TL;DRAbstract
Many claim, or at least suspect, that international law is in a crisis. For some, informal globalisation and the Iraqi war have demonstrated international law's increasing marginality in international life, the growing pattern of violation of its key provisions interpreted as proof of its irrelevancy. For others, the crisis emerges from endogenous origins, from international law's having become yet another aspect of a bureaucratic system of bargaining at Western-dominated international institutions by an 'international Hofmafia'. While both criticisms have a bite, my interest is drawn directly by neither. Instead, I want to examine the inside of the profession where the crisis sometimes appears as a sense of the loss of international law's emancipatory promise, a creeping scepticism about whether there ever was any such project to begin with.
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Many claim, or at least suspect, that international law is in a crisis. For some, informal globalisation and the Iraqi war have demonstrated international law's increasing marginality in international life, the growing pattern of violation of its key provisions interpreted as proof of its irrelevancy. For others, the crisis emerges from endogenous origins, from international law's having become yet another aspect of a bureaucratic system of bargaining at Western-dominated international institutions by an 'international Hofmafia'. While both criticisms have a bite, my interest is drawn directly by neither. Instead, I want to examine the inside of the profession where the crisis sometimes appears as a sense of the loss of international law's emancipatory promise, a creeping scepticism about whether there ever was any such project to begin with.
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