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The turn to history in international law and the sources doctrine: Critical approaches and methodological imaginaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2019

Matilda Arvidsson  and
Miriam Bak McKenna
Matilda Arvidsson
Affiliation:
Department of Law, University of Gothenburg, PO Box 650, SE405 30 Göteborg, Sweden Email: Matilda.Arvidsson@law.gu.se
Miriam Bak McKenna*
Affiliation:
Department of Law, Lund UniversityBox 207, 221 00 Lund, Sweden Email: miriam.mckenna@jur.lu.se
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Abstract

Expanding now familiar debates about the impact of the ‘historical turn’ upon the field of international law, this article considers some of the different ways in which ‘turn to history’ scholars have confronted the methodological and theoretical tensions arising from the central, yet paradoxical, role occupied by the sources doctrine in international law. We suggest that the anxiety over the sources of international law as the basic methodological precepts of the discipline has been a catalyzing element for a radical reengagement with the canon of international law, one with a significant impact on the field’s existing parameters and doctrinal limits. Within the three streams of scholarship we explore here, history has become a site of creative engagement for scholars in opening up the discipline to diverse ends, one in which a new doctrinal universe can be created, and new issues, sources, subjects, and approaches can be explored. Yet, by opening up international law’s sources doctrine, reactionary causes and unjust ends may equally well be the result. This account is an attempt at diversifying the narrative surrounding the causal relationship between history and the ongoing changes to the field of international law, along with the differential practices, techniques and epistemological foundations behind the history of international law as an evolving discipline, and of the different scholarly motivations of its specialists.

Keywords

crisisdemocratizationhistoriographysources doctrine‘turn to history’ in international law
Type
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Information
Leiden Journal of International Law , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 37 - 56
Copyright
© Foundation of the Leiden Journal of International Law 2019 

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Footnotes

*

For helpful comments and feedback, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers as well as the participants of the 2017 Meeting of the Interest Group on the History of International Law held at the European Society for International Law annual conference where we presented an early version of this article. All errors and omissions are our own.

References

1 The expression ‘historical turn in international law’ has become the popular moniker to denote the growing body of literature in the field of international legal history. See G. R. B. Galindo, ‘Martti Koskenniemi and the Historiographical Turn in International Law’, (2005) 16 EJIL 539, at 541; Koskenniemi, M., ‘Why History of International Law Today?’, (2004) 4 Rechtsgeschichte 61 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; R. C. H. Lesaffer, ‘International Law and Its History: The Story of an Unrequited Love’, in M. Craven, M. Fitzmaurice and M. Vogiatzi (eds.), Time, History and International Law (2006), 27. See also T. Skouteris, ‘Engaging History in International Law’, in D. Kennedy and J. M. Beneyto (eds.), New Approaches to International Law: The European and American Experiences (2012), 99; M. Clark, ‘Ambivalence, anxieties / adaptations, advances: conceptual history and international law’, (2018) 31 LJIL 747; d’Aspremont, J., ‘Critical histories of international law and the repression of disciplinary imagination’, (2019) 7 London Review of International Law 89 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vadi, V., ‘International Law and Its Histories: Methodological Risks and Opportunities’, (2018) 58 Harvard International Law Journal 311 Google Scholar; V. Vadi, ‘Perspective and Scale in the Architecture of International Legal History’, (2019) 30 EJIL 53.

2 For a recent discussion on these criticisms see Benton, L., ‘Beyond Anachronism: Histories of International Law and Global Legal Politics’, (2019) 21 Journal of the History of International Law 7 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 R. Parfitt, ‘The Spectre of Sources’, (2014) 25 EJIL 297.

4 See Kennedy, D., ‘The Sources of International Law’, (1987) 2 American University International Law Review 1 Google Scholar; Skouteris, T., ‘The Sources of International Law: Tales of Progress’, (2000) 13 Hague Yearbook of International Law 11 Google Scholar.

5 M. Craven, ‘Introduction: International Law and its Histories’, in M. Craven, M. Fitzmaurice and M. Vogiatzi (eds.), Time, History and International Law (2006), 1, at 8; S. Moyn, ‘Legal History as a Source of International Law: The Politics of Knowledge’, in S. Besson and J. d’Aspremont (eds.), The Oxford Handbook on the Sources of International Law (2017), 301.

6 See Parfitt, supra note 3, at 302.

7 Reactionary and counter-revolutionary interventions are, thus, equally part of the ‘turn to history’; this can be illustrated by the invocation of American Civil War historical sources by the US in the ‘war on terror’, in particular the Lieber Code and associated case law: M. Arvidsson, The Subject in International Law (2017); Y. Ronen, ‘The DoD Conception of the Law of Occupation’, in M. Newton (ed.), The United States Department of Defense Law of War Manual: Commentary and Critique (2019), 298. A wholly different example, seen as simply ‘bad history’ by some of its critics, is the publication in the Journal of the History of International Law, in 2017, of John Bennett’s article ‘The Forgotten Genocide in Colonial America: Reexamining the 1622 Jamestown Massacre within the Framework of the UN Genocide Convention’. A significant number of scholars in the ‘turn to history’ saw the piece as displaying deeply disturbing nationalist overtones, ‘pseudo-scientific and very thinly veiled racist propaganda’: An open letter to the editors of the journal published on the Opinio Iuris blog, signed by the above-mentioned scholars, available at opiniojuris.org/2017/09/06/letter-to-the-editors-of-the-journal-of-the-history-of-international-law/, resulted in an apology from the editors and an updated review policy (opiniojuris.org/2017/09/06/response-from-the-editors-of-the-journal-of-the-history-of-international-law/). Yet, the journal has refused to take down the piece or revoke its publication. Critical scholarly responses have also appeared on the Critical Legal Thinking blog: A. O’Donoghue and H. Jones, ‘The Jamestown Massacre: Rigour & International Legal History’, 24 August 2017, available at criticallegalthinking.com/2017/08/24/jamestown-massacre-rigour-international-legal-history/. Although the latter example is significantly different in substance, scope and (perhaps) aims in comparison to the excessive use of American Civil War law and history as part of contemporary US practices of war and law, the intensification of reactionary history as part of the ‘turn to history’ should neither be ignored, nor brushed off as an irrelevant or insignificant effect of ‘the turn’.

8 See, e.g., d’Aspremont, supra note 1; Clark, supra note 1; Vadi (2018), supra note 1.

9 Skouteris, supra note 1, at 99.

10 Craven, supra note 5, at 6.

11 The four primary sources enumerated in Art. 38(1) – ‘international conventions’; ‘international custom’; ‘the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations’; and ‘judicial decisions and the teachings of the most highly qualified publicists of the various nations’ – all in different ways point to the past.

12 Craven, supra note 5, at 8.

13 Parfitt, supra note 3, at 299.

14 As Martti Koskenniemi points out, ‘[w]hat we study as history of international law depends on what we think “international law” is in the first place’, see M. Koskenniemi, ‘A History of International Law Histories’, in B. Fassbender and A. Peters (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (2012), 943, at 970.

15 See, for example, M. Shaw, International Law (2003); I. Brownlie, Principles of Public International Law (1990). This applies not only in the sphere of academic scholarship but is also prominent in judicial reasoning. Contrary to this, see the Separate Opinion of Judge Trindade in the Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965, who cited the critical historical work by L. Eslava, M. Fakhri and V. Nesiah (eds.), Bandung, Global History, and International Law Critical Pasts and Pending Futures (2017).

16 See Berman, N., ‘In the Wake of Empire’, (1998–99) 14 American University International Law Review 1523 Google Scholar. For a radical example trying to counterweigh Eurocentrism in the international legal method by pluralizing its sources of custom, see B. S. Chimni, ‘Customary International Law: A Third World Perspective’, (2018) 112 AJIL 1. See also V. Nesiah, ‘Decolonial CIL: TWAIL, Feminism, and an Insurgent Jurisprudence’, (2018) 112 AJIL 313.

17 B. S. Chimni, International Law and World Order (1993), 45.

18 C. Miéville, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law (2005), 2.

19 See M. Koskenniemi, ‘The Politics of International Law’, (1990) 1 EJIL 4. See also M. Koskenniemi, ‘The Politics of International Law: Twenty Years Later’, (2009) 20 EJIL 7; M. Koskenniemi, ‘Imagining the Rule of Law: Rereading the Grotian “Tradition”’, (2019) 30 EJIL 17.

20 Koskenniemi, supra note 1. Relevant examples include: G. Simpson, ‘Linear Law: The History of International Criminal Law’, in C. Scwöbel (ed.), Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law (2015), 159; E. Haslam, ‘Silences in International Criminal Legal Histories and the Construction of the Victim Subject of International Criminal Law: The Nineteenth Century Slave Trading Trial of Joseph Peters’, in C. Scwöbel (ed.), Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law (2015), 180; G. Baars, ‘Making ICL History: On the need to move beyond prefab critiques of ICL’, in C. Scwöbel (ed.), Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law (2015), 196. See also G. Baars, ‘From The Dutch East India Company to the Corporate Bill of Rights: Corporations and International Law’, in U. Mattei and J. Haskell (eds.), Research Handbook on Political Economy and Law (2015), 260; M. Cohen and Y. Otomo (eds.), Making Milk: The Past, Present and Future of our Primary Food (2019); M. Fakhri, Sugar and the Making of International Trade Law (2014); G. Gordon, ‘Railway clocks: Temporal bases of transnational law’, in J. Hohmann and D. Joyce (eds.), International Law’s Objects: Emergence, Encounter and Erasure (2017); K. Greenman et al. (eds.), Revolutions in International Law: The Legacies of 1917 (2019); I. Tallgren and T. Skouteris (eds.), The New Histories of International Criminal Law: Retrials (2019); M. Liljefors, G. Noll and D. Steuer, War and Algorithm: Limits of Understanding, Law and Vision (2019); F. Megret and I. Tallgren (eds.), The Dawn of a Discipline: International Criminal Justice and Its Early Exponents (2019); D. Margolies et al. (eds.), The Extraterritoriality of Law: History, Theory, Politics (2019); G. Noll, ‘The ICJ and Migration’, in A. Skordas (ed.), Research Handbook on the International Court of Justice (forthcoming); S. Pahuja and A. Saunders, ‘Rival Worlds and the place of the Corporation in International Law’, in P. Dann and R. von Bernstoff (eds.), Decolonialisation and the Battle for International Law (2018); S. Pahuja and S. Chalmers (eds.), International Law and the Humanities (forthcoming); J. Parker, ‘Judging the Rwandan Soundscape’, in R. K. Sherwin and D. Selermajer (eds.), A Cultural History of Law in the Modern Age (2019); M. Trabsky, Law and the Dead: Technology, Relations and Institutions (2019).

21 See Vadi (2018), supra note 1; S. L. Hoffmann, Human Rights and History, Past and Present (2016), at 26.

22 Jouannet, E. and Peters, A., ‘The Journal of the History of International Law: A Forum for New Research’, (2014) 16 Journal of the History of International Law 1 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 2.

23 Ibid.

24 Skouteris, supra note 1, at 4.

25 Lesaffer, supra note 1, at 27.

26 Gordon, R., ‘The Arrival of Critical Historicism’, Faculty Scholarship Series, 1 January 1997, 1024 Google Scholar, quoted in Tomlins, C., ‘After Critical Legal History: Scope, Scale, Structure’, (2012) 8 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 31 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 The works here are too numerous to mention but key texts include: M. Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (2001); L. A. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (2002); E. Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (2002); G. Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order (2004); A. Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (2005); A. Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 1500–2000 (2014); E. Jouannet, The Liberal-Welfarist Law of Nations: A History of International Law (2012); L. A. Benton and L. Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850 (2016); A. Becker Lorca, Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History 1842–1933 (2014); F. A. Boyle, Foundations of World Order: The Legalist Approach to International Relations, 1898–1921 (1999); I. V. Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during the Great War (2014); M. G. Rovira, The Project of Positivism in International Law (2013); U. Özsu, Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers (2015); J. E. Nijman, The Concept of International Legal Personality: An Inquiry into the History and Theory of International Law (2004); S. Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (2015); K. Miles, The Origins of International Investment Law: Empire, Environment, and the Safeguarding of Capital (2013); A. Orford, International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (2011); L. Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (2008); S. Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2012).

28 Tomlins, supra note 26, at 38.

29 M. Koskenniemi, ‘Introduction: International Law and Empire—Aspects and Approaches’, in M. Koskenniemi, W. Rech and M. J. Fonseca (eds.), International Law and Empire—Historical Explorations (2017), 4.

30 Jean d’Aspremont makes the claim that critical histories that have come to populate the international legal literature over the last decade continue to be organized along the very lines set by the historical narratives which they seek to question and disrupt, and have therefore failed to exploit the critical potential thereof, thereby perpetuating the repression of disciplinary imagination of dominant historical narratives. See d’Aspremont, supra note 1.

31 D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000), at 28. For reviews see, e.g., Parfitt, supra note 3; S. B. Kirmse, ‘Sleepy Side Alleys, Dead Ends, and the Perpetuation of Eurocentrism’, (2014) 25 EJIL 307; A.-C. Martineau, ‘Overcoming Eurocentrism? Global History and the Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law’, (2014) 25 EJIL 329; Forji, A. G., ‘Book Review: Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, Bardo Fassbender, Anne Peters, Simone Peter & Daniel Högger (Editors)’, (2014) 16 Journal of the History of International Law 90 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J. K. Cogan, ‘Book Review: The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law. Edited by Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters’, (2014) 108 AJIL 371.

32 Martineau, ibid.

33 See M. Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia (2006).

34 Parfitt, supra note 3, at 299.

35 Koskenniemi, M., ‘Histories of International Law: Significance and Problems for a Critical View’, (2013) 27 Temple International and Comparative Law Journal 215 Google Scholar, at 226.

36 Koskenniemi, supra note 14, at 945.

37 In Koskenniemi’s words: ‘the limits of our imagination are product of a history that may have gone another way’, Koskenniemi, supra note 1, at 5.

38 See also Koskenniemi, M., ‘Histories of International Law: Dealing with Eurocentrism’, (2011) 19 Rechtsgeschichte 152 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 161. The term ‘idealist or doctrinal histories’ indicates, according to Koskenniemi, histories of international law which ‘focus on lawyers and philosophers and view the past through debates about legal principles or institutions’. By ‘realist’ narratives, reference is made, by contrast, to those histories ‘that concentrate on State power and geopolitics and view international law’s past in terms of the succession of apologies for State behaviour’ and periodize accordingly.

39 Orford, A., ‘The Past as Law or History? The Relevance of Imperialism for Modern International Law’, (2012) NYU IILJ Working Paper 2 Google Scholar, at 10.

40 The classic example here is the ‘structuralist’ phase of the work of Kennedy and Koskenniemi. See Kennedy, D., ‘Critical theory, structuralism, and contemporary legal scholarship’, (1986) 21 New England Law Review 209 Google Scholar; D. Kennedy, International legal structures (1987); Kennedy, D., ‘A new Stream of International legal scholarship’, (1988) 7 Wisconsin International Law Journal 1 Google Scholar; Koskenniemi, supra note 1.

41 Here we borrow Jacob Katz Cogan’s description of dominant forms of international legal history as ‘intensely internalist’ naval-gazing: Cogan, supra note 31, at 371.

42 Jouannet and Peters, supra note 22, at 2.

43 Gordon, supra note 26.

44 In his discussion of what the lawyerly tendency to perform ‘foreign office international legal history’ David Bederman sums up the points of criticisms as including: (i) a lack of analytical rigor in historical investigations, (ii) selective use of historical materials, (iii) sloppy or strategic methodologies in the review of historical sources, (iv) overt or implicit instrumentalism in the selection of historical data and/or the conclusions drawn from such material, and (v) an unwillingness or inability to reconcile conflicting sources, or an inability to accept ambiguity or incompleteness in historic record: D. Bederman, ‘Foreign Office International Legal History’, in M. Craven, M. Fitzmaurice and M. Vogiatzi (eds.), Time, History and International Law (2006), at 80.

45 A point which he demonstrates in his examination of Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain in the United States and the Case Concerning Kasikili/Sedudu Island before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

46 Berman, supra note 16. See also Berman, N., ‘Modernism, Nationalism and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction’, (1992) 35 Yale J. Law and Humanities 4 Google Scholar; N. Berman, ‘“The Appeals of the Orient”: Colonized Desire and the War on the Riff’, in K. Knop (ed.), Gender and human rights (2004), 195.

47 N. Berman, Passion and Ambivalence: Colonialism, Nationalism and International Law (2012), at 44.

48 See, for example, Berman, N., ‘But the alternative is despair! European nationalism and the modernist renewal of international law’, (1993) Harvard Law Review 106 Google Scholar.

49 Berman, supra note 16.

50 Ibid.

51 Kennedy, D., ‘The Move to Institutions’, (1987) 8 Cardozo Law Review 841 Google Scholar, at 878.

52 K. Knop, Diversity and self-determination in international law (2002). See also K. Knop ‘The Tokyo women’s tribunal and the turn to fiction’, in F. Johns, R. Joyce and S. Pahuja (eds.), Events: the force of international law (2011), 145.

53 D. Kennedy, ‘The Disciplines of International Law’, (1999) 12 LJIL 88.

54 Skinner, Q., ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, (1969) 8 History and Theory 10 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a similar point, set in the context of the ‘crises’ of international law in the Middle East, see Loevy, K., ‘Reinventing a Region (1915–22): Visions of the Middle East in Legal and Diplomatic Texts Leading to The Palestine Mandate’, (2016) 49 Israel Law Review 309 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 311.

55 Craven supra note 5, at 17.

56 Lesaffer supra note 1, at 36.

57 Koskenniemi, M., ‘Vitoria and Us: Thoughts on Critical Histories of International Law’, (2014) 22 Rechtsgeschichte 119 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 127.

58 See Morgan, E. M., The Imagery and Meaning of Self-Determination, (1988) 20 N.Y.U. J. Int’l L. & Pol. 355 Google Scholar; Riles, A., ‘The View from the International Plane: Perspective and Scale in the Architecture of Colonial International Law’, (1995) 6 Law & Critique 39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 I. de la Rasilla, ‘The Shifting Origins of International Law’, (2015) 28 LJIL 3; C. N. Warren, ‘History, Literature, and Authority in International Law’, in M. Del Mar, B. Meyler and S. Stern (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities (forthcoming).

60 D. Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013), at 6.

61 T. Duve, ‘European Legal History – Concepts, Methods, Challenges’, in T. Duve (ed.), Entanglements in Legal History: Conceptual Approaches (2014), at 56.

62 For a recent criticism of Orford’s deployment of anachronism and her use of Quentin Skinner’s work in context see Benton, supra note 2.

63 As power players of the field, and through their respective and co-convened institutional platforms, they have been instrumental in fostering a particular methodological and historical consciousness among junior and emerging scholars. Relevant scholarship emerging from and constituting such platforms respectively include: A. Brett and M. Koskenniemi (eds.), History, Law, Politics: Thinking Through the International (2018); Fernandes Carvalho Veçoso, F., ‘History and critique in International Law in Latin America: Revisiting past discussions on legal education in the region’, (2017) 39 Revista Derecho Del Estado 91 Google Scholar; M. G. Rovira, supra note 27; Greenman et al., supra note 20; M. Koskenniemi, W. Recht and M. Jimez Fonzenca (eds.), International Law and Empire: Historical Explorations (2017); M. Koskenniemi, M. G. Rovira and P. Almorosa (eds.), International Law and Religion: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (2017); L. Obrégon, Writing the World through Law: Lawyers and their International Histories 1750-1870 (forthcoming); N. Tzouvala, “‘These Ancient Arenas of Racial Struggles”: International Law and the Balkans (1878–1949)’, (2018) 4 EJIL 1149. See also Orford, supra note 27; A. Orford, International Law and the Politics of History (2019).

64 Purcell, K., ‘Faltering at the Critical Turn to History: “Juridical Thinking” in International Law and Genealogy as History, Critique, and Therapy’, (2015) Jean Monnet Working Paper 02/15 Google Scholar, at 15.

65 Other scholarship dedicated to the ‘past for the present’ turn includes Craven, M., ‘Between law and history: The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 and the logic of free trade’, (2015) 3 London Review of International Law 31 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; M. Gunneflo, Targeted Killing: A Political and Legal History (2016); R. Giladi, ‘The Enactment of Irony: Reflections on the Origins of the Martens Clause’, (2014) 25 EJIL 847; S. Dehm, Ordering Human Mobility: International Law, Development, Administration (2017); P. Wrange, Impartial or Uninvolved?: The Anatomy of 20th Century Doctrine on the Law of Neutrality (2007); A. Alexander, ‘A Short History of International Humanitarian Law’, (2015) 26 EJIL 109.

66 Purcell, supra note 64.

67 Orford, supra note 39, at 2.

68 Orford, A., ‘On international legal method’, (2013) London Review of International Law 166 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 170.

69 Ibid., at 171.

70 Ibid. Benton specifically criticizes Orford for an all too selective and narrow reading of Skinner’s argument: see Benton, supra note 2, at 11 and onwards.

71 Orford, in Kemmerer, A., ‘“We do not need to always look to Westphalia …” A Conversation with Martti Koskenniemi and Anne Orford’, (2015) 17 Journal of the history of International Law 1 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 3.

72 Orford, supra note 68, at 175.

73 Orford citing T. Threadgold in ‘Book review: Law and Literature: Revised and Enlarged Edition by Richard Posner’, (1999) 23 Melbourne University Law Review 839, at 838. See also A. Orford, ‘The Gift of Formalism’, (2004) EJIL 179; A. Orford, ‘Beyond Harmonization: Trade, Human Rights and the Economy of Sacrifice’, (2005) 18 LJIL 179.

74 A. Orford, Reading Humanitarian Intervention (2003), especially Ch. 2.

75 Koskenniemi, in Kemmerer, supra note 71, at 3. Even so his work has been received as ‘a true’ representation of the history of the profession (A. Orford, ‘International Law and the limits of History’, in W. Werner, M. de Hoon and A. Galán (eds.), The Law of International Lawyers: Reading Martti Koskenniemi (2017), 298, at 298), an unintended and unwished-for effect, especially as Koskenniemi states that ‘the essays [in the Gentle Civilizer] do not seek a neutral description of the past “as it actually was”’. Koskenniemi, supra note 1, at 10.

76 Well aware of his focus on Western figures in international law Koskenniemi explains (in Kemmerer, supra note 71, at 7) that ‘Eurocentrism is perhaps not so much about the substance of what is being said or studied, but what the point of a statement or study is, what kinds of normative commitments it is intended to support (or actually support, independently of the intentions of who produced it).’

77 Koskenniemi, supra note 1, at 3.

78 Orford, supra note 74, at 298.

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid.

81 See, for example, Rovira and Obrégon, supra note 63; I. Van Hulle and R. Lesaffer (eds.), International Law in the Long Nineteenth Century (c. 1775-1914) (forthcoming). On time-periods in TWAIL scholarship: Galindo, G. R. B., ‘Splitting TWAIL?’, (2016) 33 Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice 37 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 Koskenniemi, in Kemmerer, supra note 71, at 3. See also M. Koskenniemi, ‘Less is More: Legal Imagination in Context: Introduction’, (2018) 31 LJIL 469.

83 Koskenniemi, supra note 19, at 23.

84 Koskenniemi, in Kemmerer, supra note 71, at 2.

85 ‘The fate of international law’, he has claimed, ‘is re-establishing hope for the human species’. Koskenniemi, M., ‘The Fate of Public International Law: Between Technique and Politics’, (2007) 70 Modern Law Review 1 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 30.

86 Purcell, supra note 64, at 15.

87 See Arvidsson, supra note 7.

88 d’Aspremont, supra note 1.

89 Apart from the scholarship analysed below this also includes scholarship not only or primarily concerned with history as such. Relevant examples include N. Seuffert, ‘Queering International Law’s stories of Origin: Hospitality and Homophobia’, in D. Otto (ed.), Queering International Law (2018), 213; Y. Otomo, Unconditional Life: The Postwar International Law Settlement (2016); M. Elander, Figuring Victims in International Criminal Justice: The Case of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (2018); Hohmann and Joyce, supra note 20; Orford, A., ‘Feminism, Imperialism and the Mission of International Law’, (2002) 71 Nordic Journal of International Law 275 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

90 Skouteris, supra note 1, at 111.

91 Koskenniemi, M., ‘Expanding Histories of International Law’, (2016) 56 American Journal of Legal History 104 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

92 Painter, G., ‘A letter from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to King George V: writing and reading jurisdictions in international legal history’, (2017) 5 London Review of International Law 7 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 9.

93 Anghie, supra note 27.

94 Relevant examples include U. Baxi, ‘India-Europe’, in B. Fassbender and A. Peters (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (2012), 744; Bhatia, A., ‘The South of the North: Building on Critical Approaches to International Law with Lessons from the Fourth World’, (2012) 14 Oregon Review of International Law 131 Google Scholar; J. Dehm, ‘Highlighting inequalities in the histories of human rights: Contestations over justice, needs and rights in the 1970s’, (2018) 31 LJIL 871; Gathii, J. T., ‘Imperialism, colonialism, and international law’, (2007) 54 Buffalo Law Review 1013 Google Scholar; Khan, A. H., ‘Tragedy’s Law(s): Receiving The Mythology of Modern Law Today’, (2017) 43 Australian Feminist Law Journal 273 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; V. Kumar, International Law and Revolution (forthcoming); A.-C. Martineau, ‘Concerning Violence: A Post-Colonial Reading of the Debate on the Use of Force’, (2016) 29 LJIL 95; M. W. Mutua, ‘Savages, victims and saviors: the metaphor of human rights’, (2001) 42 Harvard International Law Journal 201; U. Natarajan et al. (eds.), Third World Approaches to International Law: On Praxis and the Intellectual (2018); Nesiah, supra note 16; Nesiah, V., ‘Human Shields/Human Crosshairs: Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Wars’, (2016) 110 AJIL Unbound 323 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; L. Obregón, ‘Empire, Racial Capitalism and International Law: The Case of Manumitted Haiti and the Recognition Debt’, (2018) 31 LJIL 597; Okafo, O. C., ‘Critical Third World approaches to international law (TWAIL): theory, methodology, or both?’, (2008) 10 International Community Law Review 371 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; S. Pahuja, Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality (2011); U. Natarajan, ‘Creating and Recreating Iraq: Legacies of the Mandate System in Contemporary Understandings of Third World Sovereignty’, (2011) 24 LJIL 799; B. Rajagopal, International law from below: development, social movements and Third World resistance (2003); Singh, P. ‘The Scandal of Enlightenment and the Birth of Disciplines: Is International Law a Science?’, (2010) 12 International Community Law Review 5 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Starski, P. and Kämmerer, J. A., ‘Imperial Colonialism in the Genesis of International Law – Anomaly or Time of Transition?’, (2017) 19 Journal of the History of International Law 50 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

95 V. Nesiah, ‘Doing History with Impunity’, in K. Engle, Z. Miller and D. Davis (eds.), Anti-Impunity and the Human Rights Agenda (2016), 95, at 113.

96 Chimni, supra note 17.

97 Nesiah, supra note 16, at 316.

98 Chiam, et al., ‘History, Anthropology and the Archive of International Law’, (2017) 5(1) London Journal of International Law 3 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Nesiah, supra note 16; V. Nesiah, ‘Placing International Law: White Spaces on a Map’, (2003) 16 LJIL 1.

99 Parfitt, supra note 3.

100 Chiam et al., supra note 98. See also R. Parfitt, ‘Fascism, Imperialism and International Law: An Arch Met a Motorway and the Rest is History …’ (2018) 31 LJIL 509; R. Parfitt, The Process of International Legal Reproduction (2019); L. Eslava, ‘The Moving Location of Empire: Indirect Rule, International Law, and the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment’, (2018) 31 LJIL 539; M. Bak McKenna, ‘Designing for International Law: The Architecture of International Legal Organisations 1922–1952’, (forthcoming) London Review of International Law.

101 Chiam, M., ‘Tom Barker’s “To Arms!” poster: internationalism and resistance in First World War Australia’, (2017) 5 London Review of International Law 125 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 128.

102 Relevant examples include C. Miéville, supra note 18; R. Knox, ‘Marxism, International Law, and Political Strategy’, (2009) 22 LJIL 413; G. Baars, The Corporation, Law and Capitalism A Radical Perspective on the Role of Law in the Global Political Economy (2019); Bowring, B., ‘What is Radical in “Radical International Law”’, (2011) 22 Finnish Yearbook of International Law Google Scholar; M. Fakhri, supra note 20; J. Linarelli, M. E. Salomon and M. Sornarajah, The Misery of International Law: Confrontations with Injustice in the Global Economy (2018); M. Bak McKenna ‘Blood, Breastmilk, and Dirt: Silvia Federici and Feminist Materialism in International Law (Parts One and Two)’, (2018) Legal Form; N. Tzouvala, ‘A false promise? Regulating land-grabbing and the post-colonial state’, (2019) 32 LJIL 235; N. Tzouvala, Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law (2019); U. Özsu, ‘Grabbing land legally: A Marxist analysis’, (2019) 32 LJIL 215.

103 In Pashukanis’ words: ‘[m]odern international law is the legal form of the struggle of the capitalist states among themselves for domination over the rest of the world’. E. B. Pashukanis, ‘International Law’, in P. Beirne and R. Sharlet (eds.), Pashukanis: Selected Writings on Marxism and Law (1980), 168, at 169.

104 B. S. Chimni, ‘International Institutions Today: An Imperial Global State in the Making’, (2004)15 EJIL 1, at 1.

105 See the ‘periphery’ project in the Leiden Journal of International Law: F. Johns, T. Skouteris and W. Werner, ‘Editors’ Introduction: Alejandro Álvarez and the Launch of the Periphery Series’, (2006) 19 LJIL 875. Several chapters of Fassbender and Peters’ Handbook serve similar ends, especially chapters presented in part III of the book. B. Patel’s chapter on ‘India’ (in B. Fassbender and A. Peters (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (2012), at 500) is an example of how sources that are not usually considered part of international law are made part of its historical narrative. See also M. Koskenniemi, supra note 35; A. Becker-Lorca, ‘Eurocentrism in the History of International Law’, in B. Fassbender and A. Peters (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (2012), 1034; Natarajan et al., supra note 94; V. Hamzić, ‘Mir-Said Sultan-Galiev and the Idea of Muslim Marxism: Empire, Third World(s) and Praxis’, in U. Natarajan (eds.), Third World Approaches to International Law: On Praxis and the Intellectual (2018), at 105; A. H. Khan, ‘International lawyers in the aftermath of disasters: inheriting from Radhabinod Pal and Upendra Baxi’, (2016) 37 Third World Quarterly: Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) 2061.

106 Becker-Lorca, supra note 27.

107 Illustratively, Becker-Lorca’s book was awarded the 2016 European Society of International Law Book Prize: its gesture to bring international law’s ‘peripheries’ to its ‘core’ converses well with conventional scholarship’s aim to strengthen international law’s global reach rather than to disrupt, radicalize or revolutionize its effects.

108 Orford, supra note 68, at 304.

109 Parfitt, supra note 3, at xxxix.

110 Chimni, supra note 104; Nesiah, supra note 16; Parfitt, supra note 3.

111 W. Benjamin, On the Concept of History, quoted in H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940 (2006), at 463.

112 Koskenniemi, supra note 57, at 123.