International law and its others

Institutional and political developments since the end of the Cold War have led to a revival of public interest in, and anxiety about, international law. Liberal international law is appealed to as offering a means of constraining power, representing universal values, and governing relations between sovereign states. This book brings together scholars who draw on jurisprudence, philosophy, legal history and political theory to analyze the stakes of this turn to international law. These essay explore the history of relations between international law and those it defines as other -other traditions (theology, philosophy, morality, economics), other logics (sacrifice, war, despotism, calculation), other forces (God, desire, markets, imperialism), and other groups (indigenous people, corporations, barbarians, terrorists). The authors explore the archive of international law as a record of attempts by scholars, bureaucrats, decision-makers and legal professionals to think about what happens to law at the limits of modern political organization. The result is a rich array of responses to the question of what it means to speake and writes international law in our time.