role on the international plane, notwithstanding international law’s enduring commitment to reserving international law-making authority to states, international organisations, and adjacent elites. These genealogies also evidence highly uneven distribution of that cross-cutting juris-generative capacity. Those with the means to access and leverage contemporary normative and informational infrastructures at multiple scales – including social media platforms and courts – are best positioned to work through the normative wormholes that consular internationalism punches through the architecture of international legal order, while many have little prospect of doing so. This unevenness is not new, but it bears upon international legal and political relations in new, arguably more influential ways. These suggest that the conventional scholarly and doctrinal view that consular internationalism remains subordinate to and cabined within diplomatic internationalism demands revisitation, and that international legal scholars, and scholars of global mobility in adjacent fields, would do well to attend more closely to the ambivalent attachments, compound inequalities, and hybrid forms of power that consular internationalism foregrounds.

The Open Lab is joint organised by MOBILE and the ERC Starting Grant project DALOSS

Time: 18 April 2024 13:00-14:15

Place: MOBILE – 6B-2-22 Southern Campus + ONLINE

Online participation

For online participation please register using this form. You will receive a Zoom link after you have registered.