The sentimental life of international law: literature, language, and longing in world politics

The Sentimental Life of International Law is about our age-old longing for a decent international society and the ways of seeing, being and speaking that might help us consummate that longing. This book treats international law as an experience, a language and an aspiration. It is the culmination of a decade of thinking about the practice of international lawyering (in classrooms, at conferences, in treaty negotiation) and the modes of thinking and being that naturalise that practice. In particular, it asks both how we might engage in a professional practice that has become, to adapt a title of Janet Malcolm’s, not just impossible but also difficult; and whether we might be disabled by the governing idioms of international lawyering and, then, importantly, re-enabled, by speaking different sorts of international law or by speaking international law in different sorts of ways. It tries to answer that question by making the effort to discern or, better still, to bring to the surface international law’s hidden literary prose or its redemptive enclaves, and it does so in a series of chapters on international law’s bathetic underpinnings, its friendly relations, the neurotic foundations of its underlying social order, its screened-off comic dispositions, its anti-method, and the life-worlds of its practitioners, and then, finally in a chapter in which international law is re-envisioned through the practice of gardening. All of this done in the hope of offering a contribution to the project of making international law, again, a compelling language for our times.