Chapter 12: Epilogue

Much writing about international law takes place at a distance, from high above or far away. The attempt to produce a science of law has produced varied approaches across the generations, but each wave of scholars has sought to formalize legal material in order to grasp it. 1 Early 20th-century positivists sought to abstract and distance legal knowledge from ‘the concrete legal experience on which it was based. 2 Traditional dogmatic scholarship has attempted to produce systematic accounts of legal rights and obligations, or of the principles to be found in any legal system. Critical scholarship about international has in turn often sought to maintain a studied distance from its object of knowledge, whether through taking the sociology of the profession or the history of the discipline as its focus, 3 or through producing sweeping accounts of the structure, function, grammar or ideology of international law.

Sometimes taking a distance from the object of study is necessary for the production of rigorous scholarship. That approach to critical analysis of international and transnational law has produced significant insights, through analysing the emergence of transnational networks and guilds of experts and interrogating their relation to vertical and horizontal forms of power. Yet that style produces, and indeed privileges, work with a certain, often cynical, style, 4 or gives a sense of the world of legal practice as somehow more coherent, autonomous or even intelligible than it seems to those immersed in it on a daily basis. 5 It also offers little to those who are interested in finding other ways to occupy law, whether as teachers, students or practitioners in various locations. Perhaps more importantly, the relentless cynicism of many critiques of professional expertise seems out of touch with the contemporary situation, in which professionals are increasingly far from autonomous, in which scientific and other forms of expertise are increasingly disparaged, and in which cynical reason, far from being oppositional, has become an extremely powerful resource for dominant political forces.

There is, however, a counter-tendency developing among a new community of critical scholars, whose writing takes up a pose of critical intimacy rather than critical distance. 6 An exciting body of work has begun to take shape, which gets up close and personal with international law, approaching its operations with curiosity rather than suspicion. Instead of remaining content to reproduce grand debates about the nature of international law as a structure or system, or to participate in rituals of generalized celebration or denunciation concerning the promises or failures of international law, this new scholarship engages in reflexive study of the practices, techniques, characters, objects, materials, meetings, networks, organizations, routines, images and locations in and through which international law goes to work. 7 It bears some relation to a broader self-reflexive conversation that has been taking place within the critical humanities, particularly in relation to forms of critique organised around the increasingly routine resort to ‘cynical reason’, unmasking illusions, or the ‘seemingly inexhaustible relay of scepticism and disclosure’. 8 This collection of essays makes a major contribution to such literature.

The essays gathered in this collection take as their starting point the idea of transnational law as a performance. International law, like diplomacy, is a practice of communication directed to an audience, dependent upon rhetoric, staging, protocol, place, ritual and management for its success. 9 And like any theatrical performance, much of the most important work that goes on in its staging happens in what we might conventionally overlook as merely ‘backstage’ preparations for the real event. By foregrounding the myriad practices that are necessary in order to stage a successful performance of a world in which powerful legal actors shape or discipline politics in particular ways, these essays gradually help to shift our sense of where the action really is. Indeed, reading these careful and revealing accounts of the enormous amount of time, energy, and innovation involved in preparing for the real world of the performance, we begin to see that much of the force, threat or promise of the law is an effect of the anticipation of its performance within everyday life. In so doing, these chapters alter our sense of what kind of work legal institutions and actors are really doing, when, how and for whom.

The deceptive ease with which these authors go about their task perhaps masks some of what is particularly innovative and significant about the broader project in which they are engaged. Let me here point to three key contributions that this collection makes. First, the authors are all keenly aware of the reflexive movement between the scholar and the object of study. They help the reader to understand that trying to make sense of international or transnational law involves trying to construct new virtual objects that help to make something visible that is already visible. The essays in this collection take as their object the everyday life of transnational law, in the process unsettling what we take the work of transnational law – and thus transnational law itself – to be. The chapters involve us in ‘the pleasure of understanding everyday practices’, 10 while, at the same time, drawing attention to the material conditions of such practices – the routines through which they are enacted, the sites at which they are produced, the relations upon which they depend, and the technologies upon which they rely. As a result, the essays avoid ‘the tendency to reduce the plurality of practices into a discursive homogeneity that flattens...