Once Upon a Time in International Law…

The introduction to this edited volume sets out the idea of experimenting with alternative literary forms as lenses through which to look anew at international law and to find what doors this may open. It loosely situates the endeavour within the burgeoning fields of international law and literature or aesthetics. It also outlines how the stories collected in the volume—a set of surprisingly dark chapters—inquire into who the storytellers of international law are, where the stages on which they tell their stories are found, and who are absent from these tales.

1. 1.

   James Boyd White, Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 169; Gerry Simpson, ‘The Sentimental Life of International Law,’ London Review of International Law, 3, no. 1 (2015): 3–29.

2. 2.

   Ibid. White. On the relation between stories and identity in general see Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, vol. 5019 (NY: Basic books, 1973).

3. 3.

   For an interesting analysis of the stories that international (legal) institutions tell about themselves, see Martti Koskenniemi, ‘The Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,’ in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Common Standard of Achievement, eds. G. Alfredsson & A. Eide (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1999). On the construction of a narrative of international criminal courts specifically, see Sara Kendall and Sarah Nouwen, ‘Representational Practices at the International Criminal Court: The Gap between Juridified and Abstract Victimhood,’ Law and Contemporary Problems 76 (2013): 235; Christine Schwobel-Patel, ‘The Comfort of International Criminal Law,’ Law and Critique 24 (2013): 169; Sofia Stolk, ‘“The Records on Which History Will Judge Us Tomorrow”: Auto-History in the Opening Statements of International Criminal Trials,’ Leiden Journal of International Law, 28, no. 4 (2015): 993–1012. For a similar account in the EU context, see Renske Vos, Europe and the Sea of Stories (PhD thesis, VU Amsterdam, 2020).

4. 4.

   Simpson (n 1): 28.

5. 5.

   White (n 1): 174.

6. 6.

   Ekatarina Yahyaoui Krivenko, ‘International law, literature and interdisciplinarity,’ Law and Humanities, 9, no. 1 (2015): 120.

7. 7.

   See, for example, Simpson (n 1); Christine Schwöbel, ‘The ‘Ideal’ Victim of International Criminal Law,’ European Journal of International Law, 29, no. 3 (2018); Yahyaoui Krivenko (n 6): 122; Martha Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2013).

8. 8.

   Some examples include David Kennedy, A World of Struggle: How Power, Law, and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Ingo Venzke, How interpretation makes international law: on semantic change and normative twists (Oxford: OUP, 2012); Wouter Werner, ‘Recall it again, Sam. Practices of Repetition in the Security Council,’ Nordic Journal of International Law 86, no. 2 (2017): 151–169; Christopher Warren, Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580–1680 (Oxford: OUP, 2015); Lianne Boer, ‘Narratives of Force: The Presence of the Writer in International Legal Scholarship,’ Netherlands International Law Review 66, no. 1 (2019): 1–20; Edward Morgan, Aesthetics of International Law (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Raimond Gaita, ‘Literature, Genocide, and the Philosophy of International Law,’ in Crime, Punishment and Responsibility eds. Rowan Cruft, Matthew Kramer & Mark Reiff (Oxford: OUP, 2011).

9. 9.

   Emiliano Buis, ‘How to Play Justice and Drama in Antiquity: Law and Theatre in Athens as Performative Rituals,’ Florida Journal of International Law (2004); Jaqueline Mowbray, Linguistic Justice: International Law and Language Policy (Oxford: OUP, 2012).

10. 10.

    Simpson (n 1).

11. 11.

    Roland Bleiker, ‘In Search of Thinking Space: Reflections on the Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory,’ Millennium 45, no. 2 (2017): 258–264.

12. 12.

    Elizabeth Dauphinee, The Politics of Exile (London: Routledge, 2013); Jenny Edkins, ‘Novel Writing in International Relations: Openings for a Creative Practice,’ Security Dialogue 44, no. 4 (2013): 281–297.

13. 13.

    Louiza Odysseos, ‘Prolegomena to Any Future Decolonial Ethics: Coloniality, Poetics and “Being Human as Praxis,’” Millennium 45, no. 3 (2017): 447–72.

14. 14.

    Xavier Guillaume, Rune Andersen, Juha Vuori, ‘Paint it black: Colours and the social meaning of the battlefield,’ European Journal of International Relations 22, no. 1 (2015): 49–71.

15. 15.

    Kyle Grayson, ‘How to Read Paddington Bear: Liberalism and the Foreign Subject in A Bear Called Paddington,’ British Journal of Politics and International Relations 15, no. 3 (2013): 378–393.

16. 16.

    Surabhi Ranganathan, ‘The Value of Narratives: The India-USA Nuclear Deal in Terms of Fragmentation, Pluralism, Constitutionalisation and Global Administrative Law,’ Erasmus Law Review 6, no.17 (2013).

17. 17.

    Sarah-Jane Koulen ‘Blind Justice and the Portraits on the Wall’ in Illuminating the Backstage of Transnational Legal Practice eds. Lianne Boer and Sofia Stolk (London: Routledge, 2019).

18. 18.

    Rose Parfitt, ‘The Anti-Neutral Suit: International Legal Futurists, 1914–2017,’ London Review of International Law 5, no. 1 (2017): 87–123.

19. 19.

    Luis Eslava, ‘Istanbul Vignettes: Observing the Everyday Operation of International Law,’ London Review of International Law 2, no. 1 (2014): 3–47.

20. 20.

    Sofia Stolk and Renske Vos (eds.) ‘Special section: Brutal International Law: A Walk through Marcel Breuer’s former American Embassy in The Hague,’ New Perspectives 28, no. 1 (2020).

21. 21.

    Immi Tallgren, ‘Watching Tokyo Trial,’ London Review of International Law 5, no. 2 (2017): 291–316; Wouter Werner, ‘“We Cannot Allow Ourselves to Imagine What It All Means”: Documentary Practices and the International Criminal Court,’ Law and Contemporary Problems (2014): 76, 319.

22. 22.

    Julie Stone Peters, ‘Legal Performance Good and Bad,’ Law, Culture and the Humanities 4 (2008): 179–200; Mark Drumbl in this volume.

23. 23.

    James Parker, Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi (Oxford: OUP, 2015).

24. 24.

    Hohmann and Joyce (n 27).

25. 25.

    Special Issue ‘Seeing Law: The Comic and Icon as Law,’ International Journal for the Semiotics of Law/Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique 30, no. 3 (2017).

26. 26.

    If anything, we would like to pick up on the challenge of Megan Daigle ‘to engage in that what we study: literary, novelistic forms of writing’ in Megan Daigle ‘Writing the Lives of Others: Storytelling and International Politics,’ Millennium 45, no. 1 (2016): 25–42.

27. 27.

    Hohmann and Joyce (n 27): 6.

28. 28.

    Sofia Stolk, The Opening Statement of the Prosecution in International Criminal Trials: A Solemn Tale of Horror (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2021).

29. 29.

    Yahyaoui Krivenko (n 6): 113. On silence and silencing in international law, see Elisabeth Schweiger, ‘Listen Closely: What Silence Can Tell Us About Legal Knowledge Production,’ London Review of International Law 6, no. 3 (2018); Dianne Otto, ‘Beyond legal justice: some personal reflections on people’s tribunals, listening and responsibility,’ London Review of International Law 5, no. 2 (2017): 225–249. More broadly, see: Gayatri Spivak, Can the subaltern speak? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988); Lene Hansen, ‘The Little Mermaid’s Silent Security Dilemma and the Absence of Gender in the Copenhagen School,’ Millennium 29, no. 2 (2000): 285–306; Xavier Guillaume, ‘How to do things with silence: Rethinking the centrality of speech to the securitization framework,’ Security Dialogue 49, no. 6 (2018): 476–492.

30. 30.

    See, for example, Anne Orford (ed.) International Law and its Others (Cambridge: CUP 2009); Rose Parfitt, The Process of International Legal Reproduction: Inequality, Historiography, Resistance (Cambridge: CUP, 2019); Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah (eds.) Bandung, global history, and international law: Critical pasts and pending futures (Cambridge: CUP, 2017); Antony Anghie, ‘The Evolution of International Law: colonial and postcolonial realities,’ Third World Quarterly 27, no. 5 (2006): 740; 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, no. 2 (2012): 206.

31. 31.

    Schweiger and O’Leary McNeice, Chap. 2 in this volume: 17.

32. 32.

    Drumbl, Chap. 3 in this volume: 46.

33. 33.

    Ibid.

34. 34.

    Ibid: 47.

35. 35.

    Ibid: 49.

36. 36.

    Charman, Chap. 4 in this volume: 72.

37. 37.

    Roodenburg and Stolk, Chap. 5 in this volume: 81.

38. 38.

    Ibid: 93.

39. 39.

    Marčenko, Chap. 6 in this volume: 97.

40. 40.

    Vos and Han, Chap. 7 in this volume: 117, 121.

41. 41.

    Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2nd edition 2003).

42. 42.

    Simpson (n 1): 28.

43. 43.

    Immi Tallgren, ‘Stardust of Justice? Celebrity in and by International Law,’ research paper prepared for the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting 2018, on file with authors; Payam Akhavan, ‘Making Human Rights Sexy: Authenticity in Glamorous Times’ (Harvard Human Rights Journal Blog, 9 November 2012) <http://harvardhrj.com/2012/11/making-human-rights-sexy-authenticity-in-glamorous-times/> accessed on 25 June 2018.

44. 44.

    Luis Eslava, Local Space, Global Life: The Everyday Operation of International Law and Development (Cambridge: CUP, 2015); Fleur Johns, Non-Legality in International Law: Unruly Law (Cambridge: CUP 2013); Mikael Madsen, ‘Sociological Approaches to International Courts,’ The Oxford Handbook of International Adjudication eds. Romano et al (Oxford: OUP, 2015); Sarah Nouwen, ‘As You Set out for Ithaka: Practical, Epistemological, Ethical, and Existential Questions about Socio-Legal Empirical Research in Conflict,’ Leiden Journal of International Law 27 (2017): 227.

45. 45.

    Sofia Stolk and Renske Vos, ‘International Legal Sightseeing,’ Leiden Journal of International Law 33, no.1 (2020): 1.

46. 46.

    Schweiger and O’Leary McNeice (n 31): 18.

47. 47.

    M. Arvidsson and M. Bak McKenna, ‘The Turn to History in International Law and the Sources Doctrine: Critical Approaches and Methodological Imaginaries’ 33(1) Leiden Journal of International Law (2020) 37–56; N. Rajkovic, ‘Interdisciplinarity’ in J. d’Aspremont and S. Singh (eds.) Concepts for International Law (Elgar 2019); L. Boer and S. Stolk (eds.) Illuminating the Backstage of Transnational Legal Practice (Routledge, 2019); D. Lisle and H. Johnson, ‘Lost in the Aftermath’ 50(1) Security Dialogue (2018) 20–39; R. Saugmann, ‘Military techno-vision: Technologies between visual ambiguity and the desire for security facts’ 4 European Journal of International Security (2019) 300–321; B. Tallis, ‘Multiplicity: Taking Responsibility for The International’ 27(3) New Perspectives (2019) 166.

48. 48.

    White, p. 170.

Authors and Affiliations

1. T.M.C. Asser Instituut / University of Amsterdam, The Hague, The Netherlands

   Sofia Stolk

2. VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

   Renske Vos

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Renske Vos .

Editors and Affiliations

1. T.M.C. Asser Instituut / University of Amsterdam, The Hague, The Netherlands

   Sofia Stolk

2. VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

   Renske Vos

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