A Reader – Indian Blog of International Law

Arunava Banerjee

The story of international law spans differently when viewed through the objects that shape its performance. In this tale, a shipping container does not simply carry goods; rather, it carries a particular vision of global commerce and trade that quietly got standardised through technical disputes between competing private and public actors within the International Organisation for Standardisation (Quiroga-Villamarín, 2020). An international conference venue does not simply host diplomacy; the seating arrangements, acoustic design, and spatial partitions in such a venue enact what Quiroga-Villamarín (2023) calls a ‘distribution of the sensible,’ determining who speaks, who is heard, and who is seen, even before the conference begins. Similarly, a fibre-optic cable lying on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean does not simply transmit data. Instead, it reshapes who governs, who is governed and on what terms (Johns, 2017). Thus, these are not illustrations of legal problems in such a narrative; rather, they are participants in the performance of international law, which the discipline has largely missed until recently.

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New materialism brings these insights into sharper analytical focus. Drawing on posthumanist feminism, science and technology studies (STS), and actor-network theory, it proposes that the objects and infrastructures through which international law operates are not neutral vessels but active participants. Taking them seriously, as Hohmann (2021, pg. 587) has argued, has the potential to undermine the grip of “Eurocentric idealist, doctrines and rules’ that continue to structure who and what is accorded rights, power and agency in the formation of the international legal order. The field of (critical) international law is ‘having a materialist moment’, and this reader represents the most intriguing thoughts that this moment has produced (Den Meerssche, 2023, pg. 197). Whether new materialism must be brought into closer dialogue with older structural and Marxist traditions to realise its full critical promise remains an open debate, one that runs through many of the works listed below for the reader to think about.

The following list is not exhaustive. Readers are encouraged to add more titles by commenting below.

2010

Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds.), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Duke University Press, 2010.

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, 2010.

(These two works are the indispensable background to everything that follows. They are not works of international law, but they are the theoretical foundations from which the field draws.)

2012

Luis Eslava and Sundhya Pahuja, Beyond the (Post)Colonial: TWAIL and the Everyday Life of International Law, Journal of Law and Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America 45(2), 2012.

2017

Jessie Hohmann, The Treaty 8 Typewriter: Tracing the Roles of Material Things in Imagining, Realising and Resisting Colonial Worlds, London Review of International Law 5(3), 2017.

2018

Jessie Hohmann and Daniel Joyce (eds.), International Law’s Objects, Oxford University Press, 2018.

Matilda Arvidsson, Targeting, Gender, and International Posthumanitarian Law and Practice: Framing the Question of the Human in International Humanitarian Law, Australian Feminist Law Journal 44(1), 2018.

2019

Benedict Kingsbury, Infrastructure and InfraReg: On Rousing the International Law “Wizards of Is”, Cambridge International Law Journal 8(2), 2019.

2020

Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarin, Domains of Objects, Rituals of Truth: Mapping Intersections between International Legal History and the New Materialisms, International Politics Reviews 8(2), 2020.

Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarin, Normalising Global Commerce: Containerisation, Materiality, and Transnational Regulation (1956-1968), London Review of International Law 8(3), 2020.