Colonialism in EU Law: Writing Legal Histories for the Future (ColonyEU)
This project aims to expand the geography and history of EU law and draw out the threads that tie it into a broader fabric of global law and regional integration, by focusing on practices of injustice and resistance in different locations past and present.
This project will explore the interplays of European integration and global ordering. In many debates about past and present, bygone Europe has featured as a domineering agent in the history of impassive others – while the contemporary European Union appears as a diligent exporter of norms with flickering geopolitical powers. Drawing together scholars with different geographical focal points and interest in both the past and the present, we seek to de-internalise these Eurocentric assumptions about the legal making of Europe and its purported making of the world. Through concrete case studies, this workshop will bring together scholars from different fields to collectively tell a story of how global practices of injustice and resistance have made, and can remake, the law of today.
Interplays of Integration Workshop
Organised around five panels exploring integration, distribution, sea, land, and violence, the workshop will explore interplays between the European and the global through concrete case studies of injustice and resistance:
Integration
- Hon. Mr. Justice Winston Anderson (President of the Caribbean Court of Justice)
- Hanna Eklund (University of Copenhagen)
- Idriss Fofana (Harvard Law School)
- Patricia Ouma (Leiden University)
Distribution
- Arnulf Becker Lorca (European University Institute)
- Deval Desai (Edinburgh Law School)
- Emily Marker (Rutgers University)
Sea
- Claire Kilpatrick (Queen’s University Belfast)
- Joanne Scott (European University Institute)
- Vonintsoa Rafaly (University of Gothenburg)
- Surabhi Ranganathan (University of Cambridge) tbc
Land
- Nadège Compaoré (University of Toronto)
- Leticia Díez Sánchez (Maastricht University)
- Vera Pavlou (University of Glasgow)
- Marc Steiert (Max Planck Institute for Legal History & Legal Theory)
Violence
- Fatima Ahdash (Hamad Bin Khalifa University)
- Sebastian von Massow (University of Copenhagen)
- Janine Silga (Dublin City University)
- Lionel Zevounou (L'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales)
The workshop is co-convened by the University of Copenhagen in collaboration with the Academy of European Law, with support from CECS, and will be held in December 2026 at the European University Institute, Florence.
Researchers
| Name | Title | Phone | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hanna Eklund | Assistant Professor - Tenure Track | +4535333385 | |
| Sebastian von Massow | Postdoc | +4535334220 |
External researcher
Marc Steiert, Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory
Funding
1 January 2025 – 31 March 2028
PI: Hanna Eklund
Independent Research Fund Denmark, with generous support from the Centre for European, Comparative, and Constitutional Legal Studies, UCPH.