… and New York and The Hague and Tokyo and Geneva and Nuremberg and …: The Geographies of International Law

摘要

In the dominant narrative of international law, historical events in space and time are made to fall along an invisible line of progress, from Westphalia in 1648 through the Bretton Woods and San Francisco conferences of 1944 and 1945 to the present day and continuing on through the future to a more just world. Against this, a counter-narrative has emerged which denies the possibility of such linear development and consigns international law to forever tracing an unending circular path between points of idealism and realpolitik. This article examines how international lawyers have created and continue to create these metaphysical geographies of international law. Drawing on the work of the French multi-disciplinary thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this article shows that both approaches, and indeed the very concept of international law, can at most only replicate and impose pre-conceived theories and that the imposition of such theories is contrary to the natural patterns of human consciousness. It urges us to see international law rather as but one manifestation of the ongoing struggle between efforts to impose unity on and to control human consciousness and the mind’s efforts to break free of such restricting structures.