London Review of International Law Annual Lecture: Moving Oil

Moving Oil

In this talk, Prof. Laleh Khalili will reflect on the world that hydrocarbons have forged and are destroying by examining the maritime transportation of oil over the course of the long 20th century. Moving oil by ships across the world's oceans can act as a lens through which to apprehend the embedding of fossil fuels in the way we work, in the wildly unequal accumulation of capital across the planet, in automation, in financing, and in the making (or breaking) of laws, rules, and regulations around bodies, workers, sovereignty over natural resources, and stewardship of the world's air, earth, and water.

Laleh Khalili is a professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London and the author of Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge 2007), Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford 2013), and Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso 2020).

Tor Krever is assistant professor at the University of Warwick School of Law. His research focuses on the history and theory of international law.

Gerry Simpson was appointed to a Chair in Public International Law at the LSE in January, 2016. He previously taught at the University of Melbourne (2007-2015), the Australian National University (1995-1998) and LSE (2000-2007) and has held visiting positions at ANU, Melbourne, NYU and Harvard. He is the author of Great Powers and Outlaw States (Cambridge, 2004), winner of the American Society of International Law Annual Prize for Creative Scholarship in 2005 and Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law (Polity 2007), and co-editor (with Kevin Jon Heller) of Hidden Histories (Oxford, 2014) and (with Raimond Gaita) of Who’s Afraid of International Law? (Monash, 2016). Gerry is a Fellow of the British Academy.

The London Review of International Law is an Oxford University Press publication