Dr. Ronald Jennings received his PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in New York in 2011, and he is currently a Royal Society Newton International Fellow located in the Department of Anthropology at LSE. His work addresses the question of how we should understand the cosmopolitan power to punish the criminal embodied in the new global criminal courts, and whether cosmopolitan law can serve as the basis for what an earlier generation of anthropologists would have called a culturally-neutral global order? His present project, based on SSRC-GSC funded ethnographic fieldwork at the Yugoslavia Tribunal in The Hague, uses the case of Duško Tadić, the first subject of a properly cosmopolitan law, as a lens to raise the questions of how we should understand the new cosmopolitan subjectivities being produced by the immanent institutionalization of a global criminal law and whether our historically-specific modern conceptualization of law is compatible with the maintenance of meaningful local political diversity and the rights of communities to live in a manner in keeping with their own history and traditions. His work argues that, to get at the full implications of this process, we will need to take up the now largely neglected concepts of tradition and authority as a way to make sense of the legacies various pre-modern forms of authority continue to exercise in what is called modern law. The alternative genealogies he has elaborated suggest that scholars would do best to try to understand law through the traditions of legal thought, disputation, and practice that preceded legal modernity, especially the classical republican and Roman law traditions in which virtually every aspect of modern legality (except the state and sovereignty) has a basis. It is argued that, with the first trial at the International Criminal Court, these historically-specific and local forms of authority are now the basis for the global legal system—pre-modern forms of authority which remain vital, even ascendant, in the age of cosmopolitan law.
Dr. Jennings has published in the journal Anthropological Theory, taught classes at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research, and worked as Assistant Editor for the journal Public Culture. He has received major fellowships from the Royal Society, SSRC-Global Security and Cooperation, FLAS, and the MacArthur Program on Peace and International Cooperation Fellow. Before coming to academia, Dr. Jennings received a J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School, where he was a MacArthur Program on Peace and International Cooperation Fellow and specialized in human rights law, and his present academic research builds upon his earlier professional work in the areas of international, human rights and asylum law in South Africa, Cambodia and the US. His work included serving as a Foreign Legal Advisor with the International Human Rights Law Group's Cambodia Court Training Project training judges, prosecutors and court personnel in the Cambodian provincial courts (1995-96); conducting prison interviews and assisting in preparing criminal defenses for apartheid era victims of police torture in the Vaal triangle region of South Africa in the summer of 1994; writing a internationally distributed report on HIV/AIDS labor law and corporate best practice for the AIDS Law Project, South Africa's largest HIV/AIDS legal advocacy organization (based on the organizations precedent setting Constitutional Court victory against South African Airways) (1999-2000); as well as working on a number of projects related to refugee rights and asylum in the US.
Publications:
2011 "Sovereignty, Political Modernity, and Anthropology|: A Genealogy of Agamben's Critique of Sovereignty," Anthropological Theory 11: 1 (2011).
2008 "On the Global Constitutional Meaning of an Indictment of Bashir," Making Sense of Darfur, Alex DeWaal, ed., SSRC Blog, (posted 6/24/08: .http://africanarguments.org/2008/06/24/on-the-global-constitutional-meaning-of-an-indictment-of-bashir/|
2004 "Is there a Political Globalization? Examples from Global Law and the Yugoslavia Tribunal," GSC Quarterly 12
2000 (with Liesl Gerntholtz, Mark Heywood, and Fatima Hassan) Your Victory is Our Victory: The Case of 'A' v. South African Airways: A Guide to Pre-Employment HIV Testing, Business Best Practices and the Rights of South Africans with HIV. Johannesburg: AIDS Law Project, Centre for Applied Legal Studies, University of the Witwatersrand.