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Diffuse subjects and dispersed power: New materialist insights and cautionary lessons for international law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2021

Jessie Hohmann Open the ORCID record for Jessie Hohmann [Opens in a new window]
Jessie Hohmann*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney, P.O. Box 123, Broadway, NSW, Australia2007 Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article sets out the major tenets of new materialism and maps out its implications for international law. It considers what new materialism might offer for those of us working within international law in the way of new insights, resources, practices or politics. It first sets the contours of new materialism within the broader material turn. It then elaborates three main tenets of new materialism’s methodology, theory, and ontology: its attention to matter in its physicality; the embedded and entangled subject; and the vitality or agency of objects. The article focuses on how new materialist work might help us to understand, first, subjectivity and second, power and accountability in international law. It concludes that new materialist approaches offer important and compelling insights, working against entrenched categories and structures that continue to perpetuate or excuse violence and harm in international law’s doctrines and practices. These insights provide resources for rethinking power and subjectivity, and the role these play in international law. However, those of us working to consider how we can respond to pressing crises of justice and coexistence within international law may find new materialism most powerful when brought into relation, and deep conversation, with more structural methodologies. Notably ‘older’ (Marxist or historical) materialisms grasp embedded power relations and deep-rooted systemic harms in more concrete ways. This is, the article concludes, a conversation that international law scholars are well placed to contribute to, deepening both ‘old’ and ‘new’ materialist insights for international law.

Keywords

international lawinternational legal theorylegal materialitymaterial turnnew materialism
Type
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Information
Leiden Journal of International Law , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , September 2021 , pp. 585 - 606
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney. I acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, upon whose lands and waters this work was researched and written. I pay my respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging. I acknowledge them as the Owners of Country, whose sovereignty was never ceded. I am grateful to the ISRF for Early Career Fellowship funding, to the participants at the ILSRG Research Symposium at La Trobe University in December 2019 for discussions and ideas. Thanks are also due to Christine Schwöbel-Patel for careful reading and critical discussion throughout the writing process. Two anonymous reviewers engaged deeply with the piece, and their constructive reviews were greatly appreciated. Any errors remain my own.

References

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2 A. Filkov et al., ‘Impact of Australia’s Catastrophic 2019/20 Bushfire Season on Communities and Environment. Retrospective Analysis and Current Trends’, (2020) 1 Journal of Safety Science and Resilience 44–56.

3 A. Freedman, ‘Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions effectively double as a result of unprecedented bush fires’, Washington Post, 25 January 2020, available at www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/01/24/australia-bush-fires-have-nearly-doubled-countrys-annual-greenhouse-gas-emissions/.

4 Data as at 14 December 2020. See Johns Hopkins University, Coronavirus Resource Centre, COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins, available at coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html.

5 H. Kelly, A. Freedman and J. Samenow, ‘California wildfires burn 771,000 acres in one week, killing 5 and degrading air quality’, Washington Post, 22 August 2020, available at www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/08/20/california-wildfires-evacuations/.

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7 See J. Vidal, ‘Human impact on wildlife to blame for spread of viruses, says study’, Guardian, 8 April 2020, available at www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/08/human-impact-on-wildlife-to-blame-for-spread-of-viruses-says-study-aoe.

8 J. Linarelli, M. E. Salomon and M. Sornarajah (eds.), The Misery of International Law: Confrontations with Injustice in the Global Economy (2018); A. Orford, ‘International Law and the Populist Moment: A Comment on Martti Koskenniemi’s Enchanted by the Tools? International Law and Enlightenment’, (2019) 113 ASIL Proceedings of the Annual Meeting 3, at 26.

9 I acknowledge that these anxieties reflect the scholarship, conversations, and media discourse in the context in which I am situated, and that they may not speak to the anxieties of other constituencies and communities contesting or working with or within international law. On situated knowledge, from an early new materialist perspective, see D. Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, (1988) 14 Feminist Studies 575.

10 Victoria and Albert Museum, Disobedient Objects: About the Exhibition, available at www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/disobedient-objects/disobedient-objects-about-the-exhibition/. See also C. Flood and G. Grindon, Disobedient Objects (2014). The British Museum and BBC Radio 4 collaboration began as a 100-part radio series presented by the Museum’s then Director Neil MacGregor, with short expositions of the Museum’s objects. See www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nrtd2/episodes/downloads. The project spawned a book, N. MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010) and an internationally travelling exhibition, and MacGregor has followed this object-focused format in further projects; see, e.g., N. MacGregor, Germany: Memories of a Nation (2016) and Living with the Gods: On Beliefs and Peoples (2018).

11 See, e.g., L. Zuckerman, The Potato (1999); R. Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (2010); E. de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2011).

12 See, e.g., M. Miodownik, Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape our Man-Made World (2013).

13 See, e.g., D. Balzer, Curationism (2014); I. Mida et al., ‘Scholars’ Roundtable Presentation: Everyone Their Own Curator: Professionalism and Authority in the Digital Age’, (2017) 43(1) Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America 45, at 56, and the best-selling M. Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (translated by C. Hirano) (2014).

14 On the ‘turn’ specifically see T. Bennett and P. Joyce, ‘Material Powers: Introduction’, in T. Bennett and P. Joyce (eds.), Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn (2010), 1–21.

15 See, e.g., the discussion in D. Hicks and M. C. Beaudry, ‘Introduction: Material Culture Studies: A Reactionary View’, in D. Hicks and M. C. Beaudry (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (2010), 1–21.

16 See, e.g., D. Coole and S. Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’, in D. Coole and S. Frost (eds.), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010), 10–14 for a synopsis of relevant developments in physics and in complexity and chaos theory; K. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007); Q. Meilliassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (translated by R. Brassier) (2008).

17 Coole and Frost ibid., at 15; S. Jasanoff (ed.), Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age (2011).

18 J-H. Passoth, ‘From Hardware to Software to Runtime: The Politics of (at Least) Three Digital Materialities’, in U. T. Kissmann and J. van Loon (eds.), Discussing New Materialism (2019), 173–89.

19 Barad, supra note 16; see also ‘Interview with Karen Barad’, in R. Dolphjin and I. van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (2012), at 62–8.

20 See, e.g., A. Ravenscroft, ‘Strange Weather: Indigenous Materialisms, New Materialism, and Colonialism’, (2018) 5(3) Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 353–70; P. Hinton, T. Mehrabi and J. Barla, ‘New Materialisms_New Colonialisms’, newmaterialism.eu, available at newmaterialism.eu/content/5-working-groups/2-working-group-2/position-papers/subgroup-position-paper-_-new-materialisms_new-colonialisms.pdf; but see J. Rosiek and S. L. Pratt, ‘The New Materialisms and Indigenous Theories of Non-Human Agency: Making the Case for Respectful Anti-Colonial Engagement’, (2020) 26 Qualitative Inquiry 331–46, demonstrating relatively little articulation between Indigenous agential ontologies and ‘agential realism’ in new materialism, and calling for greater engagement.

21 See, e.g., D. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, (1985) Socialist Review 80; Barad, supra note 16; R. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (2011); E. Grosz, ‘Feminism, Materialism and Freedom’, in Coole and Frost, supra note 16.

22 See, e.g., K. Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, (2003) 28(3) Journal of Women in Culture and Society 801, at 801–2; M. DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006), at 16; B. Washick and E. Wingrove, ‘Politics that Matter: Thinking about Power and Justice with the New Materialists’, (2015) 14 Contemporary Political Theory 63, at 64; Coole and Frost supra note 16, at 2–3, 6; ‘Interview with Rosi Braidotti’, in Dolphjin and van der Tuin, supra note 19, at 21.

23 See, e.g., the discussion of this point in Coole and Frost, supra note 16, at 4; J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), xiii-xix; B. Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, in B. Brown (ed.), Things (2004), at 13–14.

24 A. Perry-Kessaris’ ‘Legal Treasures’ and ‘Pop Up Museum of Legal Objects’ Projects, ‘Legal Treasures’ available at amandaperrykessaris.org/legaltreasure/ and ‘Pop Up Museum of Legal Objects’, available at amandaperrykessaris.org/collections/pop-up-museum-of-legal-objects-2017/.

25 J. Hohmann and D. Joyce (eds.), International Law’s Objects (2018); J. Hohmann, ‘The Treaty 8 Typewriter: Tracing the Roles of Material Things in Imagining, Realising and Resisting Colonial Worlds’, (2017) 5(3) LRIL 371.

26 M. Davies, Law Unlimited: Materialism, Pluralism and Legal Theory (2017), 154.

27 Ibid., at 155.

28 A. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, ‘Flesh of the Law: Material Legal Metaphors’, (2016) 43(1) JOLS 45–65.

29 H. Y. Kang, ‘Law’s Materiality: Between Concrete Matters and Abstract Forms, or how Matter becomes Material’, in A. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Law and Theory (2018), 456.

30 Ibid., at 457.

31 Ibid.

32 A. Pottage, ‘The materiality of What’, (2012) 39(1) JOLS 167. See also Pottage’s object of critique, B. Latour The Making of Law – An Ethnography of the Conseil d’Etat (translated by M. Brilman et al.) (2009).

33 Pottage, ibid., at 180.

34 Ibid.

35 H. Y. Kang and S. Kendall, ‘Legal Materiality’, in S. Stern, M. Del Mar and B. Meyler (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Law and the Humanities (2019). See also Kang, supra note 29.

36 Kang and Kendall, ibid., at 21 (original emphasis).

37 Kang, supra note 29, at 465.

38 Ibid.

39 See, e.g., the contributions in Hohmann and Joyce, supra note 25; R. Kapur, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl (2018); N. Tzouvala ‘Food for the Global Market: The Neoliberal Reconstruction of Agriculture in Occupied Iraq (2003-2004) and the Role of International Law’, (2016) 17(1) Global Jurist 1; L. Eslava, Local Space, Global Life: The Everyday Operation of International Law and Development (2015); D. R. Quiroga-Villamarín, ‘Containing Globalization: A Material History of Transnational Regulation through Shipping Containers (1956 – 1968)’ (2020), available at repository.graduateinstitute.ch/record/298599.

40 L. Eslava and S. Pahuja, ‘Beyond the (Post)Colonial: TWAIL and the Everyday Life of International Law’, (2012) 45(2) Journal of Law and Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America-Verfassung und Recht in Übersee 195, at 202.

41 Ibid.

42 Eslava (2015), supra note 39. T. Aalberts and T. Gammeltoft-Hansen (eds.), The Changing Practices of International Law (2018); F. Johns, ‘Data, Detection, and the Redistribution of the Sensible in International Law’, (2017) 111(1) AJIL 1.

43 See the contributions in (2017) 5(1) LRIL, special issue on History, Anthropology and the Archive of International Law; Hohmann and Joyce, supra note 25; R. Vos, ‘Walking Along the Rue de la Loi: EU Façades as Front- and Backstage of Transnational Legal Practice’, in L. J. M. Boer and S. Stalk (eds.), Backstage Practices of Transnational Law (2019); Perry-Kessaris’ ‘Legal Treasures’ and ‘Pop Up Museum of Legal Objects’ projects, supra note 24, in which a number of international lawyers have participated.

44 E. Jones, ‘A Posthuman-Xenofeminist Analysis of the Discourse on Autonomous Weapons Systems and Other Killing Machines’, (2018) 44(1) AFLJ 93; M. Arvidsson, ‘The Swarm that we Already are: Artificial Intelligent (AI) Swarming “Insect Drones”, Targeting and International Humanitarian Law in a Posthuman Ecology’, (2020) 11(1) JHRE 114; G. Heathcote, ‘War’s Perpetuity: Disabled Bodies of War and the Exoskeleton of Equality’, (2018) 44(1) AFLJ 71.

45 U. Nataranjan and J. Dehm, ‘Where is the Environment? Locating Nature in International Law’, (2019) 3 TWAILR: Reflections, available at twailr.com/where-is-the-environment-locating-nature-in-international-law/; A. Grear, ‘Introduction: “Staying with the Trouble”*- Environmental Justice for the Anthropocene-Capitalocene’, in A. Grear (ed.), Environmental Justice (2020).

46 See K. Khoday et al., ‘Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law: Introduction’, (2014) 23(3) LJIL 571, and the further papers in that Symposium issue, as well as Natarajan and Dehm, ibid.; Grear, ibid.

47 I. Clever and W. Ruberg, ‘Beyond Cultural History? The Material Turn, Praxiology, and Body History’, (2014) 3 Humanities 546, at 547.

48 Dolphijn and van der Tuin, supra note 19, at 115 (original emphasis).

49 See, e.g., S. Ahmed, ‘Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of “New Materialism”’, (2008) 15 EJWS 23; C. Devellennes and B. Dillet, ‘Questioning New Materialisms: An Introduction’, (2018) 35 Theory, Culture and Society 5, at 7.

50 See, e.g., the discussion in Davies, supra note 26, at 57.

51 See, e.g., Coole and Frost, supra note 16, at 176; Bennett, supra note 23.

52 See especially Brown, supra note 23.

53 In particular, the work of Latour and of Callon, e.g., B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (2005); B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (translated by C. Porter) (1993); M. Callon, ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fisherman of St. Brieuc Bay’, (1984) 32(1) The Sociological Review 196.

54 See, e.g., S. Jasanoff (ed.), States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and the Social Order (2004).

55 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980); M. DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (2016).

56 See Coole and Frost, supra note 16, at 11, who insist that ‘acknowledging nondiscursive material efficacy’ is not ‘equivalent to espousing a metaphysical claim regarding the Real as ultimate truth’.

57 See the work of Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, e.g., G. Harman, Object-Oriented-Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (2018); G. Harman, Speculative Realism: An Introduction (2018); T. Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013); T. Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2013).

58 See Dophijn and van der Tuin, supra note 19.

59 Other delineations include Devellennes and Dillet, who identify three criteria of what makes new materialism: ‘First, there is an emphasis on the novelty of the theory. Second, there is an ontological claim that is made (either explicitly or implicitly) about the nature of matter and how it impacts our lives. And finally, there are methodical implications of taking material objects seriously in our academic practices.’ Devellennes and Dillet, supra note 49, at 37. Gamble, Hanan and Nail note three trajectories of new materialism, which they name ‘negative new materialism’, ‘vital new materialism’, and ‘performative or “pedetic” new materialism’. See C. N. Gamble, J. S. Hanan and T. Nail, ‘What is New Materialism?’, (2019) 24(6) Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 111.

60 Coole and Frost, supra note 16, at 1.

61 Ibid.

62 See the synopsis in J. Hohmann, ‘The Lives of Objects’, in Hohmann and Joyce, supra note 25, at 30–2.

63 Davies, supra note 26, at 57.

64 Dolphjin and van der Tuin, supra note 19, at 59.

65 Barad, supra note 16, at 137–41 (emphasis in original).

66 Ibid., at 141.

67 Ibid.

68 Davies, supra note 26, at 58.

69 Ibid., at 61.

70 Ibid., at 60.

71 Dolphijn and van der Tuin, supra note 19, at 85–6.

72 Bennett, supra note 23, at 21.

73 Ibid., at 5.

74 Ibid., at viii.

75 Brown, supra note 23, at 174–82.

76 Bennet, supra note 23, at xvi.

77 Ibid.

78 Dolphijn and van der Tuin, supra note 19, at 54. See also Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, who writes of ‘lively agency’ as essentially relational. He defines it as ‘the ability of bodies (animate and inanimate) to withdraw in their singularity while connecting to other bodies’: A Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos ‘Lively Agency: Life and Law in the Anthropocene’, in I. Braverman (ed.), Animals, Biopolitics, Law: Lively Legalities (2016), at 194.

79 Dolphijn and van der Tuin, ibid.

80 Kang, supra note 29. See also Kang and Kendall, supra note 35, at 28.

81 Kang and Kendall, ibid.

82 Pottage, supra note 32, at 168.

83 Kang, supra note 29, at 462–3.

84 See above, note 22.

85 See also on files and filing, C. Vismann, Files: Law and Media Technology (2008) whose work has been influential on these questions for legal materiality; e.g., Kang and Kendall, supra note 35; T. Johnson ‘Legal History and the Material Turn’, in M. D. Dubber and C. Tomlins (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Legal History vol 1 (2018).

86 Haraway, supra note 9, at 62. With thanks to Matilda Arvidsson for discussion on this point.

87 Even the most generative and influential new materialist work can be critiqued for speaking as though from a vantage point beyond the assumptions it seeks to call into question. See, e.g., C. Calvert-Minor, ‘Epistemological Misgivings of Karen Barad’s “Posthumanism”’, (2014) 37 Human Studies 123.

88 See, supra note 32.

89 See, e.g., J. R. Martel, ‘The Law is Not a Thing: Kafkan (Im)materialism and Imitation Jam’, (2019) 23 Law, Text, Culture 240, at 242: ‘By looking at what the law is not (at thing) [sic] we can begin to see what it is, a desire for power, for tangibility and determination, a want that cannot be satisfied on its own terms’ he writes.

90 On military technologies, targeting, and the laws of war see, e.g., Jones, supra note 44; Arvidsson, supra note 44; M. Arvidsson, ‘Targeting, Gender, and International Posthumanitarian Law and Practice: Framing The Question of the Human in International Humanitarian Law’, (2018) 44(1) AFLJ 9; Heathcote, supra note 44; on human rights and environmental law see, e.g., A. Grear ‘Human Rights and New Horizons? Thoughts toward a New Juridical Ontology’, (2018) 43(1) Science, Technology and Human Values 129; Grear, supra note 45; Nataranjan and Dehm supra note 45. On the regulation of infrastructure and big data see B. Kingsbury, ‘Infrastructure and InfraReg: On Rousing the International Law “Wizards of Is”’, (2019) 8(2) CILJ 171. For another mapping of new or ‘renewed’ materialisms and international law see D. R. Quiroga-Villamarín, ‘Domains of Objects, Rituals of Truth: Mapping Intersections between International Legal History and the New Materialisms’, (2020) 8 International Politics Review 129.

91 On the perpetual difficulty in maintaining this distinction in theory and practice see J. Hohmann, ‘Lives of Objects’, in Hohmann and Joyce, supra note 25, at 30–3; M. Davies ‘Material Subjects and Vital Objects: Prefiguring Property and Rights for an Entangled World’, (2016) 22(2) AJHR 37.

92 Coole and Frost, supra note 16, at 10.

93 Arvidsson, supra note 90, at 17–20.

94 Ibid., at 24.

95 Ibid., at 26.

96 See, for example, E. Libelich and E. Benvenisti, ‘The Obligation to Exercise Discretion in Warfare: Why Autonomous Weapon Systems are Unlawful’, in N. Bhuta et al. (eds.), Autonomous Weapons Systems: Law, Ethics, Policy (2016), 244, arguing that a human’s administrative-legal duty to exercise discretion is the key to legal targeting decisions.

97 Grear, supra note 90, at 138.

98 Arvidsson, supra note 90, at 14.

99 A. Cole, ‘The Subject of Objects: Marx, New Materialism, and Queer forms of Life’, (2018) 22(2) Journal for Cultural Research 167, at 176–7.

100 See, e.g., the foundational works of scholars such as B. S. Chimni, International Law and World Order: A Critique of Contemporary Approaches (2017) and ‘An Outline of a Marxist Course on Public International Law’, (2004) 17(1) LJIL 1; A. Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (2004); U. Baxi, The Future of Human Rights (2002); S. Marks (ed.), International Law on the Left: Re-Examining Marxist Legacies (2009); A. Orford, Reading Humanitarian Intervention: Human Rights and the Use of Force in International Law (2003), and more recent important contributions including R. Parfitt, The Process of International Legal Reproduction: Inequality, Historiography, Resistance (2019); L. Eslava, M. Fakhri and V. Nesiah, Bandung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures (2017); N. Tzouvala, Capitalism as Civilisation (2020).

101 Washick and Wingrove, supra note 22, at 66.

102 See Cole, supra note 99, at 176; A. R. van Wyk, ‘What Matters Now?’, (2012) 8(2) Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 130, at 135.

103 See, e.g., K. Greenman, ‘Aliens in Latin America: Intervention, Arbitration and State Responsibility for Rebels’, (2018) 31(3) LJIL 617; R. Parfitt, supra note 100; UNGA, Report of the Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing as a Component of the Right to an Adequate Standard of Living, and the Right to Non-Discrimination in this Context, A/HRC/34/51 (18 January 2017) paras. 53–5.

104 See, e.g., S. Dehm, ‘Passport’, in Hohmann and Joyce, supra note 25, at 342; Johns, supra note 42.

105 Grear, supra note 90 at 141.

106 Barad, supra note 22, at 810.

107 Coole and Frost, supra note 16, at 30.

108 Ibid. See also Dolphijn and van der Tuin, supra note 19, at 21.

109 Coole and Frost, supra note 16, at 32.

110 Ibid., at 27.

111 Bennett, supra note 23, at 37.

112 Ibid.

113 See, e.g., F. Johns, ‘On Dead Circuits and Non-Events’, in I. Venzke and K. J. Heller (eds.), Contingency in International Law: On the Possibilities of Different Legal Histories (2021), 25–43.

114 On the ISO see K. Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (2014), at 107–8.

115 On electricity grids see Bennett, supra note 23, Ch. 2. See also M. Donaldson and B. Kingsbury, ‘Erzatz Normativity or Public Law in Global Governance: The Case of International Prescriptions for National Infrastructure Regulation’, (2013) 14(1) Chicago Journal of International Law 1; see also B. Honig Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (2017) and Easterling, ibid., on infrastructure more generally; on transoceanic cables see S. Humphreys, ‘Data: The Given’, in Hohmann and Joyce, supra note 25, at 191.

116 The term is Easterling’s, see supra note 114.

117 Johns, supra note 113, at 32.

118 Ibid. Johns calls these ‘vectorial’ power.

119 Ibid., at 41. Johns argues that our ‘fixations on necessity could perhaps have something to do with it … but fixations on contingency also seem to have played a role’. Ibid. I explore this aspect of the argument further in Section 5, below.

120 I. Roele, Articulating Security: The United Nations and its Infra-Law (forthcoming) Ch. 6 (on file with author).

121 Ibid.

122 See, e.g., Chimni, supra note 100; Kapur, supra note 39.

123 See, e.g., S. Pahuja, Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth, and the Politics of Universality (2011); Anghie, supra note 100; Chimni, ibid., Parfitt supra note 100.

124 See Parfitt, ibid; Anghie, ibid.

125 L. Pellizzoni, ‘Governing Through Disorder: Neoliberal Environmental Governance and Social Theory’, (2011) 21 Global Environmental Change 795.

126 L. Pellizzoni, ‘Catching up with Things? Environmental Sociology and the Material Turn in Social Theory’, (2016) 2(4) Environmental Sociology 312, at 316. See also L. Pellizzoni, ‘Metaphors and Problematizations: Notes for a Research Programme on New Materialism’, (2014) 5(2) Tecnoscienza 73, at 82–4.

127 Pellizzoni, supra note 125, at 316–17 makes the connection here cogently. For an influential work embracing the potential of disorder see N. Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder (2012).

128 Pellizzoni (2014), supra note 126, at 84. See also Johns, supra note 113, at 29–30, discussing financialization, datafication, and development as operating in this vein.

129 Pellizzoni, ibid. See also Pellizzoni, supra note 125.

130 Pellizzoni (2014), supra note 126, at 81. See also Pellizzoni, supra note 125, at 797. For an analysis of a similar approach within the World Bank see D. Van Den Meerssche and G. Gordon, “‘A New Normative Architecture” – Risk and Resilience as Routines of Un-Governance’, (2020) 11(3) Transnational Legal Theory 267.

131 Pellizzoni (2014), ibid.

132 B. Braun, ‘The 2013 Antipodes RGS-IBG Lecture: New Materialisms and Neoliberal Natures’, (2015) 47(1) Antipode 1–14.

133 D. Clausen, ‘Crude Thinking – 7 Ways of Dealing with the Complex in IR’, E-International Relations, 29 January 2016, available at www.e-ir.info/2016/01/29/crude-thinking-7-ways-of-dealing-with-the-complex-in-ir/.

134 J. Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy (2017).

135 For a classic approach to the civilizing mission of international law see, e.g., W. E. Hall, A Treatise on International Law (1890), 1; J. Lorimer, The Institutes of the Law of Nations: A Treatise of the Jural Relations of Separate Political Communities (1883). For an important critique see Anghie, supra note 100 at 3–6, 37–9.

136 Chimni (2017), supra note 100, at 103.

137 Braun, supra note 132.

138 See, e.g., Anghie, supra note 100.

139 M. Koskenniemi, ‘Empire and International Law: The Real Spanish Contribution’, (2011) 61 University of Toronto Law Journal 1; K. Miles, ‘Insulae Mollucae: Map of the Spice Islands, 1594’, in Hohmann and Joyce, supra note 25. See further, on nature and the environment, A. Grear, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Re-encountering Environmental Law and its “Subject” with Haraway and New Materialism’, in L. Kotze (ed.), Re-Imagining Environmental Law and Governance for the Anthropocene (2017).

140 See, e.g., A. Lang, ‘Purse Seine Net’, in Hohmann and Joyce, ibid.

141 J. Bennett, ‘Thing Power’, in B. Braun and S. J. Whatmore (eds.), Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life (2010), at 47–8.

142 D. Haraway, When Species Meet (2008), 11.

143 Coole and Frost, supra note 16, at 1.

144 See, e.g., R. Knox, ‘Valuing Race? Stretched Marxism and the Logic of Imperialism’, (2016) 4 LRIL 81 and the works cited at supra note 100.

145 See, e.g., Pellizzoni, supra notes 125 and 126; Braun, supra note 132; Cole, supra note 99; E. Cudworth and S. Hobden, ‘Liberation for Straw Dogs? Old Materialism, New Materialism, and the Challenge of an Emancipatory Posthumanism’, (2014) 12(1) Globalizations 134.

146 C. Tomlins, ‘Materialism and Legal Historiography, from Bachelard to Benjamin’, in S. Stern, M. Del Mar and B. Meyler (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Law and the Humanities (2019), at 18; see also C. Tomlins, ‘A Poetics for Spatial Justice: Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin, and the Return of Historical Materialism’, (2020) 32 L&Lit. 1. On the potential complementarity of Marxist materialism and legal materialism see also Kang and Kendall, supra note 35, at 25.

147 See, e.g., Bennett, supra note 23; Coole and Frost, supra note 16.

148 See, e.g., the discussion of this point in Cole, supra note 99, at 170. Thomas Nail, however, argues that Marx should be read as himself a new materialist thinker. See T. Nail, Marx in Motion: A New Materialist Marxism (2020).

149 Dolphijn and van der Tuin, supra note 19, at 54.

150 K. Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in T Carver (ed.), Marx: Later Political Writings (1996), at 32. S. Marks, ‘False Contingency’, (2009) 62 Current Legal Problems 1, at 1.

151 Marks, ibid., at 2.

152 Ibid.

153 Ibid., at 3–4. See also the important forthcoming volume by I. Venzke and K. J. Heller (eds.), Contingency in International Law: On the Possibilities of Different Legal Histories (2021), supra note 113, and Ingo Venzke’s introduction to it, teasing out how the volume contributors have dealt with the interplay of contingency and necessity: I. Venkze, ‘Introduction: Situating Contingency in the Path of International Law’, at 3–19.

154 Marks, ibid., at 9.

155 Johns, supra note 113.

156 Ibid., at 41. See also A. Pottage, ‘Power as an Art of Contingency: Luhmann, Deleuze, Foucault’, (1998) 27 Economy and Society 1.

157 Johns, ibid., at 42.

158 Ibid, at 32–3.

159 Ibid., at 34.

160 K. Marx, Captial: Vol 1, A Critique of Political Economy (1887), Ch. 1, at 27, available at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf.

161 Ibid.

162 Ibid.

163 This phrase is from the translation in K. Marx, Capital: Vol 1, A Critique of Political Economy (1976) (translated by B. Fowkes), at 165.

164 See Cole, supra note 99, at 173, commenting on the significance of Marx’s ‘speaking commodity’ and Nail, supra note 148, at 137 on the agency of matter and linen cloth as having the ability to ‘recognise’ a ‘kindred soul’.

165 Marx (1976), supra note 163, at 128.

166 Johns, supra note 113.