The Process of International Legal Reproduction
Inequality, Historiography, Resistance

Radical international legal history of the expansionary project of statehood and its role in generating profound distributional inequalities

Rose Parfitt (Author)

9781316515198, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 January 2019

534 pages, 11 b/w illus. 4 maps
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.7 cm, 0.98 kg

'In this remarkable book, Rose Parfitt offers us an entirely new way both to understand ostensibly familiar legal processes of state formation, and to write the history of those processes. International legal reproduction describes of the way existing states usher new subjects of international law into being and subject them to discipline, political, fiscal, and military. Scanning half a millennium, Parfitt explores the terms new subjects must meet even to qualify, and the prerogatives claimed by those according them conditional 'sovereign' legitimacy. Multiple case studies, including a detailed history of the 'Abyssinia Crisis' of the 1930s, put demonstrative flesh on these macrohistorical bones. This is an unapologetic call for revisionism in both the substance and method not just of international law but also of legal history, and a trenchant demonstration of the advantages that will accrue.' Christopher Tomlins, Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley

That all states are free and equal under international law is axiomatic to the discipline. Yet even a brief look at the dynamics of the international order calls that axiom into question. Mobilising fresh archival research and drawing on a tradition of unorthodox Marxist and anti-colonial scholarship, Rose Parfitt develops a new 'modular' legal historiography to make sense of the paradoxical relationship between sovereign equality and inequality. Juxtaposing a series of seemingly unrelated histories against one another, including a radical re-examination of the canonical story of Fascist Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, Parfitt exposes the conditional nature of the process through which international law creates and disciplines new states and their subjects. The result is a powerful critique of international law's role in establishing and perpetuating inequalities of wealth, power and pleasure, accompanied by a call to attend more closely to the strategies of resistance that are generated in that process.

Stand: conditionality and sovereign inequality
Frame: history as shadow-box and the process if international legal reproduction
1. The 'Abyssinia Crisis' and international law
2. State colony, individual: the Longue Durée of international legal reproduction
3. International legal reproduction and the League of Nations
4. Empire des Nègres Blancs: the emergence of the Ethiopian empire as a subject of international law
5. Interpellation and resistance: Ethiopia and the allure of the League
6. Reconnecting the crisis
Lid: discipline, resistance and the process of international legal reproduction today
Sources.

Subject Areas: Public international law [LBB], Historiography [HBAH]