Kalm, Gustav

Gustav Kalm is a Fondation Bruno Latour postdoctoral fellow at Sciences Po Law School. His research studies how the legal techniques that undergird world economy operate as a form of power and structure international inequalities. In his doctoral dissertation, he studied how the legal forms of foreign investment have recalibrated statehood. The work was based on double ethnography with lawyers in Paris and around failed mining sites in Guinea as well as financial and textual analysis of filings in numerous disputes stemming from mining projects in Guinea. During his postdoc, he will begin his next project studying the imaginaries of planetary distributive justice in the international tax industry. Tax is often seen as a key tool in the political response to climate change. But what understandings of territorial justice guide the work of tax arbitrage professionals?

Gustav Kalm received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University (2023) and previously trained as a lawyer at Sciences Po (2014). Besides his ethnographic work on legal techniques in world economy, he has also studied the importance of visual rhetoric in legal bureaucracy. He also writes cultural and political commentary in the Estonian press and has pursued multiple collaborations with artists and curators.

Contact: gustav.kalm@sciencespo.fr