Regional Orders, Geopolitics, and the Future of International Law

This article argues that the old international law of empires, greater spaces, and regional orders did not disappear with the creation of the United Nations. While revisionist histories of international law have complicated the claim that a Westphalian order of independent states completely replaced a world of more varied political forms in the mid-seventeenth century, international lawyers nonetheless largely accept that such a transformation did take place at some point. The state is treated as the normative political subject of international law, and any move away from the geography of statehood as the foundation of the international legal system is seen as novel, exceptional, or illegal. The narrative that the state has become the primary political subject and spatial form of international law masks the persistence of regional orders as a core feature of the contemporary legal system. This article shows that international lawyers have been engaged in justifying, making sense of, narrating, and assembling regional orders for at least the past century. It explores the rival regionalisms promoted during the inter-war period, the struggles over regional orders during the early decades of decolonization, the expansive vision of regional orders consolidated in the early post-Cold War decades by the United States and its allies, and the regional ambitions of China in the twenty-first century. It analyses how regional orders are assembled and resisted through international law, what values are proclaimed to justify different forms of regional ordering, whose interests are represented, and the relation between grand narratives and technical transactions in that legal work. The article concludes that bringing the concept of regional orders to the foreground can open up a new and timely set of questions about politics, representation, and the future of international law.