Trump's Assault on Global Governance: Reasons and Consequences

Jason Beckett

Associate Professor, Law Department

The American University in Cairo

Jason Beckett studied law at the universities of Dundee (LLB) and Glasgow (LLM and PhD); and taught at the Universities of Newcastle and Leicester. He initially studied and wrote from the heart of the mainstream, on topics ranging from the Law of the Sea, through the theory of International Law, to the Use of Force, and tried hard to defend a mainstream understanding of Public International Law from the critical challenge. He failed; and, after completing his PhD on the ontology and methodology of Customary International Law, reluctantly accepted that the mainstream project was not viable.

Since then, Beckett has examined both the indeterminacy and the biases of international law. He has analyzed the religious structure of legal discourse and the silencing of non-European White Male voices and critiqued the pursuit of universal truths and justice. His current research focuses on poverty, feminism, cultural pluralism, and the self-justification of mainstream legal analysis. Beckett also analyses the limitations, or futility, of abstract legal critique; and advocates for alternative approaches to international justice.

Nonetheless, he enjoys working with and coaching, University teams in the Telders', Jessup's, and the African Court of Human and Peoples' Rights, mooting competitions.

At The American University in Cairo (AUC), Beckett has taught courses in Public International Law, International Human Rights, Legal Perspectives on the Question of Palestine, and Jurisprudence; and supervised many dissertations in related areas. He always includes current research in his teaching and often develops research projects from his classroom experiences.

He has delivered presentations in Africa, Australasia, Europe, and America, often to some acclaim. But he remains, at heart, a classroom teacher, as attested by more than fifteen years of students.

Amr Adly

Associate Professor, Political Science Department,AUC

Amr Adly is Assistant Professor in the department of political science at The American University in Cairo (AUC). He worked as a researcher at the Middle East directions program at the European University Institute. He worked as a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center, where his research centered on political economy, development studies, and economic sociology of the Middle East, with a focus on Egypt.

Adly has taught political economy at AUC and Stanford University. He has also worked as a project manager at the center of democracy, development, and the rule of law at Stanford University, where he was a postdoctoral fellow.Adly is the author of cleft capitalism: the social origins of failed market-making in Egypt(Stanford University Press, 2020) and state reform and development in the Middle East: the cases of Turkey and Egypt (Routledge, 2012). He has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including Geoforum, Business and Politics, the journal of TurkishStudies, and Middle Eastern Studies. Adly is also a frequent contributor to print and online news sources, including Bloomberg, Jadaliyya, and Al-Shorouk.

Ibrahim Awad