The Misery of International Law

Abstract

Bringing together three international law scholars, this book addresses how international law and its regimes of trade, investment, finance, and human rights promote poverty, inequality, and dispossession. It addresses how international law is implicated in the construction of misery; how it is producing, reproducing, and embedding injustice and narrowing the alternatives that might really serve humanity. Adopting a pluralist approach, this work confronts unconscionable dimensions of the global economic order, the false premises upon which they are built, and the role of international law in constituting and sustaining them. Combining insights from radical critiques, political philosophy, history, and critical development studies, the book explores the pathologies at work in international economic law today. It challenges conventional justifications of economic globalization and eschews false choices. It is not about whether one is ‘for’ or ‘against’ international trade, foreign investment, or global finance. The issue is to resolve how, if we are to engage in trade, investment, and finance, we do so in a manner that is accountable to persons whose lives are affected by international law. The deployment of human rights for their part must be considered against the ubiquity of neoliberal globalization under law, and not merely as a discrete, benevolent response to it. Before we can understand how human rights can create more just societies, we must first expose the ways in which they reflect capitalist society and how they assist in reproducing the underlying terms of immiseration that will continue to create the need for human rights protection. This is a book of critique and not of prescription, but among its aims is to compel the reader to think beyond existing assumptions and structures to usher in the possibility of reconstituting the brutal world, if international law can be made to accommodate that undertaking.