To Be or Not to Be: The Ontological Predicament of State Creation in International Law

Grzybowski, Janis

doi:10.1093/ejil/chx031

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 13 publications

(15 reference statements)

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“…Moving beyond existing mainstream research orthodoxies will make it possible to reveal the indeterminacy of norms and politics of state recognition and show that it is the continued performance and reproduction of those norms that creates the perception of stability and continuity of existing regimes of recognition. At the end of the day, it is the ritualized, habitualized, repeated, and performed diplomatic discourses and practices of states that contribute to the constitution and reproduction of existing regimes of state recognition (see Grzybowski, 2017).…”

Section: Recognitionality and The Re-visioning Of State Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Statehood and recognition in world politics: Towards a critical research agenda

Visoka¹

2021

Cooperation and Conflict

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This article offers a critical outlook on existing debates on state recognition and proposes future research directions. It argues that existing knowledge on state recognition and the dominant discourses, norms and practices needs to be problematized and freed from power-driven, conservative, positivist and legal interpretations and reoriented in new directions in order to generate more critical, contextual and emancipatory knowledge. The article proposes two major areas for future research on state recognition, which should: (a) expose the politics of knowledge, and positionality, and seek epistemic justice and decolonization of state recognition studies; and (b) study more thoroughly recognitionality techniques encompassing diplomatic discourses, performances and entangled agencies. Accordingly, this article seeks to promote a long overdue debate on the need for re-visioning state recognition in world politics.

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Section: Recognitionality and The Re-visioning Of State Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Statehood and recognition in world politics: Towards a critical research agenda

Visoka¹

2021

Cooperation and Conflict

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“…Politics are invoked not only to reject an opposing position as non-legal, but also to simultaneously build on effectiveness and recognition as a factual basis for law. 128 Meanwhile, IR approaches to the emergence of states struggle as much to liberate themselves from recourse to legality as IL perspectives seek to banish the resort to politics. This can be illustrated by a glance at two IR literatures that have gained traction in the last decade, one concerned with practices of recognition in international politics, 129 the other with the emergence and position of supposed de facto or unrecognized states.…”

Section: 1mentioning

confidence: 99%

The matrix reloaded: Reconstructing the boundaries between (international) law and politics

Reis¹,

Grzybowski²

2021

Leiden Journal of International Law

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Interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of international law (IL) and International Relations (IR) has illuminated the roles of politics in law, of law in politics, and of the shifting boundary between the two in various areas of international affairs. The boundary itself, however, has proven resilient. While critical approaches investigating the politics of international law have come to insist on the lasting significance of legality proper, IR approaches to legalization have returned to politics. Although the apparent limits to challenging the boundary between legality and politics are not new, we suggest that they are intimately related to another great divide, i.e., that between the state and the international. Together, these two cross-cutting lines have shaped the possibilities and constraints of articulating substantive positions ‘in’ (international) law and politics at least since the Interwar period. Reading these distinctions as intertwined ‘nested oppositions’, this article reconstructs the stylized but paradigmatic debates between Max Weber and Hans Kelsen over the nature of the state and between Hans Morgenthau and Hersch Lauterpacht over the nature of the international. We further illustrate how the same conceptual oppositions still enable and constrain current debates in IL and IR, discussing as examples the creation of states and the justiciability of international crimes. Crossing and contesting the boundaries ultimately reaffirms them as the matrix in which conflicts over states and the international are articulated as legal and political.

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“…However, effective statehood is in turn not an obvious fact and interpretations of whether it is actually present or not legitimately differ (Koskenniemi 2005, 272-281). Hence, although both doctrines seek to determine statehood, they are eventually forced to silently assume states that neither of them can actually grasp (Grzybowski 2017).…”

Section: Circling Around State Identification: the Constitutive And Dmentioning

confidence: 99%

The paradox of state identification:de factostates, recognition, and the (re-)production of the international

Grzybowski

2019

Int. Theory

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The literature on de facto states challenges the conventional identification of states by legal recognition, proposing to identify states based on their effectiveness instead. Yet, as I argue in this paper, rather than turning the tables on recognition, the de facto state challenge ultimately reveals all state identification in International Relations and international law to be essentially indeterminate. This lacuna, I suggest, is not an accidental omission, but an expression of the foundational paradox of modern political order that is rooted in the intertwined ontology of the state system and the individual states constituting it, with each presupposing the other. As a result, the opposition between empirical facts, political decisions, and legal norms invoked in attempts to identify states cannot but remain irresolvable. This should not be regarded as a problem to be overcome, however, but as a source of social order. Although states cannot be substantively identified, any effort to do so in practice naturalizes the state as the very form through which we articulate and shape political claims, conflicts, and settlements. In performatively enacting states precisely at the contested margins, state identification thus both invokes and (re-)produces the statist international as the central imaginary of modern political order.

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To Be or Not to Be: The Ontological Predicament of State Creation in International Law

Cited by 8 publications

References 13 publications

Statehood and recognition in world politics: Towards a critical research agenda

Statehood and recognition in world politics: Towards a critical research agenda

The matrix reloaded: Reconstructing the boundaries between (international) law and politics

The paradox of state identification:de factostates, recognition, and the (re-)production of the international

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