The Shifting Origins of International Law

Abstract

Both state-centrism and Eurocentrism are under challenge in international law today. This article argues that this double challenge is mirrored back into the study of the history of international law. It examines the effects of the rise of positivism as a method of norm-identification and the role of methodological nationalism upon the study of the history of international law in the modern foundational period of international law. It extends this by examining how this bequeathed a double exclusionary bias regarding time and space to the study of the history of international law as well as a reiterative focus on a series of canonical events and authors to the exclusion of others such as those related to the Islamic history of international law. It then analyses why this state of historiographical affairs is changing, highlighting intra-disciplinary developments within the field of the history of international law and the effects that the ‘international turn in the writing of history’ is having on the writing of a new history of international law for a global age. It concludes with a reflection on some of the tasks ahead, providing a series of historiographical signposts for the history of international law as a field of new research.

In the eyes of all mankind: Interests and independence in Vattelian statehood

“…This places figures like Vattel in the crosshairs of a larger conceptual debate. Critics argue that by sourcing its normative authority in European and imperialist experience, today’s international order rests on a “congratulatory progressive narrative” with a transparently self-serving bias (Arvidsson and Bak McKenna, 2020: 40; de la Rasilla del Moral, 2015). Others argue the effort to assign Vattel among the villains of international theory obscures more than it reveals, because the closure around state interests that Vattel proscribes is never complete (Hunter, 2013a; Zurbuchen, 2010).…”