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- Title
THE DECEPTIVE DYAD: FALSENESS AND FANTASY IN INTERNATIONAL LAW.
- Authors
Beckett, Jason
- Abstract
Many of those who write about Public International Law (PIL), portray it as a relatively autonomous and tolerably just legal system; emphasizing an understanding of law as a technical practice. A determinable system of rules and principles, deployed by trained professionals to evaluate and constrain the global machinations of power and politics. This is the image of law as a tool, an authoritative structure through which global justice can be pursued. These assumptions entrench a comforting, but false, progress narrative; and obscure the limitations of actually pursuing progressive change through international law.In this paper, I expand on Susan Marks’ suggestion that PIL is structured by a falsity which has two distinct but interrelated forms: false necessity and false contingency. These become visible when the practice of international legal argumentation is examined in the context of PIL’s radical indeterminacy. To explain this, I will first describe the two forms of falseness, and how they interact to create what I call the Deceptive Dyad. I will then outline the inexorable, radical, indeterminacy of PIL; three strategies through which international lawyers endeavour to domesticate or suppress this; and why these are unlikely to succeed. PIL’s purported demands, however meticulously crafted, do not effect change in the real world. This is made visible, and intelligible, through the lens of the deceptive dyad. Emancipatory change at the global level is possible. However, it faces systemic obstructions in our contemporary world order of “planned misery”. These obstructions, and the implausibility of PIL overcoming them, reveal a global normative architecture bifurcated between two competing systems: the one we think of as PIL; and another I will introduce and sketch as the Global Legal Order (GLO). To sharpen this distinction, I adopt Weber’s theory of law as the centralized deployment of violence, through a specifically “legal rationality”. Combining this with false contingency, I develop an analytic schema which clearly distinguishes the two normative orders. The GLO, possesses coercive authority, and deploys it in a legal-rational manner. Characterised by its capacity to enforce its will and the widespread obedience this commands, it imposes an ideologically coherent set of policies in a consistent manner; producing identifiable legal norms. PIL is radically indeterminate, but aspires to ethical perfection. It mimics the rituals of law, but lacks the capacity to enforce its demands. PIL has authority, but only the GLO is authoritative. The two systems co-exist and overlap, each functions to define and correct “delinquents”, but they do so in incompatible ways. For the GLO the delinquent is the government that refuses its neoliberal economic prescriptions. For PIL delinquency is defined in ethical terms: those oppressing or subjugating others, violating their rights. I argue that these two visions of delinquency are incompatible, but they are not unrelated. As I will illustrate, the GLO’s coercively imposed policy prescriptions impoverish states and immiserate their populations. This provokes protest and opposition, which necessitates oppressive governance, culminating in what PIL understands as “human rights abuses”. Consequently, the suppression of delinquency by the GLO produces delinquency in PIL. However, these two systems, apparently contradictory at every level, actually work in tandem. By analysing human rights abuses and other “illegalities” a-structurally, PIL obscures their links to the obligations imposed by the GLO. This unintentional diversion from the GLO perpetuates the very atrocities PIL claims to condemn. In return, the GLO provides material support, and the illusion of importance, to PIL. Together, they regulate and disguise our neocolonial present: producing and reporting human rights abuses.
- Subjects
INTERNATIONAL law; WEBER-Fechner law; HUMAN rights violations; DYADS; PRACTICE of law; JUSTICE administration
- Publication
Indonesian Journal of International & Comparative Law, 2021, Vol 8, Issue 3, p277
- ISSN
2338-7602
- Publication type
Article