After ‘Iraq’: Back to the International Rule of Law? An Introduction to the NYIL 2011 Agora

Abstract

This chapter introduces the fundamental question which is addressed from different perspectives by the authors in this Agora: what does the 2003 Iraq intervention teach us about the relation between international law and politics? This chapter briefly discusses the relevance of the work by Martti Koskenniemi to that question and it treats the different points of view put forward in the contributions. It also notes that one possible position on the intervention in Iraq is not considered in this Agora, nor in the debate more generally—viz. that an intervention would be legal but illegitimate. However, if this position were examined, it could serve discussion about the political preferences which sometimes explain the choice of international legal arguments. This chapter concludes that from the contributions in this Agora a complex image emerges of the relation between international law and politics: beyond the relative indeterminacy of the law and beyond the collapse of the separation between international law and politics, an international rule of law re-emerges as a specific way of doing politics.