First ESL Annual Lecture in International Law: Masterclass of Prof. Koskenniemi ‘The Search for the “Social” in International Law: Remarks on a Critical Theme’

As Koskenniemi argued in his Gentle Civilizer of Nations (2001), modern international law arose in the last third of the 19th century. Its ideological centre lay in the concept of “civilization” that was soon equated with modern statehood. This was challenged in the interwar period by streams of French and German legal thinking that focused instead on the operations of an “international society”. Nevertheless, as the vocabulary of “society” was captured by other disciplines – sociology and political economy in particular – only a rather formalist notion of it remained with international law. In response to the disappointments with interwar “formalism”, US lawyers began in the 1950s and 1960s to employ social scientific methods to discuss the way the “system” of international politics underlay developments in international law. In Europe, the view of international law as a law of an “international society” was supported by concentration on the UN and other international institutions. The talk will review some of these efforts and end up with some reflections about variants of social thought in present-day ideas about legal pluralism and “transnational law” as well the alleged “breakdown” of the “rule-based international system”. 

Building on Koskenniemi's reflections on the breakdown of the international legal order, the masterclass will be followed by an interactive roundtable on the (alleged) death, ruptures and futures of international law, featuring dr. Luca Pasquet, dr. Kushtrim Istrefi, dr. Marco Longobardo, and dr. Sofia Stolk, and will be moderated by dr. Federica Violi.