Contingency in International Legal History

Abstract

Why are international legal scholars abandoning international law’s structuralism and searching for contingent pasts and plural futures? And why now? I use a revisionist history of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s claims at the League of Nations to explain the current preoccupation with the contingency-necessity debate. First, putting international law ‘in context’ yields more contexts and more contingency. This puts pressure on what counts as law, an issue of existential concern for international law. The controversy over contextualising and the contingency it exposes express anxiety about the differentiation of international law. Second, international law comes with its own theory of history. The debate shows scholars are repudiating international law’s own structuralist progress narrative. Third, the contingency-necessity debate is politics dressed as methodology. Necessity stories give international law a future to fight for, whereas contingency stories leave it rudderless. The controversy shows that we, scholars, do not know what to do about international law’s present or future. The heat shows we wish we did.