The reach of intersectionality in Germany has been such that as many disciplinary fields as sociology, cultural studies, ethnology, history, law, philosophy, psychology, migration studies, public policy and of course, gender studies have been touched by it. Whether approached as a theory, heuristic device, method or conceptual tool, intersectionality has been acclaimed as one of the most powerful contributions to feminist scholarship by a number of authors. Numerous feminist scholars …

The European Union admits that its Romani citizens – the continent’s largest ethnic minority – are excluded and denigrated. And the EU seems to be trying to do something about it. Yet the consensus is that the EU is failing miserably. One of the most effective critiques of the Union on this point is that the position of Romani people has actually gotten worse since their countries joined and they …

Patricia Tuitt is a UK based legal academic with a sustained track record of teaching, research and strategic management within the field of critical legal studies. She has written extensively on international refugee law and the European Union, engaging critical race and postcolonial perspectives in various contexts. In this interview, she was willing to speak about her understanding of critical race theory and of its significance for international law. The …

To frame “Race and Law in Europe” involves a set of basic questions: 1) What is Race? 2) What is Law? and 3) What is Europe? The real challenge is to elaborate on the historical, epistemological, sociological and legal connections among these three questions without equating or reducing “race” to “racism”, without reifying law as a monolithic field, and without homogenizing Europe. These themes deserve their own in-depth analyses, although …

The International Criminal Court (ICC) ‘has been put in place only for African countries, only for poor countries…Every year that passes, I am proved right.… Rwanda cannot be part of colonialism, slavery and imperialism’. This anti-colonial sentiment by Rwandan President and newly elected chairperson of the African Union (AU), Paul Kagame, has become widespread within the AU in response to the Court’s overwhelming investigation and prosecution of Africans. Yet, many of …

Introduction Despite anthropology’s troublesome contribution to the colonial project, the discipline as it is today has much to offer to critical race theory (CRT) and postcolonial approaches to international law. Already in the 1930s, Franz Boas and his students began to challenge the Eurocentrism, modernism and colonialism of anthropology. They developed a critique of cultural evolutionism, according to which culture was understood as evolving towards the “Western ideal”. Instead, they …

The conquest of Algeria introduced in French law new chapters pertaining to the treatment of indigenous people. In fact, the French Algeria gained the status of department in 1848 and then, was incorporated into the territory of France with, normally, the application of the Code Civil, the civil law. However, the colonial authorities developed in parallel a set of laws with the intention to exclude native Algerians from nationality and …

Das umstrittene Urteil des Landgerichts Frankfurt zum Flugverbot für israelische Staatsbürger bei Kuwait Airways ist auch in antidiskriminierungsrechtlicher Hinsicht interessant. Es zeigt, wie schwer es Gerichten fällt Antisemitismus unter die Kategorien des Antidiskriminierungsrechts zu subsumieren und ihn in seinen aktuellen Ausformungen zu erfassen. Nicht nur in Deutschland.

The Nazis defined the Jews as a race inferior to the Aryan race, the Khmer Rouge identified the ‘new people’ as enemies with a biologically dissimilar essence, and in Darfur (Sudan), the Janjaweed militia labelled their enemies derogatorily as ‘Zourga’, or black Africans. Seemingly, these victim classifications all have a racial denominator in common. Yet, how does international criminal law in general and the law of genocide in particular define …