Chapter Six - Imagining Community

Summary

Chapter 6, ‘Imagining a Community’, brings together, and builds on, the findings made throughout the book about the nature of the international community imagined within the archive. This shows that whilst the tribunal functioned as a site of liberal international governance, that underneath this liberal vision sat a distinctly illiberal understanding of community. In particular this shows that the archive divided the international community into the international, as a site of peace and order, and the local, as a site of barbarity; protected a space wherein violence was a legitimate aspect of international relations; and projected a patriarchal and colonial vision of community as the voice of the subaltern was denied.