Grietje (River) Baars

Grietje (River) Baars (they/them) is a Reader at SOAS, University of London, and a founder (in 2020) and co-director of the Centre for Law & Social Change. In 2023 they also co-founded the QTHoMo Collective. They work on the role of law in society, using queer and Marxist theory to understand (and ultimately subvert) the constitutive, ordering and ideological functions of law. Having worked on the political economy of international law, and law's gendering function separately, in their latest project, ‘Queer Subjects of Capital’ they bring the two together. Through research in the Dutch East India Company archives the project provides an historical-materialist analysis of how sex, gender, sexuality, and gendered, sexualised and racialised subjectivity have been and are configured to support the needs of capital, foregrounding the role of law in this process. Theory is nothing if not used to underpin praxis, and River is re-reading past instances of radical queer revolutionary work to help understand and inspire current liberatory and abolitionist organising. 

From their sabbatical at Sciences-Po during the 2019 Gilets Jaunes uprising, followed by the pandemic and Black Lives Matter, River's research has turned to situated ‘law and social change’ questions as described in my Third Text publication and forthcoming work on French liberation movements’ justice claims. 

Their first monograph (The Corporation, Law and Capitalism, Brill, 2019/Haymarket 2020) offers a radical perspective on the role of law in the global political economy, and describes the way international criminal law has been utilised to obscure the economic causes and effects of conflict, through (amongst others) an in-depth analysis of the Post-WWII Nuremberg Trials of the German Industrialists. River co-edited (with Prof. André Spicer of Bayes Business School) The Corporation, a Critical, Multidisciplinary Handbook (CUP 2017) an output of the ESRC funded Critical Corporation seminar series. 

River has a background as a in corporate-commercial legal practice in the City of London (2000-04), in-house with a multinational corporation (2004-05) and as a human rights and international humanitarian lawyer (2006-2010). 

At Al-Quds University (the Palestinian university of Jerusalem) River co-founded the Al-Quds Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Clinic, they led the International Humanitarian Law team at Diakonia, and acted as one of the team of lawyers supporting Justice Richard Goldstone on the UN Factfinding Mission on Gaza in 2009. River has intermediate passive/basic spoken Levantine Arabic, a deep and current understanding of the politics, law and lived experience of Israel/Palestine informed by three years in the region and continues to be asked to consult and organise on the Middle East and its ongoing struggles. 

In 2022 River won the Collegium de Lyon Fellowship which led to a 2023 research stay at the CEntre de Recherches CRItiques sur le Droit (CERCRID) of Lyon 2/Saint Etienne. River is frequently invited to guest lecture internationally on degree courses as well as summer schools, including at Roskilde, Lund, Paris I (Sorbonne), Paris II (Assas), ADH Geneva and the Universities of Antwerp and Amsterdam. They have been a regular faculty member at the Harvard Institute for Global Law & Policy's global and regional workshops River gained their Drs (English Literature) from Utrecht University (1997), their CPE and LPC from the College of Law (1999, 2000), and their LLM and PhD from UCL in 2012.