This book explores recent developments in the concept of hybridity through a multi-disciplinary perspective, bringing ideas about legal plurality together with the fields of peace, development and cultural studies. Analysing the concepts of hybridity and hybridization, their history, their application in law and legal studies, and their implications for thinking and rethinking legal plurality, the book shows how the concept of hybridity can contribute to an understanding of the processes that occur when different normative or legal orders or frameworks confront each other.

This book explores recent developments in the concept of hybridity through a multi-disciplinary perspective, bringing ideas about legal plurality together with the fields of peace, development and cultural studies. Analysing the concepts of hybridity and hybridization, their history, their application in law and legal studies, and their implications for thinking and rethinking legal plurality, the book shows how the concept of hybridity can contribute to an understanding of the processes that occur when different normative or legal orders or frameworks confront each other.

The United Nations Human Rights Council was created in 2006 to replace the UN Commission on Human Rights. The Council's mandate and founding principles demonstrate that one of the main aims, at its creation, was for the Council to overcome the Commission's flaws. Despite the need to avoid repeating its predecessor's failings, the Council's form, nature and many of its roles and functions are strikingly similar to those of the Commission. This book examines the creation and formative years of the United Nations Human Rights Council and assesses the extent to which the Council has fulfilled its mandate. International law and theories of international relations are used to examine the Council and its functions. Council sessions, procedures and mechanisms are analysed in-depth, with particular consideration given to whether the Council has become politicised to the same extent as the Commission. Whilst remaining aware of the key differences in their functions, Rosa Freedman compares the work of the Council to that of treaty-based human rights bodies. The author draws on observations from her attendance at Council proceedings in order to offer a unique account of how the body works in practice. The United Nations Human Rights Council will be of great interest to students and scholars of human rights law and international relations, as well as lawyers, NGOs and relevant government agencies.

This three-volume anthology comprises diverse intellectual responses to the Hamas-organised day of murder, sexual violence and kidnapping.

Responses to 7 October: Antisemitic Discourse focuses on the ideology that motivated it and the antisemitism that shaped many responses to it. It examines the provenance of the Jew-hatred, from English history to Palestinian Islamism; from toxic 19th century ‘Jewish Question’ rhetoric to the perversion of the Trotskyist tradition that allowed parts of the left to embrace antisemitism. It includes Howard Jacobson’s lecture of 22 October on antisemitism and it focuses on what was significant about this attack. There is discussion from Britain, Germany, Poland, and Norway, and a linguistic account of responses.

Responses to 7 October: Law and Society begins with a legal, and a genocide studies critique of the claim that Israel is genocidal; another reflects on the absence of an understanding of antisemitism in international legal discourse. There are reflections on experiences in the Palestine solidarity movement and on the twists that discourse there takes. Contributions draw on Judaism, feminism, and sociology to face what happened and to trace how Israelis were transported back to a quintessentially pre-Israel Jewish experience. Others survey reports of antisemitism around the globe in the wake of 7 October, including pieces about Britain and Germany.

Responses to 7 October: Universities focuses on the heartland of contemporary antisemitic thinking, which is scholarship; and its reflection in student discourse on campus. Contributions go back to Sartre and to debates of Marx’s time; another looks at the New Left forged in the civil rights movement, and shows how antisemitic responses to the 2023 violence were anticipated by some of the responses to the 1967 Arab League aggression. The feminist movement and ‘progressives’ more generally come under scrutiny, and there is analysis of antisemitism on campus after 7 October, showing how it is tolerated and protected there; including in archaeological attempts to deny that there is an ancient Jewish history in Israel.

As a set or individually, these important volumes will appeal to scholars, students and activists with an interest in antisemitism, Jewish studies and the politics of Israel.

Table of Contents

Responses to 7 October: Antisemitic Discourse

Introduction

Rosa Freedman and David Hirsh

Editor’s Note

1. What has changed?

Anthony Julius

2. 7 October and the precariousness of being Jewish

David Hirsh

3. Introduction to Howard Jacobson’s chapter

David Hirsh

The text of Howard Jacobson's LCSCA Robert Fine Memorial Lecture, 22 October 2023

Howard Jacobson

4. The Ideology of Mass Murder

Jeffrey Herf

5. Echoes of the Past: Understanding Today's Antisemitism Through a Medieval Lens

Flora Cassen

6. Where are Jews at home?

Robin Douglas

7. Disenchanting Palestine: Moralism and Hyperpolitics in the aftermath of October 7th

Matthew Bolton

8. ‘Little Short of Lunatics’: Post-Trotsky Trotskyism and the radical Left’s degenerate response to 7 October

Alan Johnson

9. October Reflections: Antisemitism, Antizionism and the Jewish Question

David Seymour

10. The German Press, Israel, and October 7, 2023: Initial research findings on reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Jonas Hessenauer and Lukas Uwira

11. The King’s “No”: Anti-Israelism and antisemitism in Norway after the 7 October massacre

Torkel Brekke

12. A View from the “Second World”: Holocaust and Colonialism in Contemporary Contexts of Eastern Europe

Anna Zawadzka

13. ‘It’s all about context’: Antisemitism in the discursive space post 7 October

Yaron Matras

Responses to 7 October: Law & Society

Foreword: 'My grandmother was killed in a pogrom. Then my daughter was, too'

Ilan Troen

Introduction

Rosa Freedman and David Hirsh

Editor’s Note

1. International Law and the Conflict in Gaza

Robbie Sabel

2. The Holocaust, Genocide, and October 7th

Philip Spencer

3. International Law Is Not Antisemitism-Proof

Ulf Haeussler

4. ‘But Israel claims to be a democracy!’ – Hypocrisy, double standards, and false equivalences

Eric Heinze

5. A Visit to Kibbutz Kfar Azza, November 28, 2023: Reflections on the Jewish Present and the Jewish Past

John Strawson

6. From the River to the Sea

Jeffrey Herf

7. Indecent Jewish theology, post October 7th: the G-d of the bathroom floor

Yehudis Fletcher

8. Collective Trauma and Resilience for the Jewish People in the Aftermath of 7th October

Leslie Morrison Gutman and Samuel D. Landau

9. After the Pogrom: A shift in the Jewish Configuration

Danny Trom and Bruno Karsenti

10. Global Leaders, Experts Must Reject Surging Antisemitism and Affirm Jews’ Equal Rights

Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights

11. Antisemitic Reactions to October 7: The German Case

Julius Gruber, Bianca Loy, Daniel Poensgen

12. The worst month in my lifetime for UK antisemitism

Jack Omer-Jackaman

Responses to 7 October: Universities

Introduction

Rosa Freedman and David Hirsh

Editor’s Note

1. ‘A Tool to Advance Imperial Interests’: Leftist Self-Scrutiny and Israeli Wrongdoing

Eric Heinze

2. Thinking with and against Sartre about Reactions to the October 7th Pogrom

Chad Alan Goldberg

3. The rise and rise of the ‘Israel Question’

Daniel Chernilo

4. Jewish “Whiteness” and its Effects in the Aftermath of October 7

Linda Maizels

5. A History of Feminist Antisemitism

Kara Jesella

6. The Return of the Progressive Atrocity

Susie Linfield

7. Rain of Ashes Over Elite American Universities

Günther Jikeli

8. The Professors and the Pogrom: How the theory of ‘Zionist Settler Colonialism’ reframed the 7 October massacre as ‘Liberation’

Derek Spitz

9. October 7 and the Antisemitic War of Words

Cary Nelson

10. Ancient Historians Embrace Debunked Conspiracy Theories Denying that Jews are Indigenous to Israel

Brett Kaufman

11. From Eighteenth-Century Germany to Contemporary Academia: Combating the Conspiracy Theory of Antisemitism in Scholarship

Rebecca Cypess

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The United Nations Human Rights Council was created in 2006 to replace the UN Commission on Human Rights. The Council's mandate and founding principles demonstrate that one of the main aims, at its creation, was for the Council to overcome the Commission's flaws. Despite the need to avoid repeating its predecessor's failings, the Council's form, nature and many of its roles and functions are strikingly similar to those of the Commission. This book examines the creation and formative years of the United Nations Human Rights Council and assesses the extent to which the Council has fulfilled its mandate. International law and theories of international relations are used to examine the Council and its functions. Council sessions, procedures and mechanisms are analysed in-depth, with particular consideration given to whether the Council has become politicised to the same extent as the Commission. Whilst remaining aware of the key differences in their functions, Rosa Freedman compares the work of the Council to that of treaty-based human rights bodies. The author draws on observations from her attendance at Council proceedings in order to offer a unique account of how the body works in practice. The United Nations Human Rights Council will be of great interest to students and scholars of human rights law and international relations, as well as lawyers, NGOs and relevant government agencies.

In an increasingly complex world, it is more crucial than ever to have a full picture of how international peacekeeping can be a force for good, but can also have potentially negative impacts on host communities. After thirteen years of presence in Haiti, the highly controversial United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti has now withdrawn. The UN's legacy in Haiti is not all negative, but it does include sexual scandals, the divisive use of force to 'clean up' difficult neighbourhoods as well as a cholera epidemic, brought inadvertently by Nepalese peacekeepers that killed more than 8,000 Haitians and infected more than 600,000. This book presents a unique multi-disciplinary analysis of the legacy of the mission for Haiti. It presents an innovative account of contemporary international peacekeeping law and practice, arguing for a new model of accountability, going beyond the outdated immunity mechanisms to foreground human rights.