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    The horizon of international law : Earth-thinking, ordering and disciplinary international law in the colonial/modern world-system

    Sardar, Zain (2018) The horizon of international law : Earth-thinking, ordering and disciplinary international law in the colonial/modern world-system. Doctoral thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

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    Abstract

    In this thesis I conduct an analysis of international law as an institution with the aim of revealing its deeper structure. I proceed by distinguishing between two modalities of international law – one ‘disciplinary’ and another ‘dissident’. This institutional-structural analysis attempts to delineate how the ordering of limits and thresholds, the lines of normative inclusion and exclusion of the institutions of international law, are set and reset, particularly in response to historically situated events which threaten to modify, and indeed, transform them. Methodologically, this leans upon Hans Lindahl’s theory of legal ordering, as well as the spatially mediated thought of Deleuze and Guattari. In examining the structures of international law, I make use of some thematic spatial devices such as ‘horizon’, ‘ground’ and ‘globalisation’. Alongside this, theory is made concrete through the invocation of two historical events both constitutive of and contemporary to international law: the effect of the national liberation movements of postcolonial countries during the 1950s–70s in modifying the modern international system, and the sixteenth-century encounter between Dominican theologians and Amerindian nations. The context of the latter, its discourse and terminology, is rendered familiar as a fundamental precursor to international law in its modern guise via proximity in this thesis to more recent debates on global security and development. Finally, I deconstruct this institutional-structural analysis through the radical dualism of Amerindian cosmology. The point here is to show how that which is excluded from law and ordering, namely the un-orderable, returns as a manifestation of immanent or liminal justice to reconnect disciplinary institutions to its triadic outside. Hence, the justice practised by the other (Amerindian or social movements in the Global South) brings forth the uncontainable multiplicity or triadism of the earth, which promises to transform the disciplinary through the dissident.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Thesis
    Copyright Holders: The copyright of this thesis rests with the author, who asserts his/her right to be known as such according to the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. No dealing with the thesis contrary to the copyright or moral rights of the author is permitted.
    Depositing User: Acquisitions And Metadata
    Date Deposited: 17 Apr 2018 11:13
    Last Modified: 01 Nov 2023 13:32
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40328
    DOI: https://doi.org/10.18743/PUB.00040328

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