The postcoloniality of international law

How are we to understand the relationship between international law and imperialism? What bearing might that have on how we see contemporary international law? According to one view, international law is simply a “cloak of legality” thrown over the subjugation of colonized peoples by the imperial powers in a distortion of international law’s true spirit. 1 According to this understanding, the contemporary task is to rid international law of the vestiges of that misappropriation. We must accept decolonization at face value and continue to broaden the scope and content of international law in a culturally sensitive way. Meeting the Symposium’s stated goal of “envisioning new orders” would therefore require the rescue of international law from the corruption of power to make good international law’s explicit promise of universality and sovereign equality. 2 At the other end of the spectrum is the belief that international law has always been encompassed by and in the service to empire. At this pole, the very doctrines and institutions of international law are understood to have been molded by the powerful in order to serve their interests. Those who hold power in the contemporary setting maintain the capacity to create and deploy international law, in turn facilitating practices of (neo)colonialism. However, most scholars engaged with the “postcolonial” in some form or other would hesitate to embrace either of these two polar positions. On the one hand, the perception of international law as an innocent victim waiting to be rescued from the corruptions of imperialism is untenable. On the other hand, the view that international law abjectly serves empire is equally unpopular with those so engaged. They are generally unwilling to accept such an encompassing frame and its attendant demand to abandon international law as a site of contestation, both historically and now. And thus there is an