“Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!” Humanitarian Intervention and the Drowning Stranger

A review of: Just Intervention edited by Anthony F. Lang Jr. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2003. 231 pp. and Reading Humanitarian Intervention: Human Rights and the Use of Force in International Law by Anne Orford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 243pp

Picturing Pedagogy: Images, Teaching, and Development

Images are powerful. They shape how we see and understand the world and, in the process, challenge (or reinforce) our assumptions and perspectives. The images we use in the classroom are no exception, whether used passively as visual aids or as a “medium through which active learning is energized.”1 In this article we embrace the “pictorial turn” in university teaching and reflect on the use of images when teaching “development.”2 Development is an area that typically attracts students with an internationalist orientation and who seek to make a positive change in the world. Yet the concept of development is fraught in historical and political economic terms. Its complexity is reflected in academic debates about developmental imageries and imaginaries and, in particular, in representing global poverty. We argue that, by using images carefully and reflectively, we can help students think critically about the development project’s history and imperial dimensions whilst nurturing their desire to either struggle against global injustices or improve life and livelihood in particular places. We write from the standpoint of teachers in postgraduate education in both law and cognate disciplines. Our aim is to equip students with the kinds of contextual understandings and critical intellectual tools which help them to become engaged agents of change

The State and International Law: A Reading from the Global South

In this essay we re-describe the relationship between international law and the state, reversing the usual imagined directionality of the flow between the two. At its most provocative, our argument is that rather than international law being a creation of the state, making the state is an ongoing project of international law. In the essay, we pay particular attention to the institutionalised project of development in order to illuminate the ways in which international law gives form to, and actualises, states, and then recirculates from a multiplicity of points “within” them

Introduction - Reading Modern Law: Critical Methodologies and Sovereign Formations

Reading Modern Law identifies and elaborates upon key critical methodologies for reading and writing about law in modernity. The force of law rests on determinate and localizable authorizations, as well as an expansive capacity to encompass what has not been pre-figured by an order of rules. The key question this dynamic of law raises is how legal forms might be deployed to confront and disrupt injustice. The urgency of this question must not eclipse the care its complexity demands. This book offers a critical methodology for addressing the many challenges thrown up by that question, whilst testifying to its complexity. The essays in this volume - engagements direct or oblique, with the work of Peter Fitzpatrick - chart a mode of resisting the proliferation of social scientific methods, as much as geo-political empire. The authors elaborate a critical and interdisciplinary treatment of law and modernity, and outline the pivotal role of sovereignty in contemporary formations of power, both national and international. From various overlapping vantage points, therefore, Reading Modern Law interrogates law\u27s relationship to power, as well as its relationship to the critical work of reading and writing about law in modernity

Introduction - Reading Modern Law: Critical Methodologies and Sovereign Formations

Reading Modern Law identifies and elaborates upon key critical methodologies for reading and writing about law in modernity. The force of law rests on determinate and localizable authorizations, as well as an expansive capacity to encompass what has not been pre-figured by an order of rules. The key question this dynamic of law raises is how legal forms might be deployed to confront and disrupt injustice. The urgency of this question must not eclipse the care its complexity demands. This book offers a critical methodology for addressing the many challenges thrown up by that question, whilst testifying to its complexity. The essays in this volume - engagements direct or oblique, with the work of Peter Fitzpatrick - chart a mode of resisting the proliferation of social scientific methods, as much as geo-political empire. The authors elaborate a critical and interdisciplinary treatment of law and modernity, and outline the pivotal role of sovereignty in contemporary formations of power, both national and international. From various overlapping vantage points, therefore, Reading Modern Law interrogates law\u27s relationship to power, as well as its relationship to the critical work of reading and writing about law in modernity

Navigating New Landscapes: The Contribution of Socio-Legal Scholarship in Mapping the Plurality of International Economic Law and Locating Power in International Economic Relations

The evolution of international economic law in the past two decades has been characterised by the growth and diversification of international economic actors, the expansion in the substantive areas governed by international law, and, crucially, the proliferation of multiple sites of international economic governance. This web of multi-layered international economic governance is, in turn, underpinned by complex dynamics of power which structure the legal and economic relations between the subjects of international economic law and other actors impacted by international legal rules and regulation. The challenge for international legal scholarship lay not only in mapping the multiple sites of international economic governance but also in unmasking the power dynamics inherent in international economic relations. Locating and analysing power relations underlying international economic law is to crucial to understanding the cause and effect of international economic rules and institutions for rulemaking. Conventional legal scholarship with its doctrinal focus, while useful in providing the foundational basis for analysis, cannot adequately capture the complexity of contemporary international economic law. Socio-legal approaches may be able to overcome these epistemological limitations by supplying: a) the methodologies to study international economic law beyond a focus on rules and institutions; and b) the critical theoretical lens to understand the power dynamics inherent in international legal relations. The objective of this paper is twofold: firstly, it will seek to identify the contributions of socio-legal approaches to the study of international economic law; and secondly, it will explore how socio-legal scholarship can provide a methodological and theoretical framework to construct an understanding of the pluralistic nature of international economic regulatory regimes and their underlying dynamics of power. In doing so, the paper will also consider the value of juxtaposing an empirical methodology for mapping legal regimes with a critical normative approach for analysing power relations in international economic law

Dreams and nightmares of liberal international law: capitalist accumulation, natural rights and state hegemony

This article develops a line of theorising the relationship between peace, war and commerce and does so via conceptualising global juridical relations as a site of contestation over questions of economic and social justice. By sketching aspects of a historical interaction between capitalist accumulation, natural rights and state hegemony, the article offers a critical account of the limits of liberal international law, and attempts to recover some ground for thinking about the emancipatory potential of international law more generally

Jurisprudences of jurisdiction: matters of public authority

This essay examines a number of jurisdictional engagements that point to difficulties in joining or separating relations between public authority, jurisprudences of jurisdiction and the writing of jurisprudence

Between Resistance and Reform: TWAIL and the Universality of International Law

In this article we explore the relationship between TWAIL scholarship and the universality of international law. In particular, we offer an account of this relation as the outcome of what we describe as TWAIL’s characteristic double engagement with the attitudes of both reform and revolution vis-à-vis international law and scholarship. In being thoroughly critical of the cornerstones of the established order, and yet engaged with the practice and operation of international law at the same time, TWAIL scholars have intimated in their search for justice, an idea of universality capable of accepting international law as an agonic project. To further its political engagement with the universal promise of international law, we suggest an explicit methodological turn for TWAIL scholarship that is attentive to international law as a material project. By paying attention to the daily operation of international law at the mundane, quotidian and material plane, we suggest that TWAIL can sharpen its analytical potential and generate at the same time, a ‘praxis of universality’. Such a praxis would be capable of troubling the constitution of places and subjects in the name of the international, whilst heightening our sensitivity to the numerous forms of resistance that are already at play as a particular normative project is being institutionalised and administered across the world