Abstract
This essay examines the ways in which anthropologists have tracked the rise and fall of international law after the end of the Cold War. It argues that anthropological research has made important contributions to the wider understanding of international law as a mechanism for social and political change, a framework for protecting vulnerable populations, and a language through which collective identities can be expressed and valorized. Yet, over time, international law has lost many of these expansive functions, a shift that anthropologists have also studied, although with greater reluctance and difficulty. The essay explains the ways in which particular categories of international law, such as human rights and international criminal justice, grew dramatically in importance and power during the 1990s and early 2000s, a shift whose complexities anthropologists studied at the local level. As the essay also explains, anthropological research began to detect a weakening in human rights implementation and respect for international legal norms, a countervailing shift that has broader implications for the possibilities for international cooperation and the resolution of conflicts, among others. At the same time, the retreat of international law from its highpoint in the early post-Cold War years has given way to the reemergence of non-legal strategies for advancing change and accounting for past injustices, including strategies based on social confrontation, moral shaming, and even violence.
Highlights
This essay examines the ways in which anthropologists have tracked the rise and fall of international law after the end of the Cold War
The essay explains the ways in which particular categories of international law, such as human rights and international criminal justice, grew dramatically in importance and power during the 1990s and early 2000s, a shift whose complexities anthropologists studied at the local level
These are the years after international law, in which the optimism about the transformative potential of the international legal order has buckled under the weight of both existing and new geopolitical and political economic pressures
Summary
As if to underscore in the starkest of terms the extent to which international law has become increasingly weakened, this essay was written on the day after the strongman president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, in complete and utter contempt for international aviation law, international human rights law, and the UN Charter, ordered a military fighter jet to pluck a dissident out of the sky This incident perfectly exemplifies a wider transition in which anthropologists of international law find themselves having to reimagine the object of research: instead of law triumphant, law as the preeminent mechanism for protecting “all members of the human family” (as stated in the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), anthropologists conduct research on law under very different historical circumstances. If anthropologists tracked the rise of international law with ethnographic sensitivity and theoretical insight during the post-Cold War Golden Age, they study the afterlives of this brief period of florescence, what is left behind after the backlash, and what logics have rushed to fill the vacuum left by international law’s pervasive marginalization
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
