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| 1 |
ID:
112421
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| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Interdisciplinary approaches often bemoan international law's lack of theoretical sophistication and naïve utopianism. Instead of offering effective tools of governance, it seems committed to outdated ideas about an international public realm and a dubious teleology of progress. This essay - given as the E. H. Carr lecture at the University of Aberystwyth in 2011 - reviews efforts to reform international law into a science and a more efficient instrument of international rule. Such efforts have been a part of international law's internal development but their lack of success depends on a mistaken view of the field as a 'discipline' - a set of theoretical or technical propositions. This essay defends a view of international law as an argumentative practice in which political claims are defended and attacked, rather than as a governance tool or institutional blueprint. At its worst, law may buttress bureaucratic privilege. At its best it may offer, for a cynical world, a vocabulary for imagining better futures. It may also sharpen political thought and strategic awareness, but it cannot replace them.
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| 2 |
ID:
091914
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2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In his 'Perpetual Peace', Kant indicts the natural law tradition (Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel) as 'miserable comforters' whose principles and doctrines 'cannot have the slightest legal force'. The indictment emerges from Kant's critique of natural law in both its empirical and rationalist variants as unable to uphold a really 'binding' notion of cosmopolitan legality. Since the early 1990s a new literature has emerged in the International Relations field that speaks about the effectiveness and legitimacy of international law as a form of supranational 'governance'. This article argues that that literature raises precisely the same problems that Kant detected in early modern natural law. Like the latter, this literature is best seen as an attempt to appropriate the voice of international legality to a fully instrumentalist discipline dedicated to serving the interests of power
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