Papers by Rose Sydney Parfitt
London Review of International Law, 2017
The WWI artefact examined in this article is the Anti-Neutral Suit, designed in 1914 -- just as t... more The WWI artefact examined in this article is the Anti-Neutral Suit, designed in 1914 -- just as the fascist movement was being born -- by the Futurist artist Giacomo Balla. Juxtaposing the Suit's materiality against that of some present-day anti-neutral outfits, I suggest that international law's most important (individual, collective) subjects are not, in fact, definitively peaceable and egalitarian but rather violently expansionist.
Leiden Journal of International Law , 2018
What would happen to our understanding of international law and its relationship with violence if... more What would happen to our understanding of international law and its relationship with violence if we collapsed the distinction between our supposedly post-colonial ‘present’ and its colonial ‘past’; between the sovereign spaces of the twenty-first century global order, and the integrated, hierarchical space of fascist imperialism? I respond to this question through an investigation into the physical contours of a precise ‘imperial location’: 30°31′00″N, 18°34′00″E. These co-ordinates refer to a point on the sea-edge of the Sirtica that is occupied today by the Ra's Lanuf oil refinery, one of Libya's three most important such facilities. In the late 1930s, however, during Libya's period of fascist colonial rule, this was the point at which a state-of-the-art motorway, the Via litoranea libica, was crossed by a giant triumphal arch, the Arco dei Fileni. Through a chronotopic reading of the temporal, spatial and interpellative aspects of this point, its architecture and its history, I suggest that fascist lawyers, officials and intellectuals accepted a horrifying truth about the relationship between international law and violence – a relationship that twenty-first century doctrinal international law is loath to confront, concerning the inherently expansionist logic of the sovereign state, and the inevitably hierarchical ordering of the ‘international community’ which stems from it.
Malcolm Evans (ed), International Law, 5th Edition (Oxford University Press), 2018
This chapter, which examines various theoretical arguments about recognition, statehood, or sover... more This chapter, which examines various theoretical arguments about recognition, statehood, or sovereignty, discusses the elusiveness of the actual place occupied by the State in legal international thought and practice. In one direction, the existence of a society of independent States appears to be a necessary presupposition for the discipline—something that has to precede the identification of those rules or principles which might be regarded as forming the substance of international law. In another direction, however, statehood is something that appears to be produced through international law following from a need to determine which political communities can rightfully claim to enjoy the prerogatives of sovereignty.
This chapter develops and applies a chronotopic method for the analysis of international legal su... more This chapter develops and applies a chronotopic method for the analysis of international legal subjectivity and its construction in the context of the Bandung Conference. This approach has a critical purpose. The aim of the chapter is to understand what (in a political sense) lay behind the superficially bland restatement of the principles of the UN Charter articulated in the Bandung Conference’s Final Communiqué. It argues that the postcolonial states represented at Bandung sought, through the construction of a particular narrative strategy, to position themselves, as the global order’s newest subjects, as also and for that reason its ‘truest’.
The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law, Ch. 29, 2016
Instead of taking the usual route of providing either a taxonomy of international personality or ... more Instead of taking the usual route of providing either a taxonomy of international personality or a history of recognition, this chapter examines the way in which the legal effect of recognition on international personality has been theorized. It will therefore distance itself slightly from the ‘indeterminacy thesis’. Bringing some of the most prominent theories of the relationship between recognition and international personality into conversation with some of their most recent and radical alternatives, it will ask why colonial patterns of inequality persist, in spite of the ‘rolling out’ of international personality globally. Is it possible that orthodox theories of this relationship have ‘determined’ these patterns in some way? The focus will therefore be on international recognition (that is, inter-state recognition, as opposed to recognition of governments and belligerents), and on the personality of entities which identify (whether actually or potentially) as territorial (such as states, colonies, ‘mandates’ and indigenous peoples). The chapter begins with a theoretical history of the relationship between recognition and personality, starting with an examination of the work of GWF Hegel, before moving to the contemporary debate and its politics.
European Journal of International Law, 2014
Responding to the ''Themes' section of Anne Peters & Bardo Fassbender (eds), The Oxford Handbook ... more Responding to the ''Themes' section of Anne Peters & Bardo Fassbender (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (OUP, 2012), I argue in this paper that what is required in order to meet the editors’ goals of 'overcoming [the] Eurocentrism' by which the history of international law has been characterised is nothing less than a revolutionary re-imagining of the discipline. For if ‘doctrine’ can be understood as the space in which international history is transformed, or ‘imaged’, into international legal history through its ordering into a particular kind of narrative, then doctrine must be the place where the process of revolutionary re-imagination and re-ordering must begin. I suggest that the international law doctrine of sources amounts to a ready-made international legal historiography which is telegraphical and Eurocentric by definition. I then go on to examine some alternative approaches, and to assess their capacity to escape this methodological trap.
(Open access -- please follow the link provided)
Leiden Journal of International Law, Jan 1, 2011
The ‘Abyssinia Crisis’ of 1935-36 – in which one League of Nations member (imperial Ethiopia) was... more The ‘Abyssinia Crisis’ of 1935-36 – in which one League of Nations member (imperial Ethiopia) was annexed by another (Fascist Italy) – presents one of the clearest twentieth-century illustrations of international law’s ‘progress narrative’. International lawyers are encouraged to draw a salutary lesson from the crisis: namely that Ethiopia’s sovereignty – and, indeed, the peace of the entire world – might have survived the 1930s if only international law had been properly enforced. Yet, the assumption upon which this lesson depends – to the effect that Ethiopia’s only discursive contribution to the crisis was passively to regurgitate the relevant clauses of the Covenant – is profoundly ideological. For this assumption effects a double suppression: erasing Ethiopia’s strategic construction of a hybrid, partially Abyssinian international law from the discipline’s memory; and concealing from scholarly view the possibility that Ethiopia’s annexation might have resulted from actions that were in accordance with, rather than in violation of, interwar international legal norms regarding sovereignty and the use of force.
Separated from us by the barrier of a century. Inaugurator of a fully mechanised modernity. Eye-... more Separated from us by the barrier of a century. Inaugurator of a fully mechanised modernity. Eye-opener for the birth of a new, horrified, global society. Premonition of a future to come. This is the Great War. As one supremely tragic bookend to the ‘long’ nineteenth century, the ‘Great War’ is offered to international lawyers as a turning point — as a hinge between the imperial and the modern (see Berman 1999). The extended moment of memorialisation in which we find ourselves today presents, in our view, a critical opportunity for interrupting the sensibility of this bounded past.
Journal of Transnational Legal Theory (forthcoming, 2013)
Transnational Legal Theory (2013) Vol. 4(1) pp. 108-125., 2013
European Journal of International Law, 2012
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
‘Earned sovereignty’ has been billed as a new addition to the international legal ‘tool kit’, des... more ‘Earned sovereignty’ has been billed as a new addition to the international legal ‘tool kit’, designed specifically to resolve nationalist conflict. So violent and intractable is such conflict, earned sovereignty’s proponents argue, that the international legal rules (protecting the integrity of the state while granting unconditional independence to colonised peoples) on which traditional solutions are based have become obsolete. In their place, a commendable body state practice is held to indicate the emergence of a new, pragmatic approach in which sovereign power is disaggregated and transferred gradually, in some cases wholly and in others partially, to those secessionist sub-state entities which deserve it, having erected liberal political and economic institutions at the behest and under the supervision of the ‘international community’. This chapter critiques the concept of earned sovereignty from both a historical and a theoretical point of view, drawing in particular on the historical work of TWAIL historians like Antony Anghie, Susan Marks’s ‘critique of international legal ideology’, and M. M. Bakhtin’s concept of ‘dialogics’.
This chapter argues that the differences between orthodox international legal and Ethiopian conce... more This chapter argues that the differences between orthodox international legal and Ethiopian conceptions of sovereignty and civilisation were consistently lost in translation during Ethiopia’s diplomatic encounter with the League of Nations, and especially during the Crisis of 1935-36. In the first place, the conditions attached to Ethiopia’s membership of the League can be linked directly to an inability on the part of inter-war international law, as institutionalised in the League, to recognise and respect the existence of a specifically Ethiopian conception of sovereignty. Second, the Abyssinian conception of civilisation as a process of cultural transformation made it possible of Ethiopia to present itself as equal in cultural terms to European states, and inferior to them only in material – that is, developmental and hence rectifiable terms.
Visual/Non-Textual by Rose Sydney Parfitt
New Perspectives, 2020
Five images produced as part of 'Brutal International Law', a collaboration oriented around a vis... more Five images produced as part of 'Brutal International Law', a collaboration oriented around a visit, in April 2019, of a group of artists and international legal academics to the former American Embassy in The Hague. The building -- one of the most famous/notorious products both of Brutalism and of the Cold War itself; now abandoned by the US in favour of a more 'secure' alternative - was designed in the 1950s by Marcel Breuer.
The rest of the special issue of New Perspectives, edited by Sofia Stolk and Renske Vos, can be accessed here: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/npsa/28/1#sage_toc_section_SpecialSection%E2%80%98BrutalInternationalLaw%E2%80%99
Books by Rose Sydney Parfitt
The Process of International Legal Reproduction: Inequality, Historiography, Resistace (Cambridge University Press). , 2019
Table of Contents + Stand (preface to the book, The Process of International Legal Reproduction)
Blog Posts by Rose Sydney Parfitt
State of Nature, 2017
One Question is a monthly series published by State of Nature (stateofnatureblog.com) in which th... more One Question is a monthly series published by State of Nature (stateofnatureblog.com) in which the editors ask leading thinkers to give a brief answer to a single question - in this case: 'Is Fascism Making a Comeback?'
With Chiara Bottici, Neil Faulkner, Tim Jacoby, Charlie Post, Yannis Stavrakakis, William I. Robinson and Elena Loizidou plus (in Part 2) Laurence Davis, Eva Nanopoulos, Cenk Saraçoğlu, Stephen Hopgood, Jessica Northey and Chip Berlet.
http://stateofnatureblog.com/one-question-fascism-part-one/
Critical Legal Thinking, 2014
Critical Legal Thinking , 2011
Uploads
Papers by Rose Sydney Parfitt
(Open access -- please follow the link provided)
Visual/Non-Textual by Rose Sydney Parfitt
The rest of the special issue of New Perspectives, edited by Sofia Stolk and Renske Vos, can be accessed here: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/npsa/28/1#sage_toc_section_SpecialSection%E2%80%98BrutalInternationalLaw%E2%80%99
Books by Rose Sydney Parfitt
Blog Posts by Rose Sydney Parfitt
With Chiara Bottici, Neil Faulkner, Tim Jacoby, Charlie Post, Yannis Stavrakakis, William I. Robinson and Elena Loizidou plus (in Part 2) Laurence Davis, Eva Nanopoulos, Cenk Saraçoğlu, Stephen Hopgood, Jessica Northey and Chip Berlet.
http://stateofnatureblog.com/one-question-fascism-part-one/
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/12/16/interruption-five-artefacts-international-law/
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/12/15/first-world-war-interrupted-artefacts-international-laws-archive/
(Open access -- please follow the link provided)
The rest of the special issue of New Perspectives, edited by Sofia Stolk and Renske Vos, can be accessed here: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/npsa/28/1#sage_toc_section_SpecialSection%E2%80%98BrutalInternationalLaw%E2%80%99
With Chiara Bottici, Neil Faulkner, Tim Jacoby, Charlie Post, Yannis Stavrakakis, William I. Robinson and Elena Loizidou plus (in Part 2) Laurence Davis, Eva Nanopoulos, Cenk Saraçoğlu, Stephen Hopgood, Jessica Northey and Chip Berlet.
http://stateofnatureblog.com/one-question-fascism-part-one/
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/12/16/interruption-five-artefacts-international-law/
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/12/15/first-world-war-interrupted-artefacts-international-laws-archive/
The slides were published as part of a blog post on the Legal Academics Strike Again blog, at https://legalacstrikeagain.blogspot.com/2019/12/teaching-politics-of-higher-education_3.html
In light of the recent and very rapid re-centring of fascist discourse and iconography across the world, the workshop aims to take fascism and its concept of the international seriously as distinctive, perhaps even inevitable consequences of the unification of 'the world' as such since 1492.
While the workshop leans towards the field of international law, its character is strongly interdisciplinary. Interventions (including textual, visual and aural interventions) from individuals and groups working in all disciplines are welcome.
Events so far:
1. Thinking with Sound (with Dr. James Parker): http://www.law.unimelb.edu.au/index.cfm?objectid=DCA83080-2698-11E1-B6610050568D0140&diaryid=8019
2. The 'Minutes of Evidence' Project:
http://www.law.unimelb.edu.au/index.cfm?objectid=DCA83080-2698-11E1-B6610050568D0140&diaryid=8454
Please click on the link above to see a video of the second in the Constellations seminar series, in which members of the groundbreaking 'Minutes of Evidence Project share their thoughts and experiences of collaborating across disciplines (from history to law to criminology), sectors (academia, performing arts, government, community), and media (from scholarly publications to theatrical performance to curricula materials for secondary schools).
The Minutes of Evidence project aims to spark new ways of engaging with history and structural justice in Victoria and elsewhere. It draws upon a little-known chapter of Victoria's past, the 1881 Parliamentary Inquiry into the Aboriginal Reserve at Coranderrk, to invite new public conversations about historical and structural injustice and the possibility of a structural justice. Through research, education and performance and public engagement, the project creates a number of 'meeting points' in schools, on Country, in theatres and between scholars. Grounded in collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, the project promotes awareness of the relationship between the past and the present, and of responsibilities in the present to work towards future justice. See: www.minutesofevidence.com.au
Speakers:
Dr Jennifer Balint: Criminology, School of Social and Political Sciences
Ms Lilly Brown: Early Career Indigenous Researcher, MoE project; Principal Tutor, Australian Indigenous Studies program, Culture & Communication
Ms Caitlin Dullard: Company Manager/Creative Producer, La Mama Theatre
Dr Julie Evans: Criminology, School of Social and Political Sciences
Ms Liz Jones: Artistic Director & CEO, La Mama Theatre TBC
Dr Mark McMillan: Melbourne Law School
Dr Nesam McMillan: Criminology, School of Social and Political Sciences
Constellations is a seminar series which aims to encourage new ways of thinking about interdisciplinary and the politics of method. The series is directed by me (Rose Parfitt) at Melbourne Law School, under the auspices of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH) -- see attachment for more details.
Please click on the link above to listen to a recording of the first in the Constellations seminar series, 'Thinking with Sound', co-organised with James Parker, author of Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi (OUP, forthcoming) and presenter of the experimental music show 'Far Side Virtual' on PBS. Joining James on the panel to talk about why they do what they do in the way they do it are Joel Stern (sound artist/curator), Linda Kouvaras (musician/musicologist) and Neil McLachlan (neuropsychologist/instrument-maker).
Constellations is a seminar series encouraging new ways of thinking about interdisciplinary and the politics of method. The series is directed by me (Rose Parfitt) at Melbourne Law School, under the auspices of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH) -- see attachment for more details.
Feel free to use it with due acknowledgment.
About the Subject: This course will take you step by step through the fundamental elements of International Law, understood in its broadest sense to encompass public international law, private international and international economic law. It will provide you with a detailed understanding of the norms, doctrines and institutions of international law, giving you a relevant and rigorous language and set of techniques with which to analyse and assess world politics, world economics and world history. However, just as you will learn to bring international law to bear on politics, economics history, you will also be encouraged, at the same time, to reverse this relationship, bringing politics, economics and history to bear on international law, in order to think more critically about the discipline and its effects. Is international law always a force for good, or is it possible that international law might have contributed to the construction and sustenance of the very problems it is called upon to solve? In order to equip you with a doctrinal, normative and institutional understanding of international law, and with the tools to apply this knowledge critically, we will be paying special attention to the question of how the doctrine, norms and institutions of international law influence not only international relations but also our daily domestic life.