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Abstract

International law events have been sites of contestation among teachers and scholars of international law and beyond. With each unsettling international event, the international law academe faces new wine in the old bottle questions on international law efficacy based on managerial expectations of international law. Though mostly unfair and disproportionate, these questions–diffused and embodied in teaching and otherwise–weigh heavily on international law’s efficacy and legitimacy during and even beyond the temporality of such events. Before any objective and horizontal assessment of IL through crises, as international law scholars, we must try to ask ourselves a few questions. What makes a crisis synonymous with the failure of international law? What conditions our perceptions about a crisis? Were Chernobyl and Hiroshima crises? Were the Chagos Islands a crisis? Was Iraq a crisis? Are the Ukraine and Gaza crises? How we qualify certain events as crises and others as not is an intriguing enquiry: is it the imminent nature of the issue, the relevance of stakeholders and their political weight in international politics, the power asymmetries between the States involved, or a combination of some factors that undercut these? What elements (and in which proportions) from a Crisis are deduced to draw the arc of IL efficacy and legitimacy? Besides these overlooked questions lie grotesque mainstream positivism, its frame of references, presuppositions, and predicates. State is one such presupposition and predicate, and crisis is a predicate for scaling the efficacy and legitimacy of IL. The relationality of a crisis with State(s), presents the construct of the State as a significant site for unpacking legal rationale and the hideous theoretical sophistries.

References

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Books and Book Chapters

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Legal Documents

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Web Sources

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