Miserable Comforters. International Relations as a New Natural Law”, 15 European Journal of International Relations (2009), 395-422 (original) (raw)

The Time of Revolution: Decolonisation, Heterodox International Legal

Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities, 2021

Historiography and the Problem of the Contemporary 'Change is the law of life. That is the obvious truth of history. The current age is particularly an age of unprecedented speed and dynamism. The world has changed more in our time than throughout the whole of previous recorded history. The rate of change is still accelerating and its scope ever widening.' Ram Prakash Anand, New States and International Law (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1972), 1. to which Anand, alongside many others, was visibly drawn. 2 But my concern here is not so much to pass comment upon the political temporalities of the present day, as to work through the linkages that were at play in the work of those such as Anandbetween a practice of decolonisation, a demand for the reconfiguration of international law, and a latent sensitivity to the question of time or temporality. My concern is to bring to an account of international law during the period of decolonisation, an appreciation of the idea that the central problematic was not simply one of international law's spatial ambit, but of its temporal structure. My medium for bringing these ideas together will be through the articulation of a specifiable problem: the problem of 'contemporaneity'. In its everyday sense, the 'contemporary' stands as a kind of shorthand for the 'present', for the 'hereabouts' of the now, or perhaps as that odd in-between period, as Arendt would put it, between past and future. 3 The contemporary in that sense, is that which is made intelligible by way of its contrast between a determined past, and an uncertain or unknowable future. Rather than work directly within this vein, however, I want to explore a more literal or etymological theme that is opened out by the idea of the contemporary. These themes resonate not only in terms of understanding the configurative significance of thinking in terms of the 'contemporary', but can also help us to see the place of the 'contemporary' in the legal discourses surrounding decolonisation. My interest is to think through the idea that the 'contemporary', as an experiential condition, carries with it two discrete connotations: that of living 'with time' (con tempus), and of living 'at the same time as others' (contemporaneus). Although these characteristics emerged as part of a particular European historical formation in late 18 th Century, they became a theoretical problematic in the middle of the 20 th Century when scholars of the 'Third

Law of Nations and the “Conflict of the Faculties”

History of the Present, 2018

Histories of international law rarely engage with what experts-teachers and practitioners-feel as the existential insecurity of the field. Is there such a thing as "international law"? What sort of thing is it? Engaging with the "deniers" is a traditional textbook topos and every international lawyer knows half-dozen ways to defend the existence or relevance of the field, as well as some rejoinders to those responses. But so far no debate has been triggered on what the subject-matter of "history of international law" might be. True, chronological problems are sometimes raised: is it possible to speak of "international law" with respect 37 I have discussed this in "Empire and International Law: The Real Spanish Contribution", 61

The Shifting Origins of International Law

Leiden Journal of International Law, 2015

Both state-centrism and Euro-centrism are under challenge in international law today and this double challenge, this work argues, is being fruitfully mirrored back into the study of the history of international law. It examines, in the first section, the effects of the rise of positivism as a method of norm-identification and the role of methodological nationalism over the study of the history of international law in the modern foundational period of international law. This is extended by an examination of how this bequeathed a double exclusionary bias regarding time and space to the study of the history of international law as well as a reiterative focus on a series of canonical events and authors to the exclusion of others such as those related to the Islamic history of international law. In the second section, the analysis turns to address why this state of historiographical affairs is changing, specifically highlighting intra-disciplinary developments within the field of the history of international law and the effects that the " international turn in the writing of history " is having on the writing of a new history of international law for a global age. The conclusion reflects on some of the tasks ahead by providing a series of historiographical signposts for the history of international law as a field of new research.