Things to Make and Do

So often reactive and responsive in its own self-understanding, the discipline of international law appears in this book as agentive, creative, and pivotal. Scholars and practitioners of international law turn out, in its pages, to be makers and purveyors of objects that the discipline can, in varying ways and degrees, call its own. The world and its objects have been, and might yet otherwise be, of international law’s making. This chapter reflects on what kind of making this might entail and what it might mean, in this context, to write of an object juridically. It tackles these questions by exploring six modes of making and doing ongoing in the book, including modes of grappling with object loss (drawing from Freud), and how these variably elucidate the role of objects, and subject–object relations, in sustaining international law as a discipline.