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2 - A Thousand Flowers Blooming, or the Desert of the Real?

International Law and Its Many Problems of History

from Part I - The Historiography of International Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2024

By
Nehal Bhuta
Edited by
Randall Lesaffer  and
Anne Peters
Randall Lesaffer
Affiliation:
KU Leuven & Tilburg University
Anne Peters
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg
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Summary

This chapter narrates a history of the history of international law as a species of European historical jurisprudence born of the nineteenth century. It connects this historical jurisprudence with a wider atmosphere of historicism and its intellectual antecedents and descendents, including (but not limited to) so-called ‘progress narratives’. It argues that the history of international law in this specific sense largely vanished after the Second World War, and the history of international law underwent two distinct rebirths: as part of the anti-colonial legal arguments repudiating the colonial structures and presuppositions of international legal thought, and as part of a critique of a renewed historicism and civilisational progressivism between 1989 and the present. But the second revival of the history of international law coincided with emergent histories of empire, international history, histories of international political thought and global history. The result is an exploding field of scholarship with objects and subjects of many kinds connected to the international and the global and their laws, institutions and practices.

Keywords

Historiographyinternational lawhistoricismhistorical jurisprudenceglobalisationglobal historyinternational history
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of International Law , pp. 49 - 106
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

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