The (Non-)Place of International Legal Scholarship

Abstract

A key materiality of international law is the knowledge that bares that name, the types of knowledge that are produced in the name of international law, or in plainer words: international legal research. These types of knowledge are the bread and butter of international legal scholars, and their setting is primarily the academic institutions that harbour them. This type of materiality has changed significantly in the last five or so decades: the number of periodicals has grown exponentially; the Internet has made networks and research much more expansive; quantitative multiplication and qualitative proliferation have blurred, and hidden, the predominance of old establishments and centres, while creating new opportunities, and challenges too, for the peripheries. This contemporaneousness is the setting for a fresh inquiry into place and non-place when doing international law research. For international law is the law of the 'everywhere' and the 'everyone', the law that is not-local, while the material practices of international legal research are tenaciously localized, even when epistemically and socially connected along global grids and networks. The purpose of this paper is to explore this potentially maddening self-reflexivity of place and non-place, as well as its necessary unconscious dimensions. Is locality an obstacle or a channel by which international law research is performed? Is 'globality', the lack of locality, an actual place? Is it doomed to be a non-place? Or is international law, or 'the international', perhaps the means by which our place and non-place acquires shape, the means by which tension becomes shape, and shape becomes action?