This introductory chapter lays out the method, theory and historical framework of the study. It focuses on the potential for historical materialism to help us better understand and critique international law uncovering its structural complicity with oppression, exploitation and dispossession. Along with offering a succinct summary of the capitalist mode of production in Marxist thought, the chapter also reflects on the benefits of combining textual deconstruction with materialist analysis in order to better comprehend law as a textual discipline that is at the same time profoundly entangled with extra-textual processes of capitalist accumulation. Drawing from epistemology and the Marxist philosopher, Luis Althusser, the author defends the importance of a symptomatic reading of international legal materials that centres a specifically juridical problematic.