When: Wednesday, April 19, 2023, 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Where: Room 313, Third Floor, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS (Via Westfield Way)

The Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context’s Law and Marxism: Speaker Series is proud to host Nicole Stybnarova (University of Oxford) to deliver a talk on ‘Human Rights Standards of Marriage as Response to the Need to Nudge Capitalist Expansion in the Post-Colonies’.

The talk unfolds how Western standards for marriage, resulting from a historically specific form of industrial capitalism, developed into standards of international law due to the changing form of imperial relations. As ‘marriage standards’, today considered to be human rights: minimum age, freedom of matrimonial consent, joint presence of spouses to the marriage ceremony; these are presently enforced by jurisdictions in the North-Atlantic and by supranational bodies (such as the EU or human rights’ IOs). The effects of these standards in migration- and private international law are then dominantly racialised, depriving subjects from the post-colonies of rights and entitlements. The speaker links this biased effect of the ‘marriage standards’ to the colonial and economic relations at play during the process of the international legal standardization (the adoption of the UN Convention on Marriage). The presentation thus first provincializes and de-universalises the human rights’ marriage standards; second it discusses how colonial relations and their economic conditions continue to define the universalism of human rights.

Nicole Stybnarova is a lecturer in Jurisprudence, International Law and Forced Migration in Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. She is currently a PhD Candidate at the Erik Castrén Institute, University of Helsinki (PhD submission planned for spring 2023). Her research focuses on Migration Law, Private and Public International Law and Critical Social Theory (in particular, critiques of the empire, feminism and Marxism).