{"id":20869,"date":"2023-11-09T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-11-09T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/?p=20869"},"modified":"2023-11-09T11:26:58","modified_gmt":"2023-11-09T10:26:58","slug":"call-for-reflections-on-ordering-and-disordering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/call-for-reflections-on-ordering-and-disordering\/","title":{"rendered":"Call for reflecti\u00d6ns on “Ordering and Disordering”"},"content":{"rendered":"

“For me now, what I\u2019m realizing is
\nI\u2019m done trying to treat people as if they\u2019re finished beings.
\nBecause we\u2019re all unfinished basically, we\u2019re all unravelling.
\nSo it’s very unfair for me to act like I\u2019ve got you figured out.” <\/em><\/p>\n

“.44” by Alfa Mist<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

International legal thinking \u2013 as Hilary Charlesworth famously put it \u2013 gains momentum in times of crisis (Charlesworth (2002)<\/a>). Thus, it seems almost natural that the ongoing \u2018polycrisis<\/a>\u2019 has prompted renewed and more fervent commitment to the international legal order. A significant number of scholars share that sentiment. In Ingrid Wurth Brunk and Monica Hakimi\u2019s piece<\/a> on \u2018Russia, Ukraine, and the Future of World Order\u2019, they argue that Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 is \u2018among the most \u2013 if not the most \u2013 significant shocks to the global order since World War II\u2019. The European Society of International Law (ESIL) in its statement on the Russian aggression against Ukraine warned that \u2018[t]o contend that other States – especially in the West – have no better record when it comes to respecting international law is a morally corrupt and irrelevant distraction\u2019.<\/p>\n

Simultaneously, Western diplomats, international lawyers<\/a>, and media outlets<\/a> seem baffled at the reluctance of many actors in the Global South to support Ukraine. In light of recent events in Israel and Gaza, existing trenches seem to be deepening inexorably.<\/p>\n

The crisis mode of international law and its lawyers comes at a price and has its limits (Charlesworth (2002), p. 382 et seq<\/a>.). Especially, necessary critical reflection seems to be too slow to keep up with the pace of political problem solving.<\/p>\n

Picking up the thread of the CIL Dialogues blog symposium<\/a>, which continues the debate on \u2018Use of Force, Territorial Integrity and World Order\u2019 and with a hint to an online Workshop Series on \u201cUnderworlds \u2013 Sites and Struggles of Global Dis\/Ordering<\/a>\u201d convened by Marie Petersmann and Dimitri Van Den Meerssche as a joint venture of QMUL and LSE kicked-off on 11 October 2023, we at V\u00f6lkerrechtsblog encourage you to continue to think together about ideas of order and disorder.<\/p>\n

For our initial call for reflecti\u00d6ns<\/strong><\/a> we invite you to submit contributions reflecting on Michelle Staggs Kelsall\u2019s \u201cDisordering International Law\u201d<\/a> published in the European Journal of International Law (EJIL) last year.<\/p>\n

In her piece Kelsall \u2013 recently discussed in EJILTalk! The Podcast<\/a> by Sarah Nouwen, Andrea Bianchi and Luis Eslava – offers the still very timely opportunity to reflect on our underlying assumptions about \u201corder\u201d in international legal thinking. Kelsall elegantly reveals how the use a specific \u201cliberal vocabulary\u201d may hinder critical approaches to international law at re-imagining how order might be constituted anew. She instead proposes to engage in a \u201cdisordering critique\u201d by which she asks us to explore \u201creflective discernment in which norms, conventions and principles [are] determined with reference to a multiplicity of spatial and temporal orders.\u201d (Kelsall, p. 731<\/a>)<\/p>\n

International legal thinking and legal thinking more generally \u2013 at least in the West – are built upon ideas of order and systematicity. These assumptions of order and systematicity crucially rely on states as their main building block, an idea deeply rooted in international liberal thought. In the past decades, international legal scholarship has passed through several rounds of re-thinking, re-ordering, and re-systematising (inter alia<\/em> Abi-Saab, 1999<\/a>; Allott, 2001<\/a>; Slaughter, 2004<\/a>; Fischer-Lescano and Teubner 2004<\/a>; ILC, 2006<\/a>; Crawford, 2013<\/a>; Chimni, 2017<\/a>). Interestingly, these efforts have been accompanied by an apodictic certainty that order and systematicity always have been and always will be there (inter alia<\/em> Kadelbach, Kleinlein and Roth-Isigkeit, 2017<\/a>).<\/p>\n

While this assumption has been scrutinized by critical approaches to international law, questioning in particular the merits of relying as a premise on the elusive concept of the state (such as inter alia Eslava and Pahuja, 2020<\/a>, Knop, 1993<\/a>), suggestions for an alternative trajectory are rarely fully articulated.<\/p>\n

Kelsall, by drawing on the ground-breaking work of Ratna Kapur<\/a>, explores such avenues and instead of tuning into the seemingly ever-growing number and volume of critical voices, she takes them as the starting point for her reflections. She shows us how public international legal discourse remains saturated with international liberal vocabulary seemingly striving for an end goal of either order, system or stability. She argues that this assessment holds true not only for self-proclaimed liberal thinkers of international law, where we might expect to find these vocabularies but also \u2013 and more surprisingly \u2013 in international critical thought (Kelsall p. 730<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Kelsall suggests that any critical re-description of the liberal international order \u2013 arguably inevitably \u2013 will fall back or carry some Western liberal vocabulary residue with it. Because \u2013 as she argues \u201cfor transgression to work, it must be played out against some form of status quo.\u201d (Kelsall p. 754<\/a>). As a way to escape this conundrum she suggests exploring \u201ca non-dualist, disordering sensibility\u201d as a response \u201cto the challenge of theorizing holistically while remaining cognizant of these complexities\u201d (Kelsall p. 755).<\/a><\/p>\n

While we do not know if Kelsall was listening to the album Structuralism<\/em> recorded in 2019 by the UK based jazz musician \u201cAlfa Mist<\/a>\u201d, when developing her thoughts, the attitude she adopts seems to run parallel to what the voice in the intro to their song \u201c.44\u201d <\/a>\u00a0asks us to consider. Kelsall\u2019s piece and the track \u201c.44\u201d<\/a> are both welcome reminders to appreciate the \u201cunfinished\u201d, the \u201calways in the making\u201d, the \u201cunravelling\u201d and to interrogate more deeply our urge to order and to develop coherent (legal) systems (see<\/em> epigraph<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Against this backdrop, we do read Kelsall\u2019s piece as an invitation to listen and get involved,\u00a0 which we wish to extend to all of you. An invitation to follow her exploring the potentials of developing \u201ca disordering sensibility\u201d, side-lining binaries and established alternative, and complementary systems of knowledge and find out if and how we can indeed make \u201cvisible to us that which is already visible but seemingly beyond grasp?\u201d(Kelsall, p. 756<\/a>). More, and at the same time \u2013 to critically question her own approach, to think with her and explore trajectories in which the way of thinking she advocates for can be developed further and\/or where it might hit a brick wall. Where are the limits of this approach and where and how can it be mobilised most productively? We encourage scholars to either pick up the thread and develop it further or, and in the spirit of Kelsall\u2019s work, scrutinise her \u201c disordering critique\u201d (Kelsall, p. 742<\/a>) \u2013 again, critically.<\/p>\n

We invite contributions between 1500-2500 words as well as recorded spoken comments or conversations (audio as well as video). We are interested in receiving single or co-authored and coproduced pieces but also welcome less traditional and more creative contributions.<\/p>\n

Please send your contribution reflecting on Kelsall\u2019s piece and ideas of ordering and disordering \u00a0international law to review@voelkerrechtsblog.org<\/a> by 7 December 2023. <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“For me now, what I\u2019m realizing is I\u2019m done trying to treat people as if they\u2019re finished beings. Because we\u2019re all unfinished basically, we\u2019re all unravelling. So it’s very unfair for me to act like I\u2019ve got you figured out.” “.44” by Alfa Mist International legal thinking \u2013 as Hilary Charlesworth famously put it \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6639],"tags":[],"authors":[5534,3947],"article-categories":[3577],"doi":[],"class_list":["post-20869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","authors-anna-sophia-tiedeke","authors-sue-gonzalez-hauck","article-categories-our-own-news"],"acf":{"subline":""},"meta_box":{"doi":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20869"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20872,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20869\/revisions\/20872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20869"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=20869"},{"taxonomy":"article-categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-categories?post=20869"},{"taxonomy":"doi","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/doi?post=20869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}