Quiroga-Villamarín on the Material Turn in the History of International Law

Gated, but very interesting: Beyond Texts? Towards a Material Turn in the Theory and History of International Law, by Daniel Ricardo Quiroga-Villamarín, in the Journal of the History of International Law, from a master’s thesis on Shipping Containers, Materiality, and Legal History:

While the history of international law has been mainly dominated by intellectual history, the neighboring humanities and social sciences have witnessed a ‘material turn.’ Influenced by the new materialisms, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have highlighted the role of objects and nonhuman infrastructures in the making of the social. Law, however, has been conspicuously absent from these discussions. Only until recently, things began to be studied as instruments of – global – regulation. In this article, I trace an intellectual history of the intellectual history of international law, contextualizing it since its inception in the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ to its spread into the legal field via the Critical Legal Studies movement and its final import into international law in the last two decades. I conclude arguing that international legal historians can depart from the ‘well-worn paths’ of intellectual and conceptual history to engage with the materiality (past, present, and future) of global governance.

–Dan Ernst

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Gaffield on international law after the Haitian Revolution

 Julia Gaffield (Georgia State University) has published "The Racialization of International Law after the Haitian Revolution: The Holy See and National Sovereignty" in the American Historical Review, 125:3 (June 2020), 841-68. Here's the abstract: 

The Haitian state shaped international definitions of sovereignty and national legitimacy after the Declaration of Independence in 1804. Haiti’s nineteenth century was not a period of isolation and decline; its first six decades were globally connected because the country’s leaders challenged their postcolonial inequality with diplomacy and state formation. This strategy aimed to establish Haiti’s membership in the “family of nations,” a central metaphor in European and American diplomatic, legal, and religious decision-making. In doing so, the Haitian state forced the Atlantic powers to redefine the boundaries of international relations. Haiti’s decades-long negotiations with the Catholic Church were tied to the racialization of the global hierarchy. After its Declaration of Independence, the Haitian state began clearing a theoretical path toward recognized sovereignty based on the dominant narrative that a society must be considered “civilized” on the world stage. But, as it cultivated internal policies and practices that rejected the dominant racist assumptions, these discriminatory ideologies became increasingly more explicit in international law.

Further information is available here. 

--Mitra Sharafi

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