Globalization, Law & Justice Workshop: Susan Marks

 The human rights movement has traditionally focused on documenting abuses, rather than attempting to explain them. In recent years, however, the question of the ‘root causes’ of violations has emerged as a key issue in human rights work. This paper examines this new (or newly insistent) discourse of root causes. While valuable, it is shown to have significant limitations. It foreshortens the investigation of causes; it treats effects as though they were causes; and it identifies causes only to put them aside. With these points in mind, the paper counterposes an alternative approach in which the orienting concept is not root causes, but ‘planned misery’.

Susan Marks is Professor of International Law at the London School of Economics. She is a graduate of the University of Sydney, and holds an LLM and PhD from the University of Cambridge. She joined the LSE in 2010, having previously taught at King’s College London and the University of Cambridge. Her research is concerned with international law and human rights. She is the author of The Riddle of All Constitutions (2000) and (with Andrew Clapham) International Human Rights Lexicon (2005) and the editor of International Law on the Left (2008).