Akbar Rasulov
University of Glasgow, School of Law, Faculty Member
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The contemporary international law discourse about imperialism is built around four narratives. Each of these narratives presupposes its own, fairly distinct concept of imperialism and thus orientates the course of accompanying... more
The contemporary international law discourse about imperialism is built around four narratives. Each of these narratives presupposes its own, fairly distinct concept of imperialism and thus orientates the course of accompanying theoretical reflections towards a fundamentally different set of issues, events, and legal and historical phenomena. Drawing on the methodologies of critical narratology and critical legal studies, I trace the general contours of these four narratives and explore their underlying theoretical logics and conceptual architectures. Each of these narratives follows a certain template. Though the role which these templates play seems at first sight to be limited only to helping articulate some general idea about international law’s relationship with imperialism, in the broader discursive economy of the attendant debates they also perform a number of other important functions. Not least crucial among them is the organizing and structuring of the wider theoretical vi...
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It is a common impression shared by many international lawyers today that the brief ‘turn to democracy’ that occurred in some segments of international legal scholarship in the early to mid-1990s was, on the whole, little more than a... more
It is a common impression shared by many international lawyers today that the brief ‘turn to democracy’ that occurred in some segments of international legal scholarship in the early to mid-1990s was, on the whole, little more than a detour of overly excitable imagination – not exactly a complete error of judgement or an outright frivolity, but certainly a lapse of conceptual clarity and professional rigour. Whatever changes may have occurred within the broader international legal system, the argument goes, they certainly did not amount to a ‘democratic revolution’, and any claims to the contrary were and are simply baseless. The kind of fundamental reorganization of the international legal system that was forecasted by scholars like Thomas Franck and Anne-Marie Slaughter never took place, and the main lesson one should learn from this whole episode is that international legal scholars should not give in to their utopian reflexes as quickly and as readily as the ‘pro-democracy enthu...
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This chapter is an inquiry into the discipline of international law as a social form. What is that content which is contained within this form? What sort of social structure does it presume and enable? Taking as its point of departure the... more
This chapter is an inquiry into the discipline of international law as a social form. What is that content which is contained within this form? What sort of social structure does it presume and enable? Taking as its point of departure the concept of knowledge production, this chapter develops a critical account of international law as a field of theoretical labour and ideological contestation. How is the process of knowledge-production in international law today actually set up? What are those basic products which it produces? What kind of added value does it add to them and how is this value extracted and appropriated in practice? This chapter seeks to explain the disciplinary politic that surrounds these and other related issues as a reflection of discursively sublimated inter-group conflicts, the ultimate object of which is the internal distribution of resources and the power to decide the intra-disciplinary division of labour.
Research Interests: Ideology and Discipline
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The concept of utopianism, however one looks at it, is not a technical legal concept. It is not a formal product of the everyday legal process and it certainly cannot be considered a legal term of art – the way, for instance, the concept... more
The concept of utopianism, however one looks at it, is not a technical legal concept. It is not a formal product of the everyday legal process and it certainly cannot be considered a legal term of art – the way, for instance, the concept of anticipatory self-defence can. Nor does it form an operative part of some other legal construct or doctrine – the way, for example, the idea of the common heritage of mankind does. And yet if one looks at the broader conceptual landscape surrounding the contemporary international legal discourse, it certainly seems to carry a very particular meaning in the eyes of what one might call the international legal profession lato sensu, a meaning which in many ways appears to be unique and without any discernible parallel in other comparable cultural arenas and discursive traditions. In this paper I propose to explore the internal phenomenology and the external theoretical structures surrounding this meaning. What is that basic complex of ideas, tropes,...
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This paper is a homage to Duncan Kennedy. A personal reminiscence, it speaks of the lessons he taught me about critical legal studies, law's relationship to politics, legal leftism, American Legal Realism, and how to think about law... more
This paper is a homage to Duncan Kennedy. A personal reminiscence, it speaks of the lessons he taught me about critical legal studies, law's relationship to politics, legal leftism, American Legal Realism, and how to think about law 'in an Althusserian way'. It also reflects on my experience of Duncan Kennedy as a teacher, the aims and goals of critical legal pedagogy, the phenomenon of intellectual debt, and Louis Althusser's contribution to the study of international law.
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This Article begins an effort to rekindle the intellectual tradition of critical legal theory. The context for the project is significant. On the one hand is the grip of a social crisis, the contours of which continue to confound the... more
This Article begins an effort to rekindle the intellectual tradition of critical legal theory. The context for the project is significant. On the one hand is the grip of a social crisis, the contours of which continue to confound the commentariat. Racism, xenophobia, gendered violence, migration and nation, climate change, health pandemics, political corruption. The parade is as intimidating as it is spectacular. On the other hand, the very tools of criticism we depend upon in identifying these characters in the parade, much less the spectacle of the parade itself, are themselves in crisis. There is, in a word, a crisis for critique itself. The working assumption of this Article is that these crises—crises in society and the crises of critique—are not unrelated. It is in this context that we believe in the need to revitalize the tools of critical legal studies, an intellectual songbook from the 1970s that deserves a 21st century reboot. The argument is as follows. Among the crises o...
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What caused the 'neoliberal turn' in international trade law and how exactly this event manifested itself in the medium of international legal practices is not a question that lends itself to simple resolutions. What I wish to do... more
What caused the 'neoliberal turn' in international trade law and how exactly this event manifested itself in the medium of international legal practices is not a question that lends itself to simple resolutions. What I wish to do in these pages, consequently, is offer a few general theses which should help put this inquiry into sharper perspective. I do this by taking as my starting point Andrew Lang's recent writings on the history of international trade law. My main focus in this context falls on the question of international legal-historical methodology. By exploring the various, often very nuanced discrepancies between Lang's formally declared theoretical project and his apparent theoretical practices, I aim to work out the common set of challenges confronting the broader enterprise of critical legal history in modern international law.
Research Interests: History, Sociology, Criminology, Law, Political Science, and 3 moreLiberalism, K, and Social legal studies
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The doctrine of indirect expropriation forms one of the cornerstones of contemporary international investment law (IIL). This paper argues that it is theoretically and conceptually unsustainable. It is a common ground among the scholars... more
The doctrine of indirect expropriation forms one of the cornerstones of contemporary international investment law (IIL). This paper argues that it is theoretically and conceptually unsustainable. It is a common ground among the scholars of international law that aspects of many contemporary international regimes concerning the treatment of private actors by sovereign states find their historical origin in the US constitutional legal tradition. In no other area of international law, however, has this pattern of mass-scale borrowing been more obvious than in that segment of IIL which deals with the subject of indirect expropriation, or, to use the standard US legal terminology, regulatory takings. The sheer scale of en bloc importation that has been carried out in this area over the last few decades has reached such colossal proportions that it would be simply impossible to try to understand the evolution of this part of international law without taking into account its relationship w...
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Research Interests: Political Economy, European Law, International Law, Private International Law, Political Science, and 12 moreCritical Legal Theory, Legal Theory, International Political Economy, Law and Economics, International economic law, International law (public and private), International trade law, History of International Legal Thought, New Approaches to International Law, Discipline, International Legal Theory, and International Economic Law
An increasing number of international law scholars over the last few years have started to turn their attention to the study of political economy. To what extent can this trend be considered an indication of an underlying ‘disciplinary... more
An increasing number of international law scholars over the last few years have started to turn their attention to the study of political economy. To what extent can this trend be considered an indication of an underlying ‘disciplinary turn’? How should one understand the phenomenon of disciplinary turns? The answer we propose to this question in this article proceeds from the assumption that not all disciplinary shifts follow the same logic. Unlike the linguistic or the historical turn, the turn to political economy in contemporary international law does not represent an exercise in inter-disciplinary exploration. The concept of political economy used in international law has very little to do with the actual discipline of political economy. It is much more diffuse and unfocused in theoretical terms. What gives it its essential sense of identity is not any form of distinct methodological orientation, but rather its basic usefulness as a potential marker of critical self-distancing ...
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Law, International Law, Critical Legal Theory, Legal Theory, and 15 moreIdeology, International Political Economy, Law and Politics, Law and Economics, Marxist Legal Theory, Critical international political economy, Legal Philosophy, History of International Legal Thought, Carl Schmitt, Discipline, International Legal Theory, Critical Legal Studies, Distancing, Marxist Political Economy, and Legal Theory and History
A certain body of mythology has emerged in recent years around Martti Koskenniemi's From Apology to Utopia (FATU). At its heart lies a group of received wisdoms that tell us that FATU should essentially be considered a work of... more
A certain body of mythology has emerged in recent years around Martti Koskenniemi's From Apology to Utopia (FATU). At its heart lies a group of received wisdoms that tell us that FATU should essentially be considered a work of postmodern scholarship, that it provides a typical illustration of the so-called deconstructivist approach, and that its single most significant contribution to the field of international legal theory lies in its discussion of the subject of legal indeterminacy. In this article, I seek to challenge and displace this set of narratives, by excavating and restoring to the surface FATU's original intellectual project: a highly ambitious attempt to revive the traditional enterprise of ‘legal science’ by marrying Kelsenian legal positivism with Saussurean structuralist semiotics. In doing so, it succeeded in developing a set of analytical idioms and reasoning protocols that gave the international law profession not only a reason but also the necessary intell...
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... Berman, Vishaal Kishore, Fleur Johns, Michael Fakhri, Sundhya Pahuja, Arnulf Becker, Ileana Porras, Matt Craven, China Miéville, and Ignacio ... of reference as did Pierre Bourdieu's Homo Academicus (1988) and Louis... more
... Berman, Vishaal Kishore, Fleur Johns, Michael Fakhri, Sundhya Pahuja, Arnulf Becker, Ileana Porras, Matt Craven, China Miéville, and Ignacio ... of reference as did Pierre Bourdieu's Homo Academicus (1988) and Louis Althusser's 'Marxism and Humanism' from For Marx (1970). ...
... 9780745323695, 381 pp., $100.00 (hb), $36.00 (pb). A new genre of scholarly writing has emerged in recent years in the field of what one can broadly call critical international theory. Its principal defining feature is an intense ...
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... 9780745323695, 381 pp., $100.00 (hb), $36.00 (pb). A new genre of scholarly writing has emerged in recent years in the field of what one can broadly call critical international theory. Its principal defining feature is an intense ...
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... Peter Fitzpatrick and Patricia Tuitt (eds.), Critical Beings: Law, Nation and the Global Subject, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, 226 pp. (hb). Sinkwan Cheng (ed.), Law, Justice, and Power: Between Reason and Will, Stanford: Stanford... more
... Peter Fitzpatrick and Patricia Tuitt (eds.), Critical Beings: Law, Nation and the Global Subject, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, 226 pp. (hb). Sinkwan Cheng (ed.), Law, Justice, and Power: Between Reason and Will, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, 278 pp. (pb). ...