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The Strategies of Rupture in International Law: The Retrenchment of Conservative Politics and the Emancipatory Potential of the Impossible

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

John D. Haskell

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The concept of rupture straddles the space between revolution and reform, anarchy and order—a paradoxical term to demarcate, on the one hand, the possibility of a complete falling away of one systematization, without necessarily initiating some new regime, and on the other hand, the conditions of improvement and renewal, an opportunity of reassessment, and quite often re-entrenchment. Thus, rupture is not necessarily the same as speaking about revolution, or even emancipation for that matter, because it does not necessitate any giving up of a certain system of ideas or authority, at least not in any longstanding sense. To put it bluntly, it is neither progressive nor reactionary, but in some sense, perhaps best understood, and I will expand on this shortly, as simply the very conditions of establishing and/or maintaining any symbolic order (by which I mean the albeit uneasy synthesis of political, social, economic, religious relationships that constitute what ends up getting called a ‘system’ or ‘order'). Rupture is a strategy, in other words, of both understanding and political action, but which itself carries no necessary affiliation with any ideological disposition. We might say, therefore, to speak of rupture is to enlist a set of concerns, disagreements, traditions, ideas, and so on, that are useful when attempting not just to describe a situation, but to move towards some political decision as a group, though what exactly that would be is open to contestation.

Type
Articles
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 13 , Issue 5: The Ruptures in International Law , May 2012 , pp. 468 - 482
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

1 Revolution and emancipation are analogous words, the former referring to political organization, the second linked more closely to personal expression, and both suggesting not merely some right to do or utilize something, but the ability to act in opposition to some other set of desires.Google Scholar

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3 Rupture, as configured here, is thereby universal in mobilization, though capable of being genealogically traced through historical moments, and always given content in relation to a specific “material” context.Google Scholar

4 I am thankful to Rob Knox for pointing out the importance of clarifying the relationship between strategy and tactics. See generally Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (1961).Google Scholar

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7 See generally Haskell, John & Mamyluk, Boris, Capitalism, Communism… and Colonialism? Revisiting ‘Transitology’ as the Ideology of Informal Empire, 9 Global Jurist 1293 (2009) (discussing the material impact of multiple “shock therapies”).Google Scholar

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9 See Haskell & Mamyluk, supra note 7, at 5 (discussing this notion in greater detail as the “economization of progress”).Google Scholar

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30 This perhaps helps explain the curious move by critical historians of international law, such as Antony Anghie, who enter the argument with guns firing, claiming the vocabulary and practices of international law are enmeshed in the workings of Western imperialism, but end up reaffirming those very targeted coordinates, now disciplined of their dangerous excesses.Google Scholar

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