Recent Posts

Emerging Voices: A View from Early Modern Cultural Studies on Fragmentation and the Law of Nations

[Christopher Warren is an Assistant Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University] Disciplinarily, as my title suggests, I come from elsewhere.  But having travelled here to the shores of international law from my home in early modern cultural studies, I come in part to praise the fragmented landscape. “Fragmentation” in recent legal discussions usually refers to “traditional international law [being] pushed aside by a mosaic of particular rules and institutions, each following its embedded preferences.” “An everyday international occurrence such as the transport of hazardous chemicals at sea,” as Martti Koskenniemi explains, can now be “narrate[d] as part of a different set of human pursuits, values, and priorities,” including trade law, transport law, environmental law, law of the sea, or human rights. Koskenniemi’s account of jurisdictional and normative fragmentation usefully captures two main insights, first, that narrative—story—plays a critical and maybe increasing role on what is notably called the “international stage”; and secondly, that the stories we tell and the ways that we tell them have legal, social, economic, and political consequences. Robert Cover’s foundational essay “Nomos and Narrative” (pdf) powerfully articulates such insights as well.

Disciplinary Fragmentation

My first interest here, however, is not normative fragmentation but a different though related kind of fragmentation, namely disciplinary fragmentation, specifically the present disconnect between international law and humanistic disciplines like literature and history. Fortunately, disciplinary fragmentation has left rough, jagged edges, and while I’m visiting here I want to take the opportunity to celebrate the craggy coastlines where we can still find evidence of international law’s connections with the humanities. The present distance between international law and literary and cultural studies might make my participation in this forum surprising, but it’s also, I’d suggest, a fruitful way to think historically and methodologically about international law.