response:ability

Anna Tijoux, Niñx

Michelle Staggs Kelsall on Dis:Order

“Disordering here refers to an analytical frame in which binary modes of thinking (rights/obligations, public/private, religious/secular, North/South) are reconsidered by adopting a non-dualist perspective that collapses the either/or nature of these distinctions.”

Michelle Staggs Kelsall, “Disordering International Law”

Michelle Staggs Kelsall’s “Disordering International Law” puts into question the function of international law as a compendium of rules to ‘order’, the Westphalian statist underpinnings (under the guise of ‘inter-national’) and espouses a call to move beyond a space of liberal exclusivity towards a more pluralistic, less prescriptive space of ‘juris-generation’. As most who critique what is presented and protected as lex lata are painfully aware, the liberal international legal order operates and designates its insiders and ‘others’ (who incidentally end up being the winners and the losers) the way it does not out of coincidence but out of design.

Re-theorizing about (international) law, imagining it anew and practicing that reimagination (praxis) cannot happen without not only understanding but un-learning the premises that shield international law in its liberal conceptualisation behind a veil of manufactured ‘objectivity’. The task of ontological overhaul must start with questions about what is central to the order. By using a journalistic convention (proverbial “5W – 1H” questions), we can probably map the various strands of scholarship that have critically engaged with international law (and which are too numerous to mention here but some of which are covered in “Disordering International Law”), uncovered and exposed its origins, its biases, its aims and its willfull omissions:

• What is (international legal) order? What does it order?
• Where does international law order? Where does it not order?
• When does international law to order? When does it not to order?
• Who orders (international law)? For whom does international law order? Who does international law order?
• Why does international law order?
• How does international law order?

To answer these questions is to uncover who and whose knowledge and whose lexicon have been included and excluded and how structures of domination and oppression function and in which direction. It is to uncover the ordering that is by and large dependent on and taking its power from othering.

For many of us, once uncovered, once seen, these structures, their mechanisms and their actors cannot be unseen.

Then the perpetual conundrum begins: While disordering -or at least attempting to- we must operate within the confines of the ‘ordering’ structures and the liberal ‘language’ that greases the wheels. While dreaming of ‘disordering’, while plotting to disorder, we must master the legal order and its ordering ways often better than those that are its champions. We must inhabit two spontenous yet distinct planes of existence, while we ask ourselves:

• Disorder what?
• Disorder where?
• Disorder when?
• Who disorders? Who is disordered?
• Why disorder? (Michelle Staggs Kelsall’s “Disordering International Law” answers this question comprehensively)
• And the elusive: How do we disorder?

While I have no easy answers, and certainly not in a short reflection such as this one, to how we disorder, Michelle Staggs Kelsall’s “Disordering International Law” that invites us to dare imagine the reimagination of international law unearths in me the words by Aimé Césaire that I read a long long time ago.

Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal – Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, his poem/manifesto/reimagining of literary form and content in a time of colonial violence and othering, encapsulates not only a pioneering break from the imposed ‘gold standard’ of acceptable and respected modes of thinking and writing, but also the spirit of profound reimagining of what comes next. I feel that it is particularly suited to this moment in the discipline.

Qu’y puis-je ?

Il faut bien commencer.

Commencer quoi ? 

La seule chose au monde qu’il vaille la peine de commencer :

La Fin du monde parbleu.

Gamze Erdem Türkelli lit un extrait d’Aimé Césaire: «Cahier d’un retour au pays natal», 2024 (ici).

What can I do?

One must begin somewhere.

Begin what?

The only thing in the world worth beginning:

The End of the world of course.

Gamze Erdem Türkelli reading from Aimé Césaire: “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land” translated by Clayton Eshleman & Annette Smith for reading on Desolo Luna Vox Theatrum, 2024 (pp. 19–27) (here).