Thomas Skouteris, THE NOTION OF PROGRESS IN INTERNATIONAL LAW DISCOURSE The Hague: T M C Asser Press (www.asser.nl), 2010. xiv + 261 pp. ISBN 9789067042994. £55.
| Author | Akbar Rasulov |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2011.0016 |
| Published date | 01 January 2011 |
| Date | 01 January 2011 |
| Pages | 158-160 |
The central question at the heart of the book is deceptively simple. It is a common truism, begins Skouteris, that the discourse of international law is strewn with countless references to the idea of progress. The language of progress has become so “perfectly embedded in international law's everyday life that its constant use [almost always] passes unnoticed” (1). And yet just what exactly is it that international lawyers understand by “progress”? How do they measure “progress”? What sort of implications do they assume follow from recognising something as “progressive”? In most other fields of the social sciences, observes Skouteris, the notion of progress has been a subject of extensive enquiry for more than two centuries. In international law, the debate has not even started (11). What sort of knowledge have the students of international law missed out on as a result of this omission?
It would be difficult not to acknowledge the stakes in Skouteris's enterprise. Few master tropes have been as important in shaping the mental map of the international law discipline as the trope of progress. Firstly, and quite obviously, “[a]ccounts of … progress give context and meaning to individual events by … relating them to one another into coherent historical or causal relationships” (9). Secondly, and much more importantly, the language of progress is also a language of authority. “Progress talk is not just hortatory” – it affects the legitimacy of international policymaking, determines the trajectory of international law's disciplinary self-reproduction (“academic education”), and, of course, influences the distribution of various types of institutional resources within...
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