Intervention is traditionally thought as coercive meddling in affairs that are inherently in the domestic domain of states. Whilst old style intervention continues to exist and is even making a comeback through brutal assertions of jurisdiction and threats, its nature has also profoundly changed as a form of ubiquitous yet often invisible, low-level disruption and even usurpation of sovereignty.

The idea of “interference” has long captured a more discrete concern that sovereignty is being constantly pierced from outside. Most interference is not particularly coercive and the idea that there are matters inherently within the domaine réservé is one that we have increased reason to be wary of on both analytical and normative grounds.

In this context, interference as a distinct prohibition may be making a come-back, notably as a form of denial of self-determination. Global North states, who traditionally sneered at the idea as a misplaced Global South invention, are now fast developing domestic arsenals to combat it.

But the contours of the norm remain murky and the dangers of enforcing it real: what if agendas of non-interference reified a vision of sovereignty that is not, if it ever was, pertinent? What if they reinforced an authoritarian playbook in the name of disrupting loosely labeled “foreign agents”? What if they further stigmatized diasporic communities? And what if the anti-interference agenda was coming full circle: creating a moral panic that ends up destroying any semblance of liberal openness to others?

Key Speaker:

Frédéric Mégret is the Hans & Tamar Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law and Full Professor at the Faculty of Law, McGill University. He was the James S. Carpentier visiting Professor at Columbia Law School (2024-2025), a regular visiting Professor at Sciences Po Paris and a permanent visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law, Copenhagen University. From 2006 to 2015, he held the Canada Research Chair on the Law of Human Rights and Legal Pluralism. He is the author of "The New Interference in Sovereign Affairs and the Discursive Economy of International Law" (Brill) and is currently co-authoring the forthcoming Diasporas and the Making of Transnational Law. 

Chair: 

Dr Maria Varaki is a lecturer in international law at the Department of War Studies at King's College London. Before moving to London she held research positions with the Erik Castren Institute of International Law and Human Rights in Helsinki and the Law Faculty of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She was also an Assistant Professor in International Law at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. Currently she is a Research Associate in 3 Generations of Digital Human Rights, ERC project, 2023-2028, Hebrew University, Faculty of Law.

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