Chatting with Alejandro Rodiles

Behind every academic contribution lies a personal journey – of questions asked, challenges embraced, and convictions tested. In this edition of ‘The Person behind the Academic,’ we had the pleasure of speaking with Professor Alejandro Rodiles. What follows is the conversation, uncovering the inspirations and daily rhythms that inform his work.

Welcome, Professor Rodiles, and thank you for accepting our invitation!

We worked together at the Chair of International Law in Jena, but I don’t think I ever asked: what drew you to academia, and what led you to choose it over a career in international legal practice when the path split?

First, let me thank you for the kind invitation – I think it’s a very nice exercise, and I’m very happy to do this.

As you know, I started in international law and relations more broadly as a Mexican diplomat, working first at the policy planning staff of the Foreign Minister (it was Jorge Castañeda Gutman, a very interesting guy, a controversial public intellectual indeed), and then at the Office of the Legal Adviser of the Foreign Ministry (the Legal Adviser back then was today’s ICJ judge, Juan Manuel Gómez Robledo). Then I began my PhD in Munich with Georg Nolte, but I soon got a call to join Mexico’s mission to the UN for its fourth participation in the Security Council, 2009–2010. I remember that Georg Nolte told me it was an offer I couldn’t refuse. So, I interrupted my PhD and went to New York.

New York was a great experience, no doubt. But then I found myself at this point where I had to make up my mind: stay on the diplomatic path, maybe join the Mexican Foreign Service as many encouraged me to do back then, or return to academia. Honestly, I had a kind of existential crisis because I enjoyed both.

When I was working as a diplomat, I remember being kind of frustrated that I couldn’t really dig deeper into the issues I worked on, and I often felt I was only scratching the surface of the things that really interested me. But then again, I liked the action and the possibility to experience first-hand what is actually going on, and that’s something I miss in academia sometimes.

On the personal side, it was something I discussed a lot with Paola, my wife: where did we want to live with a little baby? Berlin proved to be an excellent choice. Professionally, three people played an important role in helping me decide whether to pursue an academic career or stay in diplomacy. The first was Georg Nolte. He strongly encouraged me to continue with the PhD, believing in the value of my research and that I had meaningful things to say. It’s always important to see that the people you admire most believe in you.

The second was Benedict Kingsbury, whom I met a couple of times in New York. Our discussions helped me understand many connections behind what was going on at the UN – and that also made me realize what I really wanted: to get beneath the surface of things and understand their multiple relations.

The third one was Helmut Aust, a very good friend. He was about to publish his beautiful book on complicity and the law of state responsibility with CUP. We had a lot of conversations about our PhD projects back then in Munich (mostly during walks in the English Garden), and in a way, both theses – and later books – were shaped by our friendship. I think he even got the publication news while visiting us in New York. That gave me a great impulse to say: well, I really want to do that too.

I can imagine! Speaking of academia, allowing you to dig deeper into certain topics, you have spent much of your career thinking about global structures: security, governance, and resilience. Do you recall what first sparked your interest in these areas?

Very clearly so, actually. I wrote about it in the acknowledgements of my 2018 book on coalitions of the willing and international law, which was the result of my PhD thesis: it was the Iraq War in 2003. You have to imagine it: I was finishing my law studies at UNAM and beginning to work at the Foreign Office. Then 9/11 happened, and the world changed. The aftermath of that pushed me to look more deeply into global governance, global security, counter-terrorism, etc, and how these things actually work. The ‘coalition of the willing,’ gathered by the United States, which perpetrated the illegal war in Iraq, was framed in this way: if the UN isn’t willing or able to do the right thing, then we’ll do it our way. That was a shocking moment for me – to see how international law was simply bypassed. Today, we are almost accustomed to that, but in the early 2000s, before 9/11, there was a lot of optimism (maybe short-sighted, in retrospect) in the flourishing of our discipline.

And it wasn’t just that military coalition. There were all these global security coalitions the US assembled after 9/11 for regulatory purposes (PSI, FATF, GCTF, etc.), all based on the same logic: creating separate structures from the existing international legal ones yet still meant to rule. It was this multiplication of regulatory frameworks that made me want to look more deeply into global governance mechanisms – not just as parallel developments as the literature of that time mostly portrayed them, but as stuff that intensely interact and shape each other. That’s also why the subtitle of my book is “The Interplay between Formality and Informality”.

These bigger-than-life events affect us and often shape our interests. While preparing for this conversation, I wondered: you grew up in Mexico City in the 1980s and early ‘90s, in the long shadow of the 1985 devastating earthquake. Did this influence your interest in resilience and governance?

Definitely, but not so much the 1985 earthquake, because back then I was a kid living in Bonn with my mother, Sofía. But it was awful, because there was no Internet and WhatsApp, and the telephone lines were dead for more than a week. It was a really anxious time, because we had no way of knowing what was happening to my grandmother, for example. That was my experience from Bonn, but of course it stays in your mind – and you get to grasp how important earthquakes are for people living along with these geological forces.

Then, in 2017, just at the beginning of my academic career at ITAM, there was another big earthquake in Mexico City. Actually, on the very same date as the one in 1985 (19 September). Luckily, nothing happened to my family and closest friends, but I witnessed everything very closely.

At that point, I wasn’t yet researching on resilience, but it was already on my mind. I could really see firsthand how it works: on the one hand, it’s really marvellous how people self-organize and cope with severe stress; the solidarity and capabilities that emerge are very positively striking. But it’s also negatively striking how resilience is often employed to shift responsibility away from the public authorities who are supposed to act in the first place. I think this tension is almost always present in resilience discourses.

Maybe one more thing: when I hear discussions about resilience, especially among academics and people working in international organizations, there’s a lot of hope placed on it. But when you look at how resilience is actually experienced in places where vulnerability is an everyday condition, you see that resilience is not a project. It’s just the everyday life of many people in the Global South. That was very present in the aftermath of the 2017 earthquake.

Indeed, I believe resilience is often a necessity created by circumstances. Thinking of Global South and North – and as you’ve already touched on your trajectory between Germany and Mexico – you were raised in two intellectual traditions. How have they shaped the way you think about law and politics?

I remember you once said that the sound of Mexico City is the music of the street organs – instruments, brought to Mexico by German immigrants, still bearing the names of Berlin’s streets where they once played. Does that echo between places shape how you see the world?

That’s a very nice question. So, you have these organs, played by people on the street for some coins in return, always wearing very nice uniforms, keeping everything from the original time when the instruments were brought from Berlin to Mexico – all built in Schönhauser Allee.

However, the original German sound has been beautifully distorted over the years and due to bad maintenance, and this sound fits perfectly into the charming and creative chaos of Mexico City. The city is always surrounded by sounds – many kinds. It’s loud, but not unpleasant. So, to me, these street organs are a beautiful example of the hybrids we inhabit all the time. They remind me that even when you live in one place, you’re always experiencing it from many others. That’s my answer specifically on the organs – these beautiful “Berlin-Chilango” artefacts.

About intellectual traditions…in terms of legal education and tradition, my experience at UNAM was not that far away from the one in Continental Europe, and Germany in particular. But being raised in two very different cultures is something else. On the one hand, it’s kind of schizophrenic, because you don’t really know where you belong to, and you are always missing the other part. But it also has a huge advantage, especially for international lawyers and people trying to think globally: you really get to deeply understand that there is no one right answer, no one right way of seeing the world and of doing things. Some things work here, others there. That sensibility – knowing there are many different ‘Weltanschauungen,’ and possibilities of world-making, that there is right and wrong at the same time – that is, I think, really useful for someone who tries to do international law.

Considering the advantages of diversity, do you think there is something distinctly Mexican in its approach to international law – something the world could learn from?

I think you can see this from two connected perspectives. One has a lot to do with our culture and negotiation skills. I think Mexican diplomats are good negotiators because of our way of being (a culture built on so many cultures – “Mexico is many Mexicos” as the Zapatistas made clear), and that helps build bridges between opposing positions – something that has been very much recognized in international fora.

But there’s also something else, which was still very present when I started working at the Mexican Foreign Office, alongside people like Juan Manuel Gómez Robledo and Joel Hernández: a self-awareness of Mexico’s special position – call it a ‘middle power,’ or ‘semi-peripheral nation’ – and I know all the difficult debates about these terms, but I think it’s clear what I mean. Mexico isn’t a small country: it has economic power, a large population, and it is geopolitically strategic, but of course, we’re not the most developed country in every sense.

That position has led to a very genuine and profound understanding of the importance of law in international affairs, in the sense of being the common language that we need in order to get along with each other. That explains why Mexico has been a promoter of the international rule of law – not of the internationalization of the rule of law, which is very different. This goes back to an intellectual tradition very nicely described by Francisco-José Quintana in an article in the European Journal of International Law about Jorge Castañeda (the father of my former boss), who inspired much of this way of thinking, also beyond Mexico.

This diplomatic sensitivity is not something exclusively Mexican, but it’s something I have learned as a Mexican international lawyer.

Speaking of fostering a common language: what are the books you wish every scholar, no matter the positionality, had read?

That’s always a difficult question because there are so many things. I had a phase where I read a lot of Koskenniemi, which was very important – especially his articles on global governance and constitutionalism. They really helped me understand what was happening in the late 1990s and early 2000s, how international law and global governance started to interact, while many new trajectories of ruling were being explored.

I also love Benedict Kingsbury’s article on sovereignty and inequality, which I think is a very powerful way of showing how these notions, despite their shortfalls and illusions, remain very important. And Eyal Benvenisti’s work on fragmentation, especially the idea of the political economy of fragmentation that he developed with George Downs, is very important too – for me, the best work on the fragmentation of international law.

There are many other things. But if I think about today and especially of the challenges we face now, the books I actually recommend to students are, first, Andrew Hurrell’s ‘On Global Order’. Even though it’s (already!) from an older era, it’s still crucial for thinking about what kind of order – if any – we may still hope for. Then I would add Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ‘The Climate of History in a Planetary Age,’ which is extremely important for understanding the challenges we face as inhabitants of a planet that might become inhabitable. I would probably recommend it together with Anna Tsing’s work on scalar dynamics, especially her co-edited book on the ‘Patchy Anthropocene’. It complements nicely the work of Chakrabarty: showing that while we face planetary-scale challenges, we also have to think from the many different ‘patches’ of this world – the different local contexts. As Tsing reminds us, the Anthropocene arrived earlier in many places, and it is arriving with different intensities in others. These sensibilities about the scales that are involved in planetary thinking are something Tsing transmits very profoundly, and this is normatively crucial.

And maybe one last article: Fleur Johns’ ‘From Planning to Prototypes,’ which really makes clear that international law is undergoing a redesign through accelerated technological shifts.

I often find it insightful to also turn to fiction for inspiration in approaching complex issues. Is there a book of fiction that has touched you and stayed with you over time?

Let me talk about two. One I read a long time ago, and it still stays on my mind, and another I read just recently. As a Mexican, I’ll recommend two novels written by Mexicans.

The first is ‘Pedro Páramo’ by Juan Rulfo – it is part of the Latin American tradition of ‘magic realism’. I won’t anticipate much of the story: it’s about Pedro, who returns to his village and finds himself in a ghost town. He starts to engage with the dead, and I think it becomes a beautiful story about our phantoms and our past – and that’s why I think it’s relevant today, because in this planetary era, we’re confronted with many different temporalities. That’s a beautiful novel to understand how the past is always present and the present is always already involved in the future. There are many temporalities that affect us at the same time and that generate different affections in different people in different places – and Rulfo transmits that beautifully.

The more recent one is a novel by Álvaro Enrigue, ‘You Dreamed of Empires’. It’s a very funny story, I had to laugh a lot. It is about the encounter between Moctezuma, the last emperor of the Mexicas (pronounced ‘meshicas,’ and wrongly called Aztecs), and Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of what today is known as Mexico, and who became the first administrator of New Spain. The funny thing about this is that their diplomatic encounter happens under the influence of magic mushrooms. I don’t know if that’s historically true – it could be – but in the novel, they don’t really connect; they just pass each other. Each one of them is sunk in their own magic mushroom imperial dream: Hernán Cortés in his dream of a Catholic Empire and all the business opportunities opening up for him, and Moctezuma, dreaming of the empire that he wants to preserve, and which was actually already vanishing away before Cortés came to Tenochtitlan (the Mexicas had many enemies in Mesoamerica, and that’s what made the Spanish conquest actually possible).

At the same time, many other encounters happen in the novel – and perhaps the most interesting one is between Malintzin (commonly known as “Malinche”, although the Malinche was actually Cortés, the one who came with Malintzin), Cortés’ translator, diplomatic adviser, and lover, on the one hand, and Papantzin, Moctezuma’s sister, on the other. That encounter is a very different one. It is driven by empathy, solidarity, trying to understand each other. After reading it, I kind of wished our national historical narrative had focused more on the story of Malitzin and Papantzin, rather than just on these two men high on empires.

This reminded me about how dynamics between the ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ can be about struggle, but also about creation and transformation. Let’s talk a bit more about creation: Do you view academic writing as a form of creative, artistic expression? Did you find that some piece of art inspired you in the academic work?

Yes, I do. I mean, we write different types of things – some are more sober, where you have to work with legal materials much more strictly, and that’s important too. But most of what I write has a lot to do with trying to be creative: trying to understand things differently, telling a story from another angle, and through that trying to contribute to a better global understanding of the same event or story.

That requires imagination and the strength to let your own voice come through the norms and traditions of academic writing, which can be stifling; and for that, you need a connection with aesthetics – it is an aesthetic experience.

When I write, I go through many phases, including painful ones, but the one I enjoy most is when I listen to music with my earphones, actually very loudly, and just let my mind go and write. Of course, it has to be edited a thousand times afterwards. But I think that’s when the ideas really come through. And that is strictly connected to music in my case. I like rap music, old-school, 2-Pac, but also newer things like Mac Miller, and Clipping is really great!

Here we go!

[laughing]

And another thing that I’ve come to understand is how important art is becoming for our profession – again, especially given the planetary challenges we face. In the climate change literature, one big question now is how to mobilize people to understand the enormous threat we’re facing, because of the difficulty of deep and far-away time perceptions. Economic incentives is one approach, but another – which I think is gaining ground and very promising – is to resort to art, aesthetic value, and to affects in exploring reasons to act.

Yes, I think with art you can talk to the hearts and create symbols – and that’s a powerful way of gathering people. You mentioned listening to music. I wonder: when you read or write, where do you usually find yourself? What is typically beside you when you sit down to engage in academic work?

Well, I mostly enjoy writing here at home, being close to my family – that gives me a kind of security to write. I love this place and I feel comfortable here. I mean, it’s a very common place and nothing special, but yes, I always have a cup of coffee next to me, and my music, and my books around me. Even if I don’t use them all, just having these books surrounding me helps me in a way.

That makes sense. You’ve worked in many places and moved from one office to another. Is there something that always comes with you – something that finds its spot near you?

Yes, yes – and I think you know that, Polina. There are actually two pictures.

One is a picture of old Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Mexica Empire. It’s a beautiful image and a reminder of the power of infrastructures across time and space. I’ve been working on infrastructures and international law, so I’m interested in these things. Tenochtitlan was built on and surrounded by a huge lake, and today that is Mexico City. It shows how older infrastructures live within the new ones, how they become this kind of hybrid with all their problems and wonders.

Mexico City is (and always was) a megacity built on water, now experiencing serious water stress. But it somehow still works. That’s almost a miraculous function of the entangled infrastructures of Mexico City-Tenochtitlan, and there is a wonderful book on that by art historian Barbara Mundy. And you can see this history vividly here every day, for example, in the metro system, which follows the major avenues of Tenochtitlan and those which connected the latter to other towns; in Mexico City’s historic center, you feel like a time traveler, and it’s kind of a twilight zone, very intense. So, this picture reminds me how important these continuous infrastructures are and how they shape our everyday.

The second picture is of Diego Armando Maradona. I bought it in Buenos Aires a long time ago, and it is from his debut in the Argentinian Major League, with Argentinos Juniors. I’m a huge football fan, and my first hero was Maradona. I think he continues to be the greatest player of all time. Though today, my heroes are my sons, David and Matías – they’re beautiful football players.

I had both pictures in Jena, and I have them now in my office at ITAM.

What are you currently working on? What may we anticipate in the near future?

Well, I have two broader projects at the moment.

The first is something I want to do in Spanish, more focused on Mexico, and our relations to the rest of the world, in particular the US. I want to write a book on Mexican Foreign Relations Law – because, as far as I know, there is none. I think it’s very important to bring together all these constitutional and international legal aspects, along with the history of our diplomacy, and foreign policy doctrines like the Estrada Doctrine, which I’ve worked on in the past and find hugely interesting. That’s more of a long-term project.

The second is about resilience, which we touched upon on at the beginning of this nice interview. I’m trying to understand how resilience is evolving – or has already evolved – into a kind of normativity on its own. Not just resilience of international law in response to challenges, but resilience as a kind of law, at different scales and across them.

It’s driving many of today’s global practices, many things that have to do with world-making and world-unmaking. So I’m really trying to understand this.

That’s really interesting. I’m looking forward to reading more about it. Thank you again for agreeing to this interview – it’s been a real pleasure, and I’ve learned a great deal from it.

No, thank you, Polina – it’s been a huge pleasure. I enjoyed it very much.