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11 - The View from the US Leviathan

Histories of International Law in the Hegemon

from Part II - The Historiography of International Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2024

By
John Fabian Witt
Edited by
Randall Lesaffer  and
Anne Peters
Randall Lesaffer
Affiliation:
KU Leuven & Tilburg University
Anne Peters
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg
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Summary

Histories of international law more or less follow the epistemic position of the jurisdiction in which they arise. The parochial anglophone student of the comparative literature in the history of international law instantly sees a version of this phenomenon in action. With notable exceptions, even sophisticated work in the history of international law in the US is importantly different from English-language work in the same field that has begun to pour out from scholars based in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere. In this chapter, I propose that this is because US scholars since at least the Second World War have taken up the history of international law through a set of questions and presuppositions structured by a standpoint inside the leviathan. The most powerful player on the international stage – the United States – has exerted a gravitational pull on scholars writing the history of international law and on the functions that such histories serve.  In recent years, however, the cross-border professionalisation of the field is helping produce histories increasingly further afield from, or at least in a newly complex relationship with, the epistemic domination of the hegemon.

Keywords

Historiographyinternational lawUSepistemic powerhegemonyimperialism
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of International Law , pp. 330 - 377
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

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