Aesthetics, Emotions and Time in International Law: Re-reading Jurisdictional Immunities of the State (Germany v. Italy) through Objects, Affect and Temporality
(2026) JAMM07 20261Department of Law
Faculty of Law
- Abstract
- This thesis titled ‘Aesthetics, Emotions and Time in International law: Re-Reading Jurisdictional Immunities of the State (Germany v. Italy) through Objects, Affect, and Temporality’ investigates how the aesthetic, emotional, and temporal dimensions of international law shape its legitimacy, authority, and meaning. The central object of the analysis is the International Court of Justice’s 2012 judgment in Jurisdictional Immunities of the State (Germany v Italy: Greece Intervening), wherein the Court upheld Germany’s immunity from civil suit in Italian courts brought by survivors and descendants of Nazi wartime atrocities. The problem this thesis addresses is structural rather than doctrinal, implying that the problem addressed here is not... (More)
- This thesis titled ‘Aesthetics, Emotions and Time in International law: Re-Reading Jurisdictional Immunities of the State (Germany v. Italy) through Objects, Affect, and Temporality’ investigates how the aesthetic, emotional, and temporal dimensions of international law shape its legitimacy, authority, and meaning. The central object of the analysis is the International Court of Justice’s 2012 judgment in Jurisdictional Immunities of the State (Germany v Italy: Greece Intervening), wherein the Court upheld Germany’s immunity from civil suit in Italian courts brought by survivors and descendants of Nazi wartime atrocities. The problem this thesis addresses is structural rather than doctrinal, implying that the problem addressed here is not whether the Court applied the correct legal rule, but that the standards the Court applied are themselves aesthetic commitments with political and moral consequences.
This thesis primarily addresses a persistent and intensifying tension in international legal theory between the formal authority of international institutions and their substantive legitimacy in the eyes of those most affected by their decisions. At a moment when international law faces mounting challenges to its authority from contesting states, excluded communities, and critical scholars, this thesis proposes aesthetic analysis as a method for assessing where and how law’s authority is produced and how that consequently influences its legitimacy. The thesis attempts to make a methodological contribution to international legal scholarship by demonstrating that aesthetic, emotional, and temporal dimensions are not peripheral to legal reasoning but mutually constitutive of it. The Germany v. Italy judgment is a crucial site for this analysis for it sits at the intersection of all three analytical dimensions. It is aesthetically paradigmatic of the International Court of Justice’s formalism, emotionally charged by the acknowledged gravity of unremedied atrocities, and temporally complex in its management of the distance between wartime violence and present adjudication.
The thesis adopts a qualitative and critical methodology that combines a doctrinal analysis of the Germany v. Italy judgment with interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks drawn from aesthetic philosophy, affect theory, and the temporality of law. It treats the judgment not only as a legal instrument but as a material and aesthetic object carefully composed through both perceptual and semantic choices of language, formatting, structure, voice, compositional order, and rhetorical strategy that produce legal authority independently of, and in addition to, the substance of the legal reasoning. Throughout, the primary empirical material is the judgment itself, read closely as a text and supplemented by the dissenting opinion of Judge Cançado Trindade, which is analyzed as an alternative aesthetic that demonstrates the contingency of the majority’s formal choices.
The thesis advances a central argument across three analytical layers, each building on the last. The first layer establishes that the Germany v. Italy judgment’s formalist aesthetic actively produces the authority of the state immunity doctrine. The second layer introduces emotions as a dimension of aesthetic analysis and posits that the judgment performs selective empathy as an institutional technique. The third layer demonstrates that the judgment’s temporal positioning of wartime atrocity as historical background rather than as a living injustice with present legal significance for the victims deepens the authority-legitimacy gap identified in the preceding chapters. The thesis concludes that international law’s aesthetic commitment to doctrinal purity sustains authority while simultaneously undermining legitimacy by suppressing emotion and producing meaning through temporal distancing from violence. This irreconcilability is not a contingent failure of the Germany v. Italy judgment in particular but a structural condition of international law’s engagement with mass atrocity. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9232345
- author
- Alagh, Drishti LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- JAMM07 20261
- year
- 2026
- type
- H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
- subject
- keywords
- Aesthetics, Emotions, Temporality, State Immunity, Authority, Legitimacy, Legal Form, Affect theory
- language
- English
- id
- 9232345
- date added to LUP
- 2026-06-15 09:15:43
- date last changed
- 2026-06-15 09:15:43
@misc{9232345,
abstract = {{This thesis titled ‘Aesthetics, Emotions and Time in International law: Re-Reading Jurisdictional Immunities of the State (Germany v. Italy) through Objects, Affect, and Temporality’ investigates how the aesthetic, emotional, and temporal dimensions of international law shape its legitimacy, authority, and meaning. The central object of the analysis is the International Court of Justice’s 2012 judgment in Jurisdictional Immunities of the State (Germany v Italy: Greece Intervening), wherein the Court upheld Germany’s immunity from civil suit in Italian courts brought by survivors and descendants of Nazi wartime atrocities. The problem this thesis addresses is structural rather than doctrinal, implying that the problem addressed here is not whether the Court applied the correct legal rule, but that the standards the Court applied are themselves aesthetic commitments with political and moral consequences.
This thesis primarily addresses a persistent and intensifying tension in international legal theory between the formal authority of international institutions and their substantive legitimacy in the eyes of those most affected by their decisions. At a moment when international law faces mounting challenges to its authority from contesting states, excluded communities, and critical scholars, this thesis proposes aesthetic analysis as a method for assessing where and how law’s authority is produced and how that consequently influences its legitimacy. The thesis attempts to make a methodological contribution to international legal scholarship by demonstrating that aesthetic, emotional, and temporal dimensions are not peripheral to legal reasoning but mutually constitutive of it. The Germany v. Italy judgment is a crucial site for this analysis for it sits at the intersection of all three analytical dimensions. It is aesthetically paradigmatic of the International Court of Justice’s formalism, emotionally charged by the acknowledged gravity of unremedied atrocities, and temporally complex in its management of the distance between wartime violence and present adjudication.
The thesis adopts a qualitative and critical methodology that combines a doctrinal analysis of the Germany v. Italy judgment with interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks drawn from aesthetic philosophy, affect theory, and the temporality of law. It treats the judgment not only as a legal instrument but as a material and aesthetic object carefully composed through both perceptual and semantic choices of language, formatting, structure, voice, compositional order, and rhetorical strategy that produce legal authority independently of, and in addition to, the substance of the legal reasoning. Throughout, the primary empirical material is the judgment itself, read closely as a text and supplemented by the dissenting opinion of Judge Cançado Trindade, which is analyzed as an alternative aesthetic that demonstrates the contingency of the majority’s formal choices.
The thesis advances a central argument across three analytical layers, each building on the last. The first layer establishes that the Germany v. Italy judgment’s formalist aesthetic actively produces the authority of the state immunity doctrine. The second layer introduces emotions as a dimension of aesthetic analysis and posits that the judgment performs selective empathy as an institutional technique. The third layer demonstrates that the judgment’s temporal positioning of wartime atrocity as historical background rather than as a living injustice with present legal significance for the victims deepens the authority-legitimacy gap identified in the preceding chapters. The thesis concludes that international law’s aesthetic commitment to doctrinal purity sustains authority while simultaneously undermining legitimacy by suppressing emotion and producing meaning through temporal distancing from violence. This irreconcilability is not a contingent failure of the Germany v. Italy judgment in particular but a structural condition of international law’s engagement with mass atrocity.}},
author = {{Alagh, Drishti}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{Aesthetics, Emotions and Time in International Law: Re-reading Jurisdictional Immunities of the State (Germany v. Italy) through Objects, Affect and Temporality}},
year = {{2026}},
}