1 - Knowing International Law

Summary

This chapter puts forward the main point of the book: to propose a new “way of seeing” (Johns) international legal scholarship. One of its principal claims is that a focus on the ‘microlevel’ of international legal scholarship changes our understanding of what it means to make law. This has significant implications for what we scrutinize and how; for what we think matters to the way international legal knowledge comes about and what it is we do as legal scholars. What it entails is an “attentiveness” (Orford) to the particular, individually spoken and written word, as well as to the part played by the individual scholar who utters it. The introduction roughly outlines the cyberwar discourse, but mostly situates the book in scholarship about doctrine as well as scholarship about the (socio)linguistics of academic knowledge construction. It also details how it takes up Anne Orford's call for a “turn to description” and relates that turn to practice theory, linguistics and ethnographic work on and in international law.