This article examines how the encounter between China and international law is narrated in the English-speaking and Chinese literature and sheds light on the politics thereof. It particularly shows that the English-speaking and Chinese-speaking literature diverge as to the order of meaning in which the encounter between China and international law is registered. It demonstrates that the divergences between these bodies of literature are everything but innocent.

Comparison is a very common tool for international lawyers. In fact, international law is built around, and draws upon, constructions necessitating an exercise of comparison. In recent years, however, calls have been made to turn the familiar tool of comparison into a central way to engage with international law. This is the idea of those spearheading the rise of a new field called comparative international law. This article critically examines the promotion of comparison as a central mode of engagement with international law and scrutinizes some of the main features of the comparativist project. It particularly shows that the comparativist project, far from laying bare the plurality of international legal thought and practice, enables a thought-colonizing enterprise. The article ends with some reflective observations on the possibility of limiting colonizing thinking in international legal studies. In doing so, it argues that it must remain possible for international lawyers to engage with alterity in a way that does not unilaterally manufacture the “other,” silence it, and speak on its behalf. This approach is called counter-comparability.

This article uses the metaphor of the hall of mirrors to produce three distinct images of the international lawyer. The hall of mirrors refers here to the extent to which international legal discourses are built on self-referential mechanisms tantamount to mutually reflecting mirrors, by virtue of which movements and postures are reproduced ad infinitum without disclosing the origin thereof. According to the first image produced by virtue of the metaphor, the international lawyer feels invincible and fully makes use of the hall of mirrors to allow international legal discourses to obscure their origins and thrive in foundationlessness. The second image depicts a vulnerable international lawyer who is deprived of self-referential mechanisms for the production of international legal discourses because the mirrors have been shattered or the light turned off or simply because she has closed her eyes. The third image is that of a self-reflective international lawyer who is neither invincible nor vulnerable but consciously standing between the mutually reflecting mirrors wearing fissured spectacles and with no intention to smash the mirror, turn off the light or close her eyes. By developing these three distinct images, this article sheds light on how the contingency of legal doctrines, modes of legal reasoning and legal categories is experienced by international lawyers.

In his recent piece in the American Journal of International Law, B.S. Chimni depicts a doctrine of customary international law that has allowed the First World to impose its domination and promote its version of global capitalist justice. From Chimni's perspective, all the gimmicks and sophisticated dichotomies invented by international lawyers to refine international customary law serve a hegemonic socialization process whereby the center imposes its neoliberal ideals on an admiring periphery. But this diagnosis is certainly not the end of the story. In fact, Chimni's dismal image of the world and the role of custom therein is meant to foreground a more central project—i.e., the reinvention of customary international law around “the progressive ideas, beliefs, and practices of the global civil society” and geared towards the promotion of the “common good.” My view is that Chimni's postmodernization of the doctrine of international customary law does not necessarily remedy the charges he levels against custom, let alone redefine the center and the periphery. As much as I share his diagnosis about custom's complicity in hegemonic socialization and the promotion of a global capitalist ethos, I contend that Chimni's postmodernization is at best unavailing and, at worse, rehabilitative of the First World's centrality in norm-setting. Instead of striving to reinvent the doctrine of custom, we must invest in strategies that draw on the malleability and fluidity of the current doctrine and facilitate the types of argumentation that “decenter” the First World, thereby directly empowering international lawyers elsewhere.