Episode 34: In the Family: Family Tropes in International Law

Susan Marks’ EJIL 36(1) Foreword asks ‘If the World is a Family, What Kind of Family Is It?’. It’s a provocative question for international lawyers, as the trope of the family runs through the discipline in all kinds of complex, even contradictory, ways. In this episode, Janne Nijman (Graduate Institute & University of Amsterdam) interviews Susan Marks (LSE) about her Foreword and the larger project it inaugurates. Their conversation ranges across the three ‘cases’ featured in the Foreword—the human family in human rights law, the ‘family of nations’, and the child as future in climate change debates—and beyond. What are the stakes of employing these familial tropes? What do they offer and what might they mask? What alternative discourses or imaginaries might be available?

The exchange moves through visual as well as textual languages of family, in the form of photography exhibitions (for a glimpse: New York Museum of Modern Art’s ‘The Family of Man’ (1955); the deliberate counterpoint and tribute, Fenix’s ‘The Family of Migrants’ (2025); as well as World Press Photo’s ‘Ties that Bind: Photography and Family’ (2025)). 

Other scholarship mentioned includes Ariella Azoulay’s analysis of the Family of Man exhibition as ‘A Visual Universal Declaration of Human Rights’; Stephen Humphreys’ ‘Against Future Generations’ (from EJIL 33(4), Nov 2022); Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004); Jodi Dean’s Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (2019); and Janne Nijman’s ‘Grotius’ Imago Dei Anthropology: Grounding Ius Naturae et Gentium’ in Koskenniemi et al (eds), International Law and Religion: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (2017).