Cris van Eijk
@crisveijk
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International law, the (space) commons, and how they're made | PhD @NCLLawSchool | 🇺🇸🇳🇱🏳️🌈 | 🔊: krɪs van aɪk | he/him
Newcastle Upon Tyne, England
Joined January 2012
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By the way, everything I've ever written, every podcast I've done, every conference paper and panel with video record - all of it's freely available at .
Okay, self-plugging done, back to catching up on my inbox.
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@cmclymer
Huh! I didn’t know his origin story, somehow. I just assumed it went something like “cursed garden gnome come to life”??
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Got my ninth PhD rejection today. By the law of punch cards, I think I get a free coffee with the tenth.
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Today, exactly two years after my seizure and coma and all of that, after 11 rejections and a dozen crises... I was offered a fully funded PhD in Law, on 'The Environmental Othering of Orbit'.
I'll wait till it's finalised before I say anything more specific, but I'm *ecstatic*.
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The UN wasn't made to end colonialism; it continued to thrive 2 decades after the Charter was signed. The UN only began to act against colonialism due to work by Third World diplomats. In 1960, the UNGA voted on a resolution on colonial independence; the US and UK abstained.
Yes, many countries used to annex and colonize foreign lands. But we created the United Nations in part to end these practices. With a few exceptions, it worked. After 1945, decolonization marched forward. Annexation happened rarely. Russia is reversing all of that progress.
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An excellent way to honour Benjamin Ferencz's legacy would be ensuring your ~26 year old interns aren't working below minimum wage at an international criminal court.
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Small announcement: I've joined the
@SpaceCourtFdn
as Associate Director of Legal Research & Special Projects! I'm so excited to help expand public understanding of space law, past and present.
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I'm more legal hipster than historian, but I tried my best to make this handy-dandy guide anyway.
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I put a lot into this article. To see it 'out in the wild' is... very surreal.
Cristian van Eijk, 'Unstealing the Sky: Third World Equity in the Orbital Commons', (2022), 47, Air and Space Law, Issue 1, pp. 25-44,
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@rdrimmel
@Astro_Jonny
I tentatively support this!
- it’s public (not secret)
- in diplomatic tone (not military/security)
- led w/ data (enabling expert review, not reporting)
- via UN (not bilateral)
- affirms int’l law
- starts dialogue
- Stresses state responsibility (not corporate liability)
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Confession - I'm partly sad the virtual conferences era is ending because:
1) I lack financial or institutional support to attend the in-person ones and
2) I've grown fond of a lot of people on here that I couldn't pick out of a line-up.
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Just read a 2021 publication by a well-known critical legal scholar. It's fascinating, but across 25 pages and nearly 100 footnotes, they cite 3 women. Each is white and tenured, and one is even mistakenly referred to as 'he'.
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Why aren't UN speeches eligible for Pulitzers??
If you're gonna listen to any speech about
#Ukraine
🇺🇦, let it be this one.
The Kenya ambassador to the UNSC perfectly explains how people across Africa understand Ukraine, and what the Kremlin's acts of aggression mean in our post-colonial world.
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Okay, so now might be a good time for a group re-read of paragraph 139 of the ICJ's 2004 Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory:
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Holy shit this is good.
Grietje Baars' has written this really useful piece: 'the uses of marxist theory of law during a genocide'
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I interrupt my usual space and law nerdery with this potentially upsetting (and way-overwritten) 🧵 on something rather personal. I've tried and failed to write it for months. Please feel free to ignore it! CW: illness, near-death, housing precarity. [1/18]
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Three years later, I'm 3/3.
In 2014, I made three personal goals for myself.
1) Get a poem published to market.
2) Get published in an academic journal.
3) Do a PhD in International Law.
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I’ve been buried in 1960s-70s archives for months. Across 2 decades of terminological change, the claims of Black & colonised people were consistently dismissed with the same word.
“Emotional.”
PS: per UN Secretariat procedure, summary records removed “emotional” language 😬.
This is the condescension and underlying tones of racism we've seen from the Global North throughout this pandemic. The white man is always the calm, rational, pragmatic one with the facts.
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What is 'travaux preparatoires'? Turns out, the answer is more complicated than it might seem!
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Space Debris and the Right to Life: A Thread
While a lot of facts are yet unconfirmed, on 14-15 Nov Russia used a missile to destroy one of its own satellites, last orbiting at ~485 km. This created 1500+ *trackable* debris objects, and countless more too small to track.
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If you're reading a UN doc from ~1955-1975, the words you're reading are almost certainly by women. Most UN interpreters, translators, verbatim reporters, stenographers, & editorial staff were women.
Read their names!
1956:
1972:
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Help, I must find a call for papers in Chicago to meet my nephew.
This is my nephew.
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If anyone else is dealing with a rejection, read the replies to this. It took 12 hours for international law twitter to blow up my Twitter with solidarity and support.
Got my ninth PhD rejection today. By the law of punch cards, I think I get a free coffee with the tenth.
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The first two slides of my guest lecture
@Harvard_Law
for
@Monkeybane_DC
two weeks ago, called 'A Hidden History of the Outer Space Treaty'.
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Had a seizure, gonna need some time to process and recover to walking again - but I’m okay!
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CALLING ALL INTERNATIONAL LAW NERDS: what's your favourite piece of international law trivia?
Currently teaching public international law to a class with a seemingly insatiable appetite for international law trivia and, dear reader, I am leaving my best nerd life AND I HAVE NO REGRETS.
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I’ve been a bit quiet now - working on a very late thing for
@kevinjonheller
(!!) - but. Now that it’s real, I’m very thrilled to say my article will be published in Air and Space Law 47(1) in early February!
180 people have downloaded my draft paper, 'Unstealing the Sky: Third World Equity in the Orbital Commons'.
Thank you so much - it really warms my heart to see so many people interested in the anticolonial history of the space environment!
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It's really shocking how often space law scholarship discusses 'res/terra nullius' as a Roman law concept, and then immediately leaps to the present. There are *centuries* of blood and atrocities in the middle that impact the meaning and morals of those terms.
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I wrote my first article on
@Voe_Blog
on last week's SpaceX news, Martian law, territorial acquisition, and space colonialism.
Special thanks to
@GonzalezHauck
and
@RaffaelaKunz
for helping me publish my first 'real' academic blog post!
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The thing about researching 1960s international lawmaking is that I keep accidentally finding spy rings.
like I am TRYING to learn about the development of multilateral PROCEDURE, but instead I keep TRIPPING over spies in the UN Secretariat-
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Which constitutions claim sovereign rights in space?
- Colombia, art 101
- Bulgaria, art 18
- Ecuador, art 4
- Dominican Republic, art 9(3)
- Venezuela, art 11
-Thailand, s.60: gives right to orbit, a "national treasure"
- Ukraine, art 92(5): space expl governed ONLY by nat'l law
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Hello, ICC? I would like to report a crime against humanity please.
An inclusive lunch before tomorrow's big game. Remember, there is more that unites us than divides us
#ENGITA
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@rdrimmel
@Astro_Jonny
In contrast, on the US side we’ve had space officials undermining space treaties, politicising issues rather than legalising them, making informal accusations that states are attacking satellites, & developing norms in space bilaterally while voting against UN efforts.
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Shoutout to the mental health nurse who, after an hour on the phone last week, miraculously cured my 10 years of chronic depression by deciding I sounded too 'enthusiastic' to be depressed.
Ma'am, I promise you Eeyore himself would seem enthusiastic on 70mg of Vyvanse.
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Excited to join the
@Voe_Blog
team as an Editor!!
Attempt to twitter-mention everyone else involved:
@JustineBatura
,
@etuchtfeld
,
@graaf_vande
,
@KrakauMeike
,
@RaphaelMz86
,
@SchuberthSophie
,
@tdollmaier
,
@HendrikPSimon
,
@CPogies
,
@crisveijk
,
@kuliiiszka
,
@SaigerAJ
,
@NesaZimmermann
,
@ChausseCeline
,
@maliciamercedes
.
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Unions.
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Someday I'll give my students a nice big multilateral treaty to read. I'll ask them things like who wrote what, why, how to interpret it...
Then we'll read declassified memos to see what it was really about: a hundred random political squabbles and Olympic-level face-saving.
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At risk of doing the classic history-nerd thing of “this is just like the 1960s…”, this is remarkably similar to the discourse on the ICJ South Africa cases in the 1960s.
There too, a lot of int’l lawyers (often affiliated with Western gov’ts) worried about ICJ legitimacy.
After The Gambia v. Myanmar this was only a question of time. The Court has opened Pandora‘s box. Irrespective of the merits of this case, the Court will have no choice but to order provisional measures. As in Ukraine v. Russia, the Court’s order will have no effect on the
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BREAKING: Space law matters again! After years of eye rolls, scoffing, and PhD rejections, I hope we can all remember this cultural moment for the future. Or at least for ten minutes. Please?
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I got a peer review back the other day, about something I've been working on for years... and I think Reviewer 2 understood my paper better than *I* do. 🥹
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@AkilahObviously
Was memorizing the periodic table during reading time. Teacher thought I'd forgotten my book, made me stand and recite it. I got to vanadium
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Okay, now that Im off the plane and with flat white in hand, it’s official: I’m in Melbourne!!
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MYTH: The Outer Space Treaty's authors never imagined corporate space actors - therefore it needs updating.
FACT: The OST's drafters *consciously chose* states as the main space actors.
Czechoslovakian Amb. Jiří Hájek said this to the UNGA on 7 Dec 1962 (UN Doc A/C.1/PV.1294)
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The most informed, intricate, and intimate knowledges of space in human history have been by Indigenous astronomers.
Notice how some relationships with space get classed as ‘science’ and funded; others get classed as ‘religion’ or ‘culture’ and are denigrated.
NASA responds to Navajo Nation's request to delay private mission placing human remains on the moon
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Good news: ChatGPT is awful at interpreting (space) law. Every single one of its summaries is a lie, and a few of the years it claims are wrong too.
Bonus good news: I think this means my PhD is AI-proof...
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Who's Using Space? A Chart.
"Each and every one of us, on Earth, is a space user: we believe it is time to mobilize political resources to address this pressing challenge both nationally and internationally, before it’s too late."
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180 people have downloaded my draft paper, 'Unstealing the Sky: Third World Equity in the Orbital Commons'.
Thank you so much - it really warms my heart to see so many people interested in the anticolonial history of the space environment!
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Here's a list of 235+ treaties that apparently do not exist:
“International law” in
#space
does not, as a practical matter, exist. Rules that cannot be enforced are only imaginary. And they are dangerous to those who unilaterally adhere to them.
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What is 'space law'? What does it tell us about the international lawmaking process, and how to read multilateral treaties? What role does history have in governing the future of a space we all share?
Gosh, I wish I knew. But hey, come by and hear me talk about it anyway!
Join Cris van Eijk on Nov. 23rd at 12:30 PM ET and learn about Space Lawmaking!
Cris is an international lawyer researching the international law and history of the outer space commons.
To register:
@westernuLaw
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A few days ago, I broke a long streak of writer’s block and perfectionist paralysis, and (thanks to
@edajones16
& Gina Heathcote) actually published something. More is coming!
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Every dead body in every picture from Ukraine is the worst day of someone's life. Maybe dozens of someones. Maybe hundreds of someones who survived conflict their loved ones did not. Don't just think before you retweet - feel, too.
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Tzouvala N, ‘The Specter of Eurocentrism in International Legal History’ (2021) 31 Yale J. L. & Human. 413
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But it's everything after that broke me.
Losing my flat, finance, & college access. Having to retraumatise myself to strangers to check my mail. Returning after a year to be asked if I'd been on holiday. Becoming a walking monument to my own trauma, so someone would remember.
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This is now a
@UNOGLibrary
archivist fan account.
I sent a random & left-field question to their online form. W/in 48 hrs, they sent:
- a custom Excel of potentially helpful folders I never would have found myself
- a PDF of another folder they'd digitised for me, *just in case*
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@rdrimmel
@Astro_Jonny
(And note that here I’m not speaking to substance - I don’t mean to suggest one actor is acting more responsibly or lawfully in space than another -but form, namely how they addressed and framed the issue.)
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I wrote a lil something for the nice folks
@Voe_Blog
. It's about international law, space, and its 60-year history of perceived irrelevance - and how in the current era, that perception has consequences.
'From where I’m writing in Cambridge; outer space is closer than Oxford. But somehow, space is too distant to ‘matter’ to the international legal mainstream.'
@crisveijk
on
@Voe_Blog
with some astute observations on what counts as the 'core' of IL
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Like 2x/month, a legal scholar I respected reveals they're 'gender critical'. It's well-established that 'GC' discourse has been used to enable authoritarianism, restrict human rights (esp freedom of expression), & hijack feminist political advocacy.
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1) 1st definition of what's now sustainable development: African Convention on Nature & Natural Resources (1968)
2) 1st right to environment: Algiers Declaration on the Rights of Peoples (1976)
3) 1st binding right to environment: African Charter on Human & Peoples' Rights (1981)
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I was wrong, longform tweets were worth it, specifically for this.
Namibia rejects Germany’s Support of the Genocidal Intent of the Racist Israeli State against Innocent Civilians in Gaza
On Namibian soil,
#Germany
committed the first genocide of the 20th century in 1904-1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most
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ANTI-BLACKNESS & THIRD WORLD EXCLUSION IN SPACE LAWMAKING
Did you know that in the 1950s-1960s, the US, and its allies discouraged African governments from attending international conferences?
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See, I for one am still waiting for neoliberals to wipe out poverty by privatising the seabeds.
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Without further ado, here's the 1959 US government proposal to nuke the moon.
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@AkilahObviously
(And for the record, memorizing the periodic table wasn't SO weird back then. Harry Potter was doing it.)
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@scalzi
I mean, it's simple. All you copyright holders just need to stop making drastic federal legal reforms to the copyright syst-
Oh, wait.
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I am, once again, on my way to The National Archives to go find some spacey secrets and whatnot.
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In 2014, I made three personal goals for myself.
1) Get a poem published to market.
2) Get published in an academic journal.
3) Do a PhD in International Law.
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In the 1960s, space language was used to explain colonialism - eg "satellite" states.
In the 2020s, colonial language is used to explain space - eg nearly all 2300 Reddit replies to my blog last Nov.
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1) I'm proud to say my poem "Soffritto" will be published in
@MaysAnthology
this year! Here's a draft version.
2) My editorial with
@Timiebi89
will be forthcoming in
@NewSpace_JRNL
9(1).
3) The PhD is still TBC, but... it's WILD that all could happen within March 2021??
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THREAD: If an international lawyer refers to primary sources (and that is a monumental "if"), we usually do it in a specific way. We chant our magic spell ("travaux preparatoires!"), hit 'footnote', and cite a summary record.
Our "history" often stands on summary. Why *is* that?
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Article 135, Draft Chilean Constitution:
1. The State shall pursue measures to conserve the atmosphere and the night sky, according to territorial needs.
2. The State has a duty to contribute to and internationally cooperate in space research for peaceful and scientific purposes.
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Congratulations to the Vatican, which became the newest space actor 73 days ago. Its first satellite is a 3U cubesat called 'Spei Satelles', and includes a 'nanobook' by Pope Francis.
My Dutch brain and I will endeavour to not misread it as 'spy satellite'.
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If I can stay covid-free for six more days, I can see California again after two years. Just six days. Please.
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Shoutout to
@JessicaWestPhD
and
@planet4589
; without their respective 'space event' live tweets, we'd all be lost.
The joint meeting of the UN
#FirstCommittee
and
#FourthCommittee
is at 10 am ET today.
These two committees each hold mandates related to space, focused on disarmament and international security (C1) and peaceful use (C4).
Watch live:
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Okay, did not expect this tweet to blow up like it did, I'm crying happy tears, you all are lovely.
*looks at above* okay, 99% of you all are lovely.
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Oh my god, this is AMAZING!! (And the chapter is too, if I can say so. Spoiler: turns out space is queer af!!)
Excited to be presenting I paper I co-authored with
@crisveijk
on queer feminist approaches to international space law tomorrow, as part of the
@aflj_
’s 9am panel (sess.6, room 308). Here’s a sneak peak at my cool ~ spacey ~ outfit 🚀💫
@lawlithum
@LawTechHum
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Is orbit a 'resource'? Is it within the 'environment'? Does int'l law compensate env damage to orbit? The ILC seemed to think so.
Two decades after Project West Ford, it was still the ILC's go-to reference in debates on liability & responsibility for environmental harm.
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Since 2017, I've read 52 fantasy novels a year*... but 2020 was what it was.
So, of the 35 I finished, here are my favourites. I loved so many; the rankings are so, so close. So I also did lil superlatives & tagged them with common themes.
* Technically, in 2019 I read 69. Shh.
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Excited to announce that I am able to decide that someone on Twitter's opinion is wrong, without having to tell them so directly and in writing.
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A Jewish man wins his 1st Oscar. In his speech, he discusses his *own & his colleagues'* Jewishness. But 450 people decide he invoked his Jewishness WRONGLY, making his win a "very sad, very scary night".
So they publicly "refute" his 'wrong' Jewishness with their 'right' sort.
More than 450 Jewish creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals have signed an open letter denouncing Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” Oscar speech.
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Had to reread that first sentence a few times till it landed.
1. Many journalists are asking what the Royal family has to do with colonialism. I'll just cover the basics. Elizabeth I gave her ships to English slave trading voyages by John Hawkins in the 1560s. Slave-trading didn't begin in earnest, though, till the reign of Charles II.
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Who were the women of space law pre-Outer Space Treaty?
Rep/Legal Roles:
- Joyce AC Gutteridge: UK Rep. (1962-1964)
- Elisa Aguirre: Mexican Adv. (1964-1965)
- K. Chen: UN Legal Officer (1962-1964)
- Sen. Margaret Chase Smith: US Adv. (1963)
- Sylvia Meagher: WHO Analyst (1965)
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About 8 months ago, I was scavenging the web for early chapters to read in time for a half dozen (eventually unsuccessful) PhD proposals. I cannot overstate how surreal it is to read this!
I wish
@IngoVenzke
and I could have included the essay in our contingency book. It would have been a great addition.
And I wish I had written this sentence: OST Art I "should be read as a battlefield, a site of hegemonic contestation fought with normative weaponry."
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So far, I've found ten women who helped make space law from 1958-1970. Only one was married.
Mrs. Agda Rössel, the 1st woman Permanent Rep to the UN, represented Sweden to UNCOPUOS from 1961-1963. At the time, many states banned (married) women from public employment or office.
@crisveijk
Ambassador Agda Rossel (Sweden) is pictured with Joyce Gutteridge in the UN Committee for Peaceful Uses of Outerspace
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If you're not within the orange your nearest area beyond national jurisdiction is space.
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The differential solidarities the West seems to feel for Ukraine vs other conflicts isn’t actually that complicated.
It’s white tears, always has been. And apparently, they’re stronger than nuclear threats.
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... So this is happening. 😳
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Just popping in to boost this *awesome* symposium, upon which I'm delighted to inflict my most wackadoodle essay yet.
I wrote it in breaks, during meals, before bed... And now, this line exists: "Michael Fakhri and Cris van Eijk then close the first half of the symposium..." 🤯
International Law and Pop Culture Symposium: Introduction
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Four years ago tonight, I was furiously making sure my page number font matched my footnotes matched my body, all of which totalled at 21,500 words. I'd say it's gone okay for me since!
Good luck to all working on end-of-year thesis-y or big project-y deadlines. You can do it!!
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Reading in the sunshine and just generally glad to be alive.
And as a thank you to my mom for the whole helping-save-my-life thing, my hair is back to natural.
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This was *amazing*. Things I learned:
- Critical scholars are funnier than doctrinal scholars.
- TWAIL is an origin story, not a response.
- "Allyship isn't an identity; it's a relationship" -
@SarahRileyCase
We just finished an extremely illuminating and thought-provoking panel on indigenous and TWAIL perspectives on international law at the
@CCIL_CCDI
conference, featuring
@bisi_akins
@JTGathii
@obioraokaforc
@SarahRileyCase
@SaraGhebremusse
and
@Sujith_Xavier
.
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The Oxbridge intermission system doesn't accommodate students with health concerns; it erases them. What's billed as an individual status has become a red flag by my name; no one knows what to do with me. I'm left explaining my trauma again and again, just to gain access.
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In all this it's hard not to feel like a burden. Though I'm the only one who can't remember what happened; I'm also the only one who can't forget it. Who can't move on.
But I'm an alchemist of silver linings. I've just got to keep looking, and I'll find them. Somewhere. [18/18]
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