Models and documents: Artifacts of international legal knowledge

International and Comparative Law Quarterly

Volumn 48, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 805-825

  Riles, Annelise ^a  

^a TRINITY COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 85016230002     PISSN: 00205893     EISSN: 14716895     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0020589300063697     Document Type: Article

References (101)

1. Frederick S. Dunn, The Practice and Procedure of International Conferences 6(1929).
2. Richard A. Falk, The Status of Law in International Society 7 (1970).
3. Louis Henkin, How Nations Behave- Law and Foreign Policy 2 (1979).
4. Carty describes the mission of the founders of the Institute of International Law in 1873 was how precisely to set up an academic and hence objective source of international legal principles. This objectivity was understood in direct contrast to the “particular interests” of diplomats and their sovereigns. See J. A. Carty, “Changing Models of the International System”, in Perestroika and International Law 13 (W. E. Butler, ed. 1990) p.20.
5. See Falk, Perestroika and International Law
6. Henkin, Perestroika and International Law.
7. W. Michael Reisman, “International Incidents: Introduction to a New Genre in the Study of International Law,” in W. Michael Reisman & Andrew R. Willard, eds., International Incidents: The Law thai Counts in World Politics 6 (1988).
8. In this respect, I treat international law in a similar manner as recent studies of science. See e.g. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modem Science (1992)
9. Marilyn Strathern, After Nature, English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century (1992)
10. Paul Rabinow, Making P.C.R.: A Story of Biotechnology (19%)
11. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (1986)
12. John Law, Organizing Modernity (1994).
13. See e.g. Henkin, Organizing Modernity at p.7 (“An inquiry into the role of law must take into account the state of ‘the system’–the character of international society and of the law at a given time.”)
14. Reisman, Organizing Modernity at p.15 (“I define an ‘incident’ as an overt conflict between two or more actors in the international system.”)
15. See e.g. Thomas M. Franck, “Legitimacy in the International System” (1988) 82 A J.I.L. 705.
16. See Thomas J. Lawrence, The Principles of International Law (4th ed. 1910).
17. This was the famous Gulf War phrasing of George Bush in arguments concerning the legality of that war under international law. See e.g. Barton Gellman, “U.S. Officials Reiterate Possibility Of Attack on Iraq Over Arms Issue; Senate Supports Bush Administration's Stance on 97 to 2 Vote” The Washington Post, Saturday, August 3,1991.
18. J. H. Barton and B. E. Carter, “International Law and Institutions for a New Age” (1993) 81 Geo.LJ. 535.
19. See S. E. Baldwin, “The New Era of International Courts”. (1910–1912) Jud. Settlement of Int'I Disp. 3.
20. Thomas M. Franck, “The New Development: Can American Law and Legal Institutions Help Developing Countries?” (1972) 12 Wis.L.Rev. 767.
21. See Anne-Marie Burley, “Law Among Liberal States: Liberal Internationalism and the Act of State Doctrine”, (1992) 92 Colum.L.Rev. 1907.
22. Cf. Carry, Colum.L.Rev. at p.20 (noting that even for international lawyers of the Soviet bloc, “[t]he nature of the preferred international system is profoundly liberal”).
23. See Phillip Allott, “Reconstituting Humanity: New International Law”, (1992) 3 EurJ.Int'l L. 219.
24. See Thomas M. Franck, The Power of Legitimacy among Nations 5 (1990) (lamenting international lawyers' failure to ask more philosophical, “teleological” questions about our models of the international system as would have been commonplace in an era in which theories of natural law dominated the agenda).
25. Cf. Carty The Power of Legitimacy among Nations (“The reflections of international lawyers on [the international] system are in fact what lawyers call international law.”)
26. The academic international lawyer's modelling has parallels in other genres of modernist academic inquiry. Anthropology, for example, has devoted itself to making models out of other people's practices. No wonder, then, that anthropology is evoked by international lawyers only to demonstrate that “International law is analogous to the decentralised systems studied by anthropologists, given the paucity of an international integration and the ability of some actors to withstand such modest coercion as can usually be deployed.” Paul H. Brietzke, “Insurgents in the ‘New’ International Law”, (1994) 13 Wisc.Int'l LJ. 1,22.
27. See e.g. Elizabeth Heger Boyle and John W. Meyer, “Modern Law as a Secularized and Global Model: Implications for the Sociology of Law” in Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth (eds.) Global Prescriptions: Law as the Reproduction and Intemationalisation of the Field of State Power (forthcoming)
28. Emanuel Adler, “The Emergence of Cooperation: National Epistemk Communities and the International Evolution of the Idea of Nuclear Arms Control”, (1992) 46 Int'l Org. 102–145.
29. See e.g. Kenneth W. Abbott & Duncan Snidal, “Why States Act through Formal International Organisations”, (1998) 42 J. Conflict Resolution 3.
30. See Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (1998)
31. Brietzke J. Conflict Resolution at pp.1–56.
32. See e.g. Falk J. Conflict Resolution at p.8 (“Most international lawyers, whether inside or outside universities, profess to be antitheoretical. Such a profession is often accompanied, or even justified, by a conviction that theory is a waste of time in legal studies. The serious work of legal research, the argument proceeds, is to organise and analyze the knowledge that has grown up as a consequence of attempts by lawyers, judges, government officials, and other scholars to solve specific legal problems.”).
33. See e.g. Francisco Orrego Vicuna, “The Status and Rights of Refugees under International Law: new issues in light of the Honecker affair”, (1994) 25 U. Miami Inter-Am.L-Rev. 351
34. Jennifer Moore, “Restoring the Humanitarian Character of U.S. Refugee Law Lessons from the International Community”, (1997) 15 BerkJ.Int'l Law 51
35. Elizabeth E. Ruddick, “The continuing constraint of sovereignty: international law, international protection, and the internally displaced”, 1997 77 B.U.L.Rev. 429
36. Roman Boed, “The State of the Right of Asylum in International Law”, (1994) 5 Duke J.Comp. & Int'l L. 1.
37. See e.g. Erika Sussman, “Contending with Culture: An Analysis of the Female Genital Mutilation Act of 1996” (1998) 31 Cornell Int'l LJ. 193
38. Robyn Cerny Smith, “Female circumcision: bringing women's perspectives into the international debate”, (1992) 65 S.Cal.L.Rev. 2449.
39. See e.g. Howard S. Levie, “Prosecuting War Crimes Before an International Tribunal”, (1995) 28 Akron L.Rev. 429
40. Darryl Robinson, “Developments in International Criminal Law: Defining ‘Crimes against Humanity’ at the Rome Conference”, (1999) 93 AJ.I.L. 43; 998
41. Sean D. Murphy, “Developments In International Criminal Law: Progress and Jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia 1999”, (1999) 93 A.J.I.L. 57.
42. The archetypal contemporary example is Reisman's turn to “incidents” which is a turn from models of the international system to incidents. See Reisman A.J.I.L.
43. See James Boyle, “Ideals and Things: International Legal Scholarship and the Prison-house of Language,” (1985) 26 Harvard Int'l L.J. 327.
44. See, L. P. Breckenridge, “Protection of Biological and Cultural Diversity: Emerging Recognition of Local Community Rights in Ecosystems Under International Environmental Law”, (1992) 59 Tenn.L.Rev. 735.
45. See e.g. David Kennedy, “A New World Order Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow”, (1994) 4 J.Trans.L. & Contemp.Probs. 1,2.
46. See e.g. M. C. Lam, “Making Room for Peoples at the United Nations: Thoughts Provoked by Indigenous Claims to Self-Determination” (1992) 25 Cornell Int'l LJ. 603.
47. See e.g. Paul C. Szasz, “General law-making processes” in The United Nations and International Law (1997) p.32, “Hard international law is, by definition, binding, at least on some international entities (states or IGOs). … By contrast, soft international law is not binding, though perhaps superficially it may appear to be so; nevertheless, international entities habitually comply with it, and it is this feature that makes it possible to characterize it as ‘law’.”
48. I do not mean to imply that an impermeable divide exists between academics and practitioners of international law. For a useful discussion of the relationship between practitioners and academics, and the way in which many figures in both camps work as “double agents”, see Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth, Dealing in Virtue (1996) pp.70–73.
49. In this respect, this project participates in the traditional modernist anthropological ambition to understand others' social practices on their own terms. See e.g. Bronislaw Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1984).
50. Cf. Abram Chayes and Antonia H. Chayes, The New Sovereignty (1995), p.xi (making a similar argument, in the context of compliance with international agreements, that “it is important to understand what states, international organisations, officials and other actors actually do)”.
51. From this vantage point Chayes and Chayes assert that agreements such as the Global Platform for Action are not “merely aspirational” but, rather, are “designed to initiate a process”: idem, p.17.
52. “An examination of State practice at international conferences reveals however that the rules of procedure and their interpretation follow remarkably consistent patterns.” Robbie Sabel, Procedure at International Conferences: A Study of the Rules of Procedure of Conferences and Assemblies of International Inter-govemmental Organisations 1 (1997).
53. The CSW is a sub-body of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and shoulders the responsibility of convening the Beijing Conference. See United Nations Secretariat, “Organization of Work, Including the Establishment of the Main Committee”, UN doc.A/CONF. 177/1.
54. Officially, the PrepCom was also the annual meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), an organisation of member states elected on a rotating basis from the membership of the UN's Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the major UN organ of which the CSW is a part. See United Nations, “Commission on the Status of Women”, http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/. All UN member states and official observers were invited to send delegates to the PrepCom and the FWCW.
55. United Nations, Draft Platform For Action, UN doc.A/CONF.177/L.l.
56. United Nations, Platform for Action, UN docA/CONF. 177/20.
57. Johan Kaufmann, Conference Diplomacy: An Introductory Analysis, 36–37 (1988).
58. United Nations General Assembly, Report on Violence against Women Migrant Workers, UN doc. A/49/354
59. United Nations General Assembly, Executive Summary of 1994 World Survey on Women, UN doc.A/49/378
60. Commission on the Status of Women, Technical Assistance and Women, UN doc.E/CN.6/1995/6
61. Commission on the Status of Women, Status of Women in the Secretariat, UN docE/CN.6/1995/7
62. Commission on the Status of Women, Situation of Palestinian Women, UN doc.E/CN.6/1995/8
63. Commission on the Status of Women, Crime Prevention and Violence against Women, UN doc.E/CN.6/ 1995/9
64. Commission on the Status of Women, CSW Priority Theme: Economic Decisionmaking, UN dcc.E/CN.6/1995/10
65. Commission on the Status of Women, CSW Priority Theme: Gender, Education and Training, UN doc.E/CN.61 1995/11
66. Commission on the Status of Women, CSW Priority Theme: International Decision-making, UN doc.E/CN.6/ 1995/12
67. Commission on the Status of Women, Joint Work Plan on Women's Human Rights, UN docE/CN.6/1995/13.
68. The World's Women, 1995: Trends and Statistics, UN Sales No. E.95.XVII.Z
69. Commission on the Status of Women, Jakarta Declaration and Plan of Action for the Advancement of Women in Asia and the Pacific, UN Doc.E/CN.o/1995/5/Add.l (1994)
70. Commission on the Status of Women, Regional Programme of Action for the Women of Latin America and the Caribbean, 1995–2001, UN DocE/CN.6/1995/5/Add.3 (1994)
71. Commission on the Status of Women, Regional Platform for Action–Women in a Changing World–Call for Action from an ECE Perspective, UN Doc.E/CN.6/1995/5/Add.4 (1994)
72. Commission on the Status of Women, Arab Plan of Action for the Advancement of Women to the Year 2005, UN DocE/CN.6/1995/5/Add.5 (1994)
73. Commission on the Status of Women, Dakar Declaration and African Platform for Action, UN Doc.E/CN.6/1995/5/ Add.2 (1994).
74. For a discussion of the experience of the conference as a “global” phenomenon see Annelise Riles, The Network Inside Out (forthcoming).
75. United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, Platform for Action, chap.IV. sec.L. paras.259–285.
76. See Donald Brennets, “Discourse and Discipline at the National Research Council: A Bureaucratic Bildungsroman” (1994) 9 Cultural Anthropology 23
77. Donald Brenneis, “New Lexicon, Old Language: Negotiating the ‘Global’ at the National Science Foundation” in George Marcus (ed.) Cultural Anthropology Now: Unexpected Contexts, Shifting Constituencies, Changing Agendas (1999).
78. Kaufrnann Cultural Anthropology Now: Unexpected Contexts, Shifting Constituencies, Changing Agendas at p.16.
79. This notion of the clean text has parallels to the notion of the conference documentation as “weak” or “strong”: “It is weak if papers or conference documents are available only shortly before or during the conference, so that delegates have had no time to study them. It can be called strong if conference documents are available several weeks prior to the conference.” Kaufmann, Cultural Anthropology Now: Unexpected Contexts, Shifting Constituencies, Changing Agendas, at p 35.
80. See also Riles Cultural Anthropology Now: Unexpected Contexts, Shifting Constituencies, Changing Agendas.
81. United Nations World Conference on Human Rights, Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, UN doc.A/CONF. 157/23 (1993).
82. United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Agenda 21, gopher//unephq.unep.org:70/ll/un/unced/agenda21.
83. “Copenhagen” refers to the text of the Social Summit, negotiated at Copenhagen in March 1995. See United Nations World Summit for Social Development, Report of the World Summit for Social Development, UN doc.A/CONF. 166/9.
84. Appiah Pathmarajah, “Preparing for a Meeting: Some Practical Advice to Diplomats,” in Multilateral Diplomacy 113, 115 (M. A. Boisard and E. M. Chossudovsky, eds. 1998).
85. Integration of Women in the Middle East Peace Process, UN Commission on the Status of Women, 39th Sess., Agenda Item 5, UN Doc.E/CN.6/1995/L.9 (1995).
86. See Georges Selle, “The Evolution of International Conferences”, 5 UNESCO International Social Science Bulletin 241,249–50 (1953).
87. “Translators, working behind the scenes, are charged with the translation of documents, including draft resolutions, into the working languages of the conference. The great time pressure under which translators work sometimes result in minor errors being made. In such an event a correction is promptly issued”. Kaufmann UNESCO International Social Science Bulletin, at p.44.
88. James Boyd White, Justice as Translation: An Essay in Cultural and Legal Criticism, 254 (1990).
89. See e.g. International Women's Tribune Centre. “Anatomy of the Platform for Action”, (1995) The Tribune 54: 12
90. Asia-Pacific NGO Working Group. “Strategic Objectives from the Platform for Action” (19%) Reaching Out 2(4): 6–7
91. The National Council of Women, Fiji, Post-Beijing Seminar. Suva, Fiji (1995)
92. Women's Environment and Development Organization, “Top Twelve Topics at the Beijing Women's Conference … and a Brief summary of Actions Recommended in the Platform for Action” (1995) News and Views 8: 3
93. Women's Environment and Development Organization “Turn the words into action!” Highlights from the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. 30 Nov. 1995.
94. United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, The Beijing Declaration, UN doc.A/CONF. 177/20.
95. See e.g. Marilyn Strathern, Partial Connections (1991)
96. Annelise Riles, “The View from the International Plane: Perspective and Scale in the Architecture of Colonial International Law,” in Eve Darian-Smith (ed.) Laws of the Postcolonial (1999).
97. Noel Lateef, Parliamentary Diplomacy and the North-South Dialogue, (1981) 11 Georgia J. Int'I & Comp.L. 1,2 (notes omitted).
98. See David Kennedy, “The Disciplines of International Law and Policy”, (1999) 12 Leiden Journal of International Law 9, 10. Kennedy's failure to discuss those he terms “professionals” as opposed to “intellectuals” is all the more striking for a survey of international law and policy because of the care he takes in delineating the issues that separate and define public international lawyers, comparative lawyers, and international economic lawyers.
99. This understanding of international law as the institutionalisation of a liberal political philosophy is most often traced to Immanuel Kant's work on International Law. See Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, (1983)
100. The Philosophy of Law; An Exposition of the Fundamental Principles of Jurisprudence as the Science of Right (1974).
101. See Brock Chisholm, “How to Think and Act Internationally”, reprinted in Multilateral Diplomacy 107, 108 (M. A. Boisard & E. M. Chossudovsky, eds. 1998).