This trend, also visible in Russia’s annexation of Crimea and Israel’s settlement policies, reveals a shift from legally disguised expansionism to overt land grabs, while violating different forms of sovereignty: including state sovereignty, Indigenous sovereignty, and food sovereignty. This pattern raises urgent questions about the possibility and limits of international law and human rights to shield against these various forms of land dispossession.

This workshop will address how legal, economic, and geopolitical forces intersect in various processes of land dispossession: we will be attentive to the configurations between state and corporate powers, while also looking at forms of resistance. The goal is to identify how law can be used–– and how we will have to reimagine it to protect the right of peoples to self-determination, communal rights, and public goods in the face of expanding structural violence.

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Please confirm your participation by registering before 4 September 2025.

Programme

09:00 – 09:30 | Arrival & Registration

09:30 – 09:45 | Opening Remarks

Lys Kulamadayil (Geneva Graduate Institute)

09:45 – 11:15 | Panel 1: Authority, Power and the State(s)

Chair: Jens Theilen (Helmut-Schmidt University)

·         Dimitri Van Den Meersche (Queen Mary University)

·         Helena Alviar García (Sciences Po)

·         Mónica A. Jiménez (University of Texas, Austin)

11:15 – 11:30 | Break

11:30 – 13:00| Panel 2: Emptying Lands

Chair: Michele Tedeschini (FU Berlin)

·         Maya Avis (Geneva Graduate Institute)

·         Zeina Jallad (American University of Beirut)

·         Nahed Samour (Orient-Institut Beirut)

·         Henrietta Zeffert (University College Cork)

13:00 – 14:30 | Lunch & Tour of the Exhibition Unsettled Earth (tbc)

14:30 – 16:00 | Panel 3: Capturing Territory

Chair: Khaled El Mahmoud (University of Potsdam)

·         Gail Lythgoe (University of Edinburgh)

·         Christine Schwöbel-Patel (University of Warwick)

·         Neve Gordon (Queen Mary University)

·         Anastasiya Kotova (University of Lund)

16:00 – 16:15 | Break

16:15 – 17:45 | Panel 4: Capturing Common Goods

Chair: Esra Demir-Gürsel (Hertie School of Governance)

·         Tamar Novick (TU Munich)

·         Federica Violi (University of Rotterdam)

·         Usha Ramanathan (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi)

·         Gabriele Wadlig (TU Dresden)

17:45 – 18:00 | Closing Remarks