Dr Henrietta Zeffert publishes new book

26 Apr 2024

'Home and International Law: Dispossession, Displacement and Resistance in Everyday Life' is a book about home and international law.

More specifically, it is about the profound, and frequently devastating, transformations of home that are happening almost everywhere in the world today, and what international law has to do with them. Through three stories of home – the desert home, the lake home, and the city home – the book traces how the everyday operations of international law shape the material, affective and imaginative experience of home. It argues that international law’s ‘homemaking work’ is characterised by acts of domination, practices of resistance and the production of unhomely space, and that its homemaking (unmaking and remaking) work is entangled with a global logic of dispossession. However, the book also considers whether and how the liberatory potential of international law could be unlocked through the metaphor of home. This book draws from Dr Zeffert’s fieldwork in Cambodia, Palestine and the United Kingdom. It takes a global socio-legal approach to home and international law, informed by feminist political theory, feminist geography, home studies and contemporary critical approaches to international law. This is the first academic work to examine the relationship between home and international law. The book should be of interest to scholars of international law, human rights, socio-legal studies, law and geography, and global legal pluralism.