Critical Histories of International Law and the Repression of Disciplinary Imagination

Abstract

This article engages with international lawyers’ growing historiographical appetites. It makes the argument that the critical histories that have come to populate the international legal literature over the last decades continue to be organised along the very lines set by the linear historical narratives which they seek to question and disrupt. It makes a plea for radical historical critique, that is, for critical histories that move beyond the markers, periodisation and causal sequencing they seek to displace or disrupt and that embrace a consciously interventionist history-writing attitude with a view to unbridling disciplinary imagination.

Keywords: history of international law, historiography, legal theory, historical turn, radical historical critique, Hayden White, critical theory, linearity, progress narrative