In this episode, Dr Ellycia Harrould-Kolieb (Faculty of Science, University of Melbourne) Professor Karen N Scott (University of Canterbury) and Professor Margaret Young (Melbourne Law School) shared reflections on their experiences at the 2025 United Nations Oceans Conference (UNOC3).
The United Nations Oceans Conference in Nice, France, was a five day event in June involving more than 60 heads of states and governments and over 15,000 participants. Its published outcome, the ‘Nice Ocean Action Plan’ comprises a political declaration (A/CONF.230/2025/L.1) and voluntary commitments which seek to address the grave state of ocean health. Calls to expand marine protection, curb pollution, regulate the high seas, and unlock financing for vulnerable coastal and island nations were advanced in this third summit, dubbed UNOC3, which followed previous conferences in New York (2017) and Lisbon (2022). Alongside the ‘blue zone’ of government delegations and the ‘green zone’ of civil society engagement were side-events in universities and other organisations. The three speakers of this episode – academics in Australia and New Zealand – attended UNOC3 in various research capacities and present their reflections and critical perspectives.
This event was organised by the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH), Melbourne Climate Futures (MCF), the International Law Association (Australian branch) and the Oceans and International Environmental Law Interest Group (OIELG) of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law (ANZSIL).
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In this episode, Dr Ellycia Harrould-Kolieb (Faculty of Science, University of Melbourne) Professor Karen N Scott (University of Canterbury) and Professor Margaret Young (Melbourne Law School) shared reflections on their experiences at the 2025 United Nations Oceans Conference (UNOC3).
The United Nations Oceans Conference in Nice, France, was a five day event in June involving more than 60 heads of states and governments and over 15,000 participants. Its published outcome, the ‘Nice Ocean Action Plan’ comprises a political declaration (A/CONF.230/2025/L.1) and voluntary commitments which seek to address the grave state of ocean health. Calls to expand marine protection, curb pollution, regulate the high seas, and unlock financing for vulnerable coastal and island nations were advanced in this third summit, dubbed UNOC3, which followed previous conferences in New York (2017) and Lisbon (2022). Alongside the ‘blue zone’ of government delegations and the ‘green zone’ of civil society engagement were side-events in universities and other organisations. The three speakers of this episode – academics in Australia and New Zealand – attended UNOC3 in various research capacities and present their reflections and critical perspectives.
This event was organised by the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH), Melbourne Climate Futures (MCF), the International Law Association (Australian branch) and the Oceans and International Environmental Law Interest Group (OIELG) of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law (ANZSIL).
In this episode, Dr Daniel McLoughlin (UNSW) presents on Giorgio Agamben’s Covid Critique and the Homo Sacer Project. This seminar was chaired by Dr Richard Joyce.
On the 26th of February 2020, Giorgio Agamben published a short piece on his personal website, entitled ‘Invention of an Epidemic,’ which argued that the Italian state was exploiting the appearance of COVID-19 to govern by emergency decree. Over the following year, he went on to criticise the use of masks, compared the “Green Pass” to the Yellow Star, and argued that academics teaching online were the “perfect equivalent” of Nazi collaborators. Agamben’s work has been enormously influential in critical legal theory over the past two decades. However, these interventions generated a great deal of criticism, with commentators accusing him of peddling “critical-cum-conspiracy theory,” and urging us to “forget about Agamben.” This paper analysed Agamben’s interventions around the pandemic and their relationship to his philosophical critique of law and politics. It argued that they illustrate limits to his analysis of sovereignty and his concern with the politics of totalitarianism, as they have the potential to play into a politics that presupposes a virtuous liberal status quo that has been lost and needs to be restored. There are, however, two aspects of Agamben’s thought in the Homo Sacer project that mitigate against this conceptual danger: his deconstruction of the concepts that underpin the legitimacy of the modern democratic state; and his analysis of the relationship between liberal democracy, biopolitics, and governmentality. Daniel McLoughlin’s claim is that these issues, taken together, have generated the much-noted proximity between Agamben’s critique of the response to COVID, and that of the far right.
The IILAH Podcast
In this episode, Dr Ellycia Harrould-Kolieb (Faculty of Science, University of Melbourne) Professor Karen N Scott (University of Canterbury) and Professor Margaret Young (Melbourne Law School) shared reflections on their experiences at the 2025 United Nations Oceans Conference (UNOC3).
The United Nations Oceans Conference in Nice, France, was a five day event in June involving more than 60 heads of states and governments and over 15,000 participants. Its published outcome, the ‘Nice Ocean Action Plan’ comprises a political declaration (A/CONF.230/2025/L.1) and voluntary commitments which seek to address the grave state of ocean health. Calls to expand marine protection, curb pollution, regulate the high seas, and unlock financing for vulnerable coastal and island nations were advanced in this third summit, dubbed UNOC3, which followed previous conferences in New York (2017) and Lisbon (2022). Alongside the ‘blue zone’ of government delegations and the ‘green zone’ of civil society engagement were side-events in universities and other organisations. The three speakers of this episode – academics in Australia and New Zealand – attended UNOC3 in various research capacities and present their reflections and critical perspectives.
This event was organised by the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH), Melbourne Climate Futures (MCF), the International Law Association (Australian branch) and the Oceans and International Environmental Law Interest Group (OIELG) of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law (ANZSIL).
