On Epistemic Universalism and the Melancholy of International Law

Abstract

This contribution, first delivered as the keynote address to the 2018 annual conference of the European Society of International Law, aims to explore the effects of the way international legal research is organized on the contents of such research. The paper suggests that international law is no longer about what states do, but has come to be about what international lawyers do, and traces this to two inter-related factors (without any claims of exhaustiveness). First, international legal research has come to be embedded in a highly competitive setting, which affects the topics we examine and the ways in which we do so; it has stimulated, for instance, a strong division between doctrinal scholars, rational scholars, and critical scholars. Second, this competitive setting stimulates a sense of high drama: if we cannot promise a paradigm shift, we will not receive funding or other accolades, yet this way of thinking has little traction in practice or even academically. As a result, international lawyers have become highly fragmented, and the refusal to engage with each other can only be considered as contributing to epistemic injustice - and that is all rather melancholy.