(image source: OUP)
Pathetic fallacies: personification and the unruly subjects of international law (Joseph R. Slaughter)
Abstract:
International law is a creole without native speakers, produced at interfaces among distinct languages (often in colonial contact zones), not reducible to its participating tongues. Its figurations of sovereignty and personhood may not obey ordinary grammatical rules. Unruly personifications in Amos Tutuola’s Palm-wine Drinkard, colonial charter company treaties, and legal theory, highlight some pitfalls of confusing legal fictions for social facts.The invisibility of race at the ICC: lessons from the US criminal justice system (Randle C. DeFalco & Frédéric Mégret)
Abstract:
Drawing comparisons between the US criminal justice system and international criminal justice, we argue that much of the current discourse concerning the International Criminal Court’s racial politics is impoverished by being grounded in an overly thin understanding of racism that views it as wholly the product of deliberate racist acts rather than embedded in racist structures.Critical histories of international law and the repression of disciplinary imagination (Jean d'Aspremont)
Abstract:
This article engages with international lawyers’ growing historiographical appetites. It makes the argument that the critical histories that have come to populate the international legal literature over the last decades continue to be organised along the very lines set by the historical narratives which they seek to question and disrupt. It makes a plea for radical historical critique, that is, for critical histories that move beyond the markers, periodisation, and causal sequencing they seek to displace or disrupt and that embrace a consciously interventionist history-writing attitude with a view to unbridling disciplinary imagination.The modern and the traditional: Islam, Islamic law and European capitulations in late Qajar Iran (Pierre-Alexandre Cardinal)
Abstract:
This article argues that international law was a technology of Empire reinforcing the modern/colonial divide, especially in the relationship between secularism and Islam. It explores this dynamic in the relationship between Qajar Persia and the imperial powers of Great Britain and Russia at the dawn of the 20th century.(source: OUP)
