What is critique? Towards a sociology of disciplinary heterodoxy in contemporary international law

No abstract available

The horizontal mechanism initiative in the WTO: the proceduralist turn and its discontents

No abstract available

CLS and Marxism: a history of an affair

This essay explores the relationship between the Critical Legal Studies movement and the Marxist tradition. What role did Marxism play in the formation of CLS's ideological and theoretical horizons? What part was it assigned in the movement's symbolic economy of discursive projects and practices? What kinds of critical challenges did CLS scholars mount against the Marxist legal-theoretic tradition and what sorts of broader lessons can the Marxist tradition extract today from those criticisms? The essay starts by summarising the standard account of the relationship between CLS and Marxism that has historically developed within the CLS's own internal discourse. It problematises a number of basic assumptions underlying this account before turning its attention to the examination of CLS's (potential) contribution to the development of a new wave of the Marxist legal-theoretic enterprise

A legal realist critique of the new international law regime relating to the treatment of minority communities in Eastern and Central Europe : (a dialectical theoretical inquiry)

This thesis is a work written in the genre of the legal realist critique. Its main topic is the development of the new international legal regime relating to the treatment of minority communities in Eastern and Central Europe (ECE) following the end of the Cold War. The general methodological approach on the basis of which it was produced derives primarily from the traditions of American legal realism and the first-wave critical legal studies (CLS). On a more fundamental level, the philosophical sensibility underlying this thesis's inquiry can be described as a combination of a non-Hegelian dialectical theory and historical materialism.The basic analytical project pursued in this thesis consists of two general investigative tasks each of which constitutes its own separate problematic. The first investigative task relates directly to the development of the new international law relating to the treatment of minority communities (ILTMC). Its main line of inquiry focuses primarily on that complex socio-historical transformation which has occurred in the ECE region in the last seventeen years and which has been marked on the plane of international law by the rapid emergence of the new ILTMC project.The second investigative task addressed in these pages relates to a somewhat more abstract subject matter. Its main line of inquiry can be preliminarily summarized in the form of the following question: "How should the general problematic of the new ILTMC project be investigated from the point of view of international law? "The theory of historical materialism practised in this thesis derives essentially from the works of the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Despite the terminological parallels, it differs quite considerably from the similarly-named theories practised by the orthodox Marxist schools from the Second International onwards. In particular, it rejects in every form and guise all versions of Hegelian teleologism, which it considers to be a variation of ontological idealism, and adopts a position of extreme suspicion with regard to vulgar economism.In that context, for the purposes of the present thesis, the term "structural conjuncturalism" should be generally understood as the short name given to the basic analytical method developed in the framework of the historical materialist theory for the purposes of social sciences. Legal realism, in its turn, should be generally understood as the "local" variation of that method adapted for the specific purposes of juridical scholarship

A Marxism for international law: a new agenda

What can Marxist theory contribute to the discipline of international legal studies? Can one be a Marxist and an international lawyer at the same time? What place is there for international legal scholarship in Marxist politics? How can Marxist international law theory position itself vis-à-vis other critical legal traditions? Does Marxism have any theoretical gaps that it needs to fill? How does a Marxist approach to international law differ from a New Left one? In this review essay, I propose to explore these and other related questions by examining one of the most important recent contributions to the Marxist debate about international law, the new edition of B.S. Chimni’s International Law and World Order. My aim in these pages is to reveal and bring to the surface its general critical method, some of the less obvious aspects of its underlying theoretical project, its disciplinary ambition as well as its overall place in the broader landscape of contemporary international law thought, including its relationship with other works of Marxist international law theory

Writing about empire: remarks on the logic of a discourse

A new genre of scholarly writing has emerged in recent years in the field of what one can broadly call critical international theory. Its principal defining feature is an intense preoccupation with the phenomenon of the so-called ‘new world order’, which it tries to explain and describe through an analytical lens constructed primarily around two ideas: the idea of ‘empire’ and the idea of ‘imperial law’. In this article I attempt to provide a brief overview of this genre, which for the sake of simplicity I shall call henceforth the ‘new imperial law’ or NIL genre, and to reflect critically on its underlying ideological dynamics

Deep Cuts: Four Critiques of Legal Ideology

This Article begins an effort to rekindle the intellectual tradition of critical legal theory. The context for the project is significant. On the one hand is the grip of a social crisis, the contours of which continue to confound the commentariat. Racism, xenophobia, gendered violence, migration and nation, climate change, health pandemics, political corruption. The parade is as intimidating as it is spectacular. On the other hand, the very tools of criticism we depend upon in identifying these characters in the parade, much less the spectacle of the parade itself, are themselves in crisis. There is, in a word, a crisis for critique itself. The working assumption of this Article is that these crises—crises in society and the crises of critique—are not unrelated. It is in this context that we believe in the need to revitalize the tools of critical legal studies, an intellectual songbook from the 1970s that deserves a 21st century reboot. The argument is as follows. Among the crises of our time is the sense that law is either too marginal or too political to be of any use in the work for social justice—social justice rendered in any one of the crises mentioned above. We all know only too well, according to this sensibility, how to criticize judges, lawyers, and the academic elite. And these criticisms, of which everyone so easily partakes, all seem to bottom out in the same thing: law is either corrupt or ineffective. This Article suggests that this defeatist sensibility, and its affiliation with a popularized notion of legal criticism, is itself a legal ideology. Strangely enough, this ideology of defeat is the result of decades worth of ideology-critique that have now calcified into a block on our ability to see beyond them. That is, over the course of the twentieth century there emerged four traditions for criticizing the ideology of law, and today, these four traditions exhaust our collective abilities to formulate novel critical approaches. This Article names and evaluates these four critiques of legal ideology, but not with an eye toward rehabilitation. Rather, it is our hope that in making explicit our traditions of ideology-critique in law, we put ourselves in a better position for the next step: to imagine what the critique of legal ideology might yet become

Deep Cuts: Four Critiques of Legal Ideology

This Article begins an effort to rekindle the intellectual tradition of critical legal theory. The context for the project is significant. On the one hand is the grip of a social crisis, the contours of which continue to confound the commentariat. Racism, xenophobia, gendered violence, migration and nation, climate change, health pandemics, political corruption. The parade is as intimidating as it is spectacular. On the other hand, the very tools of criticism we depend upon in identifying these characters in the parade, much less the spectacle of the parade itself, are themselves in crisis. There is, in a word, a crisis for critique itself. The working assumption of this Article is that these crises—crises in society and the crises of critique—are not unrelated. It is in this context that we believe in the need to revitalize the tools of critical legal studies, an intellectual songbook from the 1970s that deserves a 21st century reboot

Central Asia and the globalisation of the contemporary legal consciousness

What is the logic which governs the processes of legal globalization? How does the transnational proliferation of legal forms operate in the contemporary geo-juridical space? What are the main defining characteristics of the currently dominant mode of transnational legal consciousness and how can the concept of legal consciousness help us understand better the historical ebb and flow of the Western-led projects of good governance promotion in regions like Central Asia after the fall of the Soviet Union? Using Duncan Kennedy’s seminal essay Three Globalizations of Law and Legal Thought as its starting platform, this essay seeks to explore these and a series of other related questions, while also drawing on the work of the Greek Marxist lawyer-philosopher Nicos Poulantzas to help elucidate some latent analytical stress-points in Kennedy’s broader theoretical framework. Reacting against the neo-Orientalist tone adopted across much of the contemporary field of Central Asian studies, it develops an alternative account of the internal history of the legal-globalizational encounter between the Western-based reform entrepreneurs and the national legal-political elites in Central Asia in the post-1991 period, complementing it with a detailed description of the general institutional and discursive structures within which this encounter took place