2025 Sir George Turner Lecture, Part 2.

International law and the human question: Between realism and survival
Presented by: Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui, of the Africana Studies and Research Centre, Cornell University

Crises, conflicts, and wars - in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Congo and more - have put the legal, moral, ethical, and political underpinnings of the contemporary international order into question.

The emerging consensus is that the latter no longer corresponds to the exigencies of the present. Yet, there is no agreement about the causes of dysfunction. Public officials, publicists, and other professionals have alternatively blamed the rules and procedures of the UN Security Council; a putative double standard applied by the West at moments of adjudication; the non-normativity of ‘rogue’ actors, state and non-state actors alike.

But in this lecture, Professor Grovogui will argue that these related arguments are mistaken. He will reject arguments that blame the present course of affairs on the non-effectiveness of international law, its unenforceability, or inconsistencies in its application. Instead he will argue that the problem with both the ideas and practices of international law today is the continuing coloniality of what should have been a post-imperial and postcolonial international order. This is signified by the survival in both law and jurisprudence of dubious moral and ethical constructs that undermine the possible coexistence in international law of universalism, humanism, pluralism and democratic commonsense.

Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui is originally from Guinea, where he attended Law School before serving as law clerk, judge, and legal counsel for the National Commission on Trade, Agreements, and Protocols. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1988. Prior to joining Cornell University’s Africana Studies, Grovogui was professor of international relations theory and law at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-determination in International Law (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Institutions and Order (Palgrave, April 2006). Grovogui has recently completed and submitted a book manuscript titled The Gaze of Copernicus: Postcolonialism, Serendipity, and International Relations (University of Manchester Press). He is working to complete the companion book, tentatively titled ‘Quilombo’s Horizon: Moral Orders and the Law of the Commons.’

Grovogui has received a number of awards including but not limited to 2019 Distinguished Scholar from the THEORY Section of the International Studies Association and the 2018 Distinguished Scholar from the Global South Caucus of the International Studies Association. He has given distinguished and named lectures including the 2019 Imber Lecture of the University of St. Andrews (Scotland, UK), the Nelson Mandela Lecture (Rhodes University, 2021) and the 2023 Africa Day Lecture of the Thabo Mbeki Foundation. He has been awarded several research grants, including by the United States National Science Foundation for research on the rule of law. He frequently intervenes on international events including most recently in Foreign Policy Magazine on Western intervention in Libya and the German Die Zeit on the War in Ukraine. He enjoys teaching and the company of the curious and inquiring. He was recently elected President of the International Studies Association for 2025-26. He also delivered the keynote lecture for the 2024 annual conference of the Turkish Academy of Sciences.