How Will the Emerging Plurality of Lives Change How We Conceive of and Relate to Life?

The project “A Plurality of Lives” was funded and hosted by the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies at Lund University, Sweden. The aim of the project was to better understand how a second origin of life, either in the form of a discovery of extraterrestrial life, life developed in a laboratory, or machines equipped with abilities previously only ascribed to living beings, will change how we understand and relate to life. Because of the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the project aim, the project took an interdisciplinary approach with a research group made up of 12 senior researchers representing 12 different disciplines. The project resulted in a joint volume, an international symposium, several new projects, and a network of researchers in the field, all continuing to communicate about and advance the aim of the project

The Life and Times of Targeted Killing

Against the background of the ongoing shift in the perception of the legality and legitimacy of extraterritorial lethal force in counterterrorism, this thesis analyses the emergence of so-called “targeted killing” in the history of Israel and the US, as well as in international law. It finds that the relationship between targeted killing and law, particularly international law, is not a straightforward case of more or less determinate and legally binding norms being applied to state measures adopted in situations of insecurity (in this case, those of the second Intifada and 9/11) but rather one of a much longer and mutually productive relationship. Making use of the work of Roberto Esposito, Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, and with due attention to the particular historical contexts and the legal and political conditions in which Israel and the US took up their policies of targeted killing, the thesis highlights both the general problem of the precarious relationship between violence and law in the sovereign protection of the political body and the more particular question of the mutually productive relationship between targeted killing and international law. The emergence of targeted killing is accounted for by an analysis of the enactment of certain conceptions of sovereignty, law and political community in the articulation of problems and threats; the provision of answers, definitions and interpretations; and the shaping and gaining in importance of practices over time. In the case of the US, the study goes back to the early 1980s; with Israel, it goes as far back as the birth of the state. Recognising that the question of the lawfulness of targeted killing is far from settled, the thesis argues that targeted killing has the effect of renewing international law’s sanctioning of lethal force in an individualising and deterritorialising fashion that defies conceptions of universal and inalienable human rights by either subordinating human rights to the law of armed conflict or by merging the two, with the effect of simultaneously restraining and licensing targeted killing

Demokrati och lagprövning : om rättfärdigandet av en positiv respektive negativ inställning till lagprövning

This article focuses on the justification of a positive and a negative attitude respectively towards judicial review. The analysis is performed by textual analysis of the texts of four authors with different opinions on the subject matter: Robert Dahl and Jeremy Waldron who have a negative attitude towards judicial review, and Erwin Chemerinsky and Ronald Dworkin who have a positive attitude. A theoretical model is being used for the analysis, which consists of different dimensions of the issue of democracy and judicial review. The study shows that there are important differences in the democratic values underpinning a positive and a negative attitude. There are differences of opinion on the balance between democracy as; process or substance, rule by the broad mass of people or rule by an elite, the spirit of the community or the rights of the individual. The analysis also points out that there are differences concerning the comprehension of the important democratic concepts of liberty and equality