By Ahana Datta
Last year, the Kent Graduate Law Student Conference took place jointly with the Kent Critical Law Society Student Conference bringing together the talents and efforts of the undergraduate and postgraduate law student communities. It commenced with an extraordinary speech by Professor Lydia Hayes remembering the untimely death of our beloved lecturer Dr Alex Magaisa. Acknowledging that he would not want us to be mourning, we proceeded with our examination of Sovereignty, a subject Dr Magaisa was very passionate about.
The theme of the conference was ‘Revisiting the Meaning of Sovereignty’. As perplexing as it sounds, this broad topic included a wide spectrum of papers dealing with global governance and the state, financial crisis, cryptocurrency, climate change, sovereign interests, and theoretical troubles with sovereignty. The conference panellists included undergraduate law students, postgraduate law students and PhD researchers from different universities and countries. Celebrating its 10th anniversary, this was the first time this annual conference took place in hybrid form allowing panellists and participants to take part both online and in-person.
The first day of the conference started with an infamous quote by one of the presenters ‘‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’’. It was an eye-opening start to the first panel chaired by Sebastian Payne that covered the relationship between the state and global governance. The next panel chaired by Dr Josipa Saric explored sovereignty in relation to issues raised by cryptocurrencies, AI, and financial crises.
The final panel of the day chaired by Lara Tessaro dealt with the interplay between climate change and sovereignty. Papers considered the relationship between Global North and Global South countries and the impact of non-state actors on climate change, thus exploring how the concept of sovereignty relates to questions of climate change. The first day of the conference proved to be very enriching and fulfilling as it gave interesting insight into a topic easily assumed to be of narrow scope.
Day Two of the Conference was noteworthy as the keynote lecture was given by Dr Daniel Matthews from the University of Warwick who spoke about how sovereignty, an organising principle for modern law and politics, depends on a particular aesthetics that ensures that the way we see, feel, and order the world distances the realities of climate change.
The first panel of Day 2 was chaired by Dr Shahd Hammouri. The panellists discussed how sovereign interests have shaped international law, considering topics such as transnational crime and migration. The final panel that consisted of PhD researchers interrogated the concept of sovereignty by drawing on knowledge from non-Western contexts.
The conference concluded with a sense that sovereignty, our subject of analysis, provides us with the wrong pair of glasses to consider alternate ways of ordering our world and that re-thinking how we engage with it could lead to viable solutions to our global problems.
As a member of the conference organising committee, I found the conference a beautiful experience, both enlightening and enriching every step of the way. The journey of organising it resembles a bag full of spices, challenges, and mixed emotions that was conceived by motivated members and supported by our lecturer who led us until the very end. Like every journey, it is inevitable that we would stumble upon obstacles, but I felt that I could endure and overcome these challenges with the help of my team members. Their unfaltering optimism and cooperation made my participation in the organising committee worthwhile.
My advice for future students considering organising the annual Kent Graduate Law Student Conference: there is never enough time!
Members of the 2022 Organising Committee:
Sabah Alam
Husein Aldoseri
Chikanso Aroyewun
Ahana Datta
Olanrewaju Folarin
Shahzeb Khan
Aleksandra Kujawinska
Okechukwu Osuji Collins
The next annual conference will take place on 5-6 June 2023. All welcome to attend!