FASCISM & the INTERNATIONAL

What/Why:

Fascism and the International is an open collaborative project led by Dr Rose Sydney Parfitt (Kent Law School). It brings together artists and academics of all descriptions, based in Mexico, Sweden, Australia, Colombia, Italy, Indonesia, the US, Brazil, France, Canada, India, Germany and elsewhere.

Their work takes place in an ongoing series of counter-disciplinary workshops aimed at developing a new, sharper set of tools with which to challenge the language and aesthetics of the twenty-first century far-right and develop a more precise, more effective understanding of its historical trajectory.

Where/When:

The first workshop ‘Fascism and the International: Law, Expansion, Hierarchy, Resistance’ was held in 2017 at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City.

The second, 'Speeches Punctuated with Resounding Slaps: Law, Expansion, Hierarchy, Resistance', was organised in collaboration with Australian sound art collective Liquid Architecture, the Italian Cultural Institute in Melbourne and Melbourne Law School’s Institute for International Law and the Humanities. It took place at West Space in Melbourne in 2018.

For the third workshop, entitled ‘(Non)fascist Living, Law, and AI: Actions for Posthuman Anti-Fascist Becomings’, Fascism and the International joined forces with another project, Democratic Participation, AI and Law in the Human+ Condition, led by Matilda Arvidsson (University of Gothenburg). It took place at Handelshögskolan (Gothenburg University’s School of Business, Economics and Law) in December 2022.

Who/What:

Dr Rose Sydney Parfitt is a Senior Lecturer at Kent Law School, where she teaches international law, international humanitarian law, public law, and coaches students who are struggling to reach their full potential.

Rose has been a global faculty member at Harvard Law School’s Institute of International Law and Policy since 2011, and held positions at Melbourne Law School, the American University in Cairo, the LSE and SOAS, University of London prior to her arrival at KLS in 2016. She was a founding member of the ARC-funded International law and the Challenge of Populism project, with Richard Joyce (Law/Monash), Andrew Benjamin (Philosophy/Monash), Kojo Koram (Birkbeck), Sundhya Pahuja (Law/Melbourne) and James Martel (Political Science/SFSU). She also co-directs the ‘International Law and Politics’ Collaborative Research Network at the Law and Society Association.

Rose has published widely in the fields of international law, legal history, critical theory and history of art, broadly speaking, with a particular focus on the relationship between fascism and international law. Her work brings together words, images, objects and sounds – as well as traditions dedicated to analysing words, images, objects and sounds. Its aim in doing so is to develop more effective ways of making sense of the legal past and its material consequences for a human and non-human world — a world in which wealth, power and pleasure are distributed more and more unequally. Her first monograph, The Process of International Legal Reproduction: Historiography, Inequality, Resistance, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.

You can find Rose’s work on fascism and the far-right, together with interventions produced by other members of the Fascism and the International project, on the INTERVENTIONS page of this website.