The analytic move animating Henrietta Zeffert’s Home and International Law is brilliant and original: she deploys home “as a conceptual lens to open up a view of international law” (3). The lens she deploys approaches “home” as multidimensional and complex, “shaped through relationships and based on connection and association, rather than separation and exclusion” (3). Through scrupulously detailed analysis of three case studies, and a theoretically informed discussion of the issues at stake, Zeffert demonstrates how “home” brings into focus a range of social, political, historical and legal forces structuring the many conflicts and crises making and un-making home. Taking readers through “home” as concept, materiality and metaphor, Zeffert’s important book delivers the first ever account of how home and international law are intimately intertwined, challenging disciplinary conventions of home lying “outside, or perhaps on the littoral zone” (6) of international law’s principal concerns. Her book shows how, even as international law has long turned a blind eye to home as a legal category, international law shapes home through domination, resistance and the production of what she calls unhomely spaces.

Grounded in fieldwork in Palestine, Cambodia and the United Kingdom, and informed by many of the disciplines and approaches familiar to sociolegal scholars (law, sociology, gender studies, critical theory, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, a global sociolegal approach, the humanities), Zeffert’s thinking also draws on a range of fields, literatures and approaches less familiar to sociolegality, including family studies, psychology, discrimination theory, feminist geography, home studies and architectural history. This richness of sources is convincingly synthesized and applied to her analysis. In the process, Zeffert troubles received ways of thinking about law and legal concepts that will excite and inspire law and society scholars.

Mapping the book’s claims, structure and approach in Chapter One, Zeffert confronts the paradoxes and contradictions inherent to home. An ideal home protects and nurtures, but as feminists point out, home can be “a place of oppression and insecurity” (2). This feminist attention to vulnerability lays a framework for uncovering law’s role in the public/private co-constitutions of the unhomely. Zeffert situates her global sociolegal approach in relation to sociolegal studies, global legal pluralism and international law’s relatively recent attention to everyday life. Consistent with these approaches, she illuminates the “many forms and types of ‘law’ producing, organizing and demarcating domestic space” (13), including doctrinal international law, transnational law, local, military and municipal law, and customary law. In Chapter Two, repudiating the closures of a definition of home as an analytic concept, Zeffert instead offers a heuristic for thinking about home, tracing links between home and a range of familiar legal concepts: state, homeland, territory, jurisdiction, sovereignty, privacy, order and preservation. Chapter Two closes with a consideration of home in relation to a cluster of normative values: safety, individuation, identity, privacy and preservation. The case studies that follow, in Chapters Three, Four and Five show how the heuristic she offers illuminates a conventionally unacknowledged dark side that is also a feature of law’s entanglements with home. Normative values such as safety, for example, sit on a continuum with displacement, demolition and thin understandings of the right to housing. In the best sense of grounded sociolegal theorizing, the heuristic she generates emerges from the specifics of place, history and contestation of her field sites.

Chapter Three offers a nuanced and detailed case study of the desert home in Palestine’s Area C of the West Bank to illuminate “the ‘texture’ of occupation, and its productive and transformative effects for home” (74) in relation to international law. Here, exile, loss, threat, fear and danger co-constitute home and state, “the borders of the state, like the home, is the product of shifting definitions of political space … [t]he membrane between home and the outside world is filigree-thin; the threshold dividing the public/private collapses, even while the walls of the home stand” (74–75). This chapter shows how the law of occupation as “a normalised and legalised regime of slow violence” (78), connects with the duty towards ordinary life (article 43 of the Hague Regulations), to reach into and shape the jurisdictional space of home. The abstractions of international law are intertwined with international law’s everyday “homemaking work through four modalities of occupation – demolition, siege, surveillance, and invasion” to create unhomely spaces, disrupting and distorting belonging, identity and homeland (83–84). Zeffert shows how these four modalities transform Area C into “a place that embodies, performs and resists occupation,” calling on scholars to “take the conceptual resources of home” further into the “far from ordinary” spaces shaped by international law (99).

From Chapter Three’s desert home, Chapter Four takes us to the lake home. Focusing on the sale, by the ruling Cambodian People’s Party to a private investor, of Boeung Kak Lake and its nine surrounding villages, Zeffert examines a 2008 land grab, highlighting the very problematic role of the World Bank in an ongoing crisis of displacement, dispossession and eviction. Law, she shows, has been a key driver of the twinning of land grabbing and the neocolonial project of development. Through the conceptual lens of home, Zeffert vividly shows how the World Bank “transformed home into property, giving rise to opportunities for speculation, and the transfer of wealth from the poor to the more secure,” precipitating “devastating losses of home, livelihood and identity” (120). Consistent with a global sociolegal approach, Zeffert takes readers through the multiscalar resonances of land grabbing in relation to law and the World Bank, showing how the intimacies and immediacies of the local connect to the international, and the global, implicating international law and the development project’s technical and economic activities in land grabs worldwide that decimate “the material, affective and imaginary meanings and experiences of home” (142).

Chapter Five focuses on the Heygate Estate in south London, showing how financialization evacuates the right to housing. The right to housing “is the most direct protection of housing under international law” (157). UN Special Rapporteurs on the Right to Adequate Housing have deplored how the financialization of housing in London undermines state obligations to provide housing by transforming “homes into assets” (157). Zeffert augments the Special Rapporteurs’ evaluations, drawing on her fieldwork, and the conceptual depth of “home” to argue that “home” means much more than rights to dwell or shelter. She advocates for enriching understandings of housing as a right by infusing this right with the “affective and psychic geography” (168) tied to the “humanising force” (171) of home. Including “the experience of the urban housing poor” (157), attending to losses of familiarity, community, identity, comfort, security and interdependence (169), lays the ground for international law to grapple with rights in the dynamic contexts of contemporary urban reality. This chapter also traces how the “financialised home” connects to discourses of urban regeneration; a euphemism, as Zeffert traces, for “spatial and social disruptions and displacements” (157).

What does it mean to think about international law as home? Chapter Six takes up home as a metaphor through which Zeffert traverses the actual and the aspirational, asking “what sort of home is international law …and what sort of home could it be?” (201). This concluding chapter both synthesizes the book’s main arguments while also opening up possibilities for re-thinking international law through “home” as a tool for theorizing, and “a site for liberatory praxis, with a view to catalysing progressive change in the discipline” (201). Advocating for “the idea of home as freedom” (202), Zeffert argues that the “values of home,” including the formation of identity, a private space in which to build relationships, a place to preserve meaningful things and memories and to sustain collective life” (201), constitute a resource for international law and international law’s actors, including international negotiators, peacemakers and state representatives. She argues, “[e]xtending the metaphor of home to international law would also mean seeing resistance and other counter-hegemonic projects as constitutive of the international legal system, rather than opposed to it, and harnessing the political valences and possibilities of that” (214).

Home and International Law offers sociolegal scholars a model for how to re-think the gap between law on the books and law in action by drawing on a fresh range of disciplinary and critical resources. Zeffert grapples with the ubiquitous but slippery concept of home, shedding light on law’s failures, complicities and strengths, showing us how to revitalize sociolegality’s enduring commitment to social justice by deploying “home” as lens and as legal category. This book will be of enormous interest to sociolegal scholars concerned with legal geography, settler colonialism and neocolonialism, feminism, law and language, global studies, affect studies, militarism, financialization, security studies and the politics of law. And, because we live in a time of the neoliberal devaluing of care-infused and beautiful scholarly writing, it is worth noting that this book features exquisite writing as the vehicle for conveying its powerful and transformative thinking.