Rose Parfitt

Empire Des Nègres Blancs: The Hybridity of International Personality and the Abyssinia Crisis of 1935-36

The ‘Abyssinia Crisis’ of 1935-36 – in which one League of Nations member (imperial Ethiopia) was annexed by another (Fascist Italy) – presents one of the clearest twentieth-century illustrations of international law’s ‘progress narrative’. International lawyers are encouraged to draw a salutary lesson from the crisis: namely that Ethiopia’s sovereignty – and, indeed, the peace of the entire world – might have survived the 1930s if only international law had been properly enforced. Yet, the assumption upon which this lesson depends – to the effect that Ethiopia’s only discursive contribution to the crisis was passively to regurgitate the relevant clauses of the Covenant – is profoundly ideological. For this assumption effects a double suppression: erasing Ethiopia’s strategic construction of a hybrid, partially Abyssinian international law from the discipline’s memory; and concealing from scholarly view the possibility that Ethiopia’s annexation might have resulted from actions that were in accordance with, rather than in violation of, interwar international legal norms regarding sovereignty and the use of force.

The Spectre of Sources

Their aim is that the Handbook should represent ‘a first step towards a global history of international law’, and therefore also towards ‘overcoming [the] Eurocentrism’ by which this area of study has, as they observe, long been afflicted (at 1). Given that the history of international law has tended to be a history of states, and that most of the world’s non-European states came into existence after 1945 (the Handbook’s chronological cut-off point), this goal is not an easy one to achieve. Indeed, as Martti Koskenniemi points out (at 970),

(Post)Revolutionary Interlinkages: Labour, Environment and Accumulation

A review essay discussing Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso, 2011), 288 pp, ISBN: 978-1844677450. With thanks to David Kennedy and the Institute for Global Law and Policy for the opportunity to discuss this text and issues arising from it at the IGLP 2013 Workshop, Doha, Qatar, 5-14 January 2013, and to those who participated in our panel on the book: Dennis Davis, Sheila Jasanoff, Kerry Rittich and Hani Sayed.