As law and literature reorients itself to the global South and other understudied localities, the question of what remains of the European legacy in the postcolonial conjuncture becomes all the more pressing. In Planetary Gifts of Law and Literature published in Law & Literature, I attempt to address this by reading Nuruddin Farah’s Gifts (1993), a Somali novel surrounding a young Muslim nurse Duniya’s care for a foundling, alongside Immanuel Kant’s writings on cosmopolitanism, enlightenment, and book publishing. My suggestion is that these key exchanges between Farah’s critique of humanitarian aid in late-1980s Somalia and Kant’s classics reflect the importance of (re)staging dialogues between postcolonial literature and the European legacy as we work towards a planetary discourse of law and literature.

A struggle is underway in internet governance between two competing governance structures. The first structure, multistakeholderism, continues in some ways the informality and public-private partnerships that have characterised the internet since its inception. Today however, internet governance is rapidly moving away from its multistakeholder origins towards an alternative structure rooted in multilateralism. I recently analysed the struggle between multistakeholderism and multilateralism, and the role played therein by international law, in ‘Another Swing of the Pendulum? The International Rule of Law and the “Splinternet”’ (published in Rule of Law in a Transitional Spectrum). This blog post briefly outlines the main contours of the struggle analysed in the longer piece.