By Claire Walls (LLM Student, International environmental law)
On Tuesday the 22nd of March, LLM students taking International Human Rights module had the pleasure of being taught by Dr Robert Knox, who gave a lecture and attending the seminars concerning ‘The Poor’. Dr Robert Knox is currently a lecturer in Law at the University of Liverpool. His research interests lie in critical and Marxist legal theory, focusing on imperialism and its relationship with International law.
The LLM students were given a draft of Dr Knox’s essay titled ‘Marxist Theories of International Law’ to read in preparation for the lecture. This essay will appear in The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law, edited by Anne Orford and Florian Hoffmann (forthcoming). During his lecture, Dr Knox discussed the reasons and logics underpinning global poverty and argued that rather than being accidental, as it is often perceived, poverty is a systematic outcome of the capitalist political economic model underpinning the current international order.
Dr Knox pointed out that traditional human rights accounts often consider poverty as an anomaly which can be remedied through charity or legislative intervention, despite it being omnipresent. He suggested that poverty can be considered instead as an intractable problem created by capitalism. Following Marxist theory, Dr Knox underlined the ‘inevitability’ of poverty in a society organised around profit and growth.
Capitalism was born in Europe, following the Industrial revolution. This led to the rise to the idea of property, separating those who owned and those who did not. The latter, who had previously relied on common goods were forced to become labourers. According to Marxist thought, this precise economic and social structure born from capitalist relationships can be seen as the origin of a particular type of legal relations that, in themselves, aimed at profit and growth maximization. Law functions, in this sense, as a means of crystallising inequalities and disproportionately affecting ‘the poor’ as illustrated by the following quote by Anatole France:
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
In his lecture, Dr Knox suggested that there are three usual avenues to conceptualized the relationship between poverty and human rights. The first suggests that human rights, and formal legal and institutional structures, are not directly implicated in the production of poverty and therefore they do not have a ‘direct role’ to play in addressing it. The second considers human rights to be a tool to ameliorate poverty, which it is considered as coming from external factors. The third position posits that poverty is a violation of Human Rights, particularly because poverty is produced by State driven decisions or inaction. Dr Knox explained the latter by pointing out how capitalism and globalisation had led to a weakening of the State’s ability to interfere in economic and social matters. This is problematic to human rights lawyers who aim to use the State as a tool to re-distribute resources and to reduce asymmetries of power amongst nationals. For Dr Knox, however, this latter position, although extremely important, it continues to neglect the deeper connection that exist between the production of poverty and the idea of law, that underpins human rights. An evidence of this is the continuous inability of human rights to fundamentally challenge the global structures that, on a daily basis, generate even higher levels of maldistribution of resources.
During the seminars the discussion focused on imperialism and globalisation and their link to poverty and international law. Marxist legal theory considers (liberal) law to be the outcome of a particular arrangement of social relations predicated on exclusion and exploitation and which started in Europe and later expanded across the world through the process of imperial expansion. International law can be seen, from this perspective, as the outcome of imperialism – an argument advanced by many Marxists scholars including Susan Marks, author of ‘Human Rights and the Bottom Billion’, an article published in the European Human Rights Law Review and which was discussed during the seminars.
The discussions during the seminars, led by Dr Knox and Dr Eslava, the module convenor of the International Human Rights Law course, explore the issues associated to conceiving law as being purely a product of the mind and not a product of particular social, as well as material, arraignments. Missing this forecloses the possibility of understanding how law, in trying to solve a problem, often ends up crystallising and reproducing the same problem, as it has arguably been the case with poverty.
It was pointed out by a student that Human rights is at odds with reducing poverty as it focuses on the end result, failing to concentrate on the reasons for poverty, in particular the economic structures that are at the origin of the organisation of today’s society.
Dr Knox’s talk was part of a series of guest lectures that formed the second of three parts of the International Human Rights Law module. Each guest lecture focused on a specific subject (ie. The Citizen, The Refugee, The Worker, The Woman and The Poor) and its relationship with international human rights law. The guest lectures offered from their own research critical insights into the ways in which the field of international human rights law constitutes and tries to negotiate the claims and needs of these subjects.