Akbar Rasulov

Writing about Empire: Remarks on the Logic of a Discourse

A new genre of scholarly writing has emerged in recent years in the field of what one can broadly call critical international theory. Its principal defining feature is an intense preoccupation with the phenomenon of the so-called ‘new world order’, which it tries to explain and describe through an analytical lens constructed primarily around two ideas: the idea of ‘empire’ and the idea of ‘imperial law’. In this article I attempt to provide a brief overview of this genre, which for the sake of simplicity I shall call henceforth the ‘new imperial law’ or NIL genre, and to reflect critically on its underlying ideological dynamics.

From Apology to Utopia and the Inner Life of International Law

A certain body of mythology has emerged in recent years around Martti Koskenniemis From Apology to Utopia (FATU). At its heart lies a group of received wisdoms that tell us that FATU should essentially be considered a work of postmodern scholarship, that it provides a typical illustration of the so-called deconstructivist approach, and that its single most significant contribution to the field of international legal theory lies in its discussion of the subject of legal indeterminacy. In this article, I seek to challenge and displace this set of narratives, by excavating and restoring to the surface FATUs original intellectual project: a highly ambitious attempt to revive the traditional enterprise of ‘legal science’ by marrying Kelsenian legal positivism with Saussurean structuralist semiotics. In doing so, it succeeded in developing a set of analytical idioms and reasoning protocols that gave the international law profession not only a reason but also the necessary intellectual materials to revolutionize its day to day understanding of the essential character of international legal practice. Thus, far from being a manifestation of any kind of postmodernist sensibility, FATU, I am going to argue, represents, in fact, the exact opposite of it.

CLS and Marxism: A History of an Affair

Abstract This essay explores the relationship between the Critical Legal Studies movement and the Marxist tradition. What role did Marxism play in the formation of CLSs ideological and theoretical horizons? What part was it assigned in the movements symbolic economy of discursive projects and practices? What kinds of critical challenges did CLS scholars mount against the Marxist legal-theoretic tradition and what sorts of broader lessons can the Marxist tradition extract today from those criticisms? The essay starts by summarising the standard account of the relationship between CLS and Marxism that has historically developed within the CLSs own internal discourse. It problematises a number of basic assumptions underlying this account before turning its attention to the examination of CLSs (potential) contribution to the development of a new wave of the Marxist legal-theoretic enterprise.

International Law and the Turn to Political Economy

An increasing number of international law scholars over the last few years have started to turn their attention to the study of political economy. To what extent can this trend be considered an indication of an underlying ‘disciplinary turn’? How should one understand the phenomenon of disciplinary turns? The answer we propose to this question in this article proceeds from the assumption that not all disciplinary shifts follow the same logic. Unlike the linguistic or the historical turn, the turn to political economy in contemporary international law does not represent an exercise in inter-disciplinary exploration. The concept of political economy used in international law has very little to do with the actual discipline of political economy. It is much more diffuse and unfocused in theoretical terms. What gives it its essential sense of identity is not any form of distinct methodological orientation, but rather its basic usefulness as a potential marker of critical self-distancing vis-a-vis the mainstream international law tradition and its ideological function as a mediating device for the expression of a deep-seated concern about the structural injustices of modern capitalism.

The Horizontal Mechanism Initiative in the WTO: The Proceduralist Turn and its Discontents

This article addresses a series of questions relating to the development of the so-called ‘horizontal mechanism’ (HM) initiative within the World Trade Organization. Through close readings of the various accompanying texts and scholarly writings, it proposes a robust critical-theoretic engagement with the topic going beyond what has so far been attempted in the literature. The article proposes a detailed structuralist analysis of the internal and external structures of the HM discourse. It then proceeds to interpret the emergence of the HM initiative and the development of the accompanying conventional wisdoms in the light of the broader legal-historical dynamics characteristic of the presentday public international law enterprise. Drawing on David Kennedy’s seminal “International Legal Structures”, it concludes by analysing the HM episode as part of what can be called the ‘inevitable’ proceduralist turn in contemporary international law.