Decoding crisis in international law: A queer feminist perspective

Abstract

INTRODUCTION International law has aptly been called a “discipline of crisis” – although I rather like the idea that it could be a “crisis of discipline” (as I inadvertently described it in a recent footnote). For better or worse (and I will argue that it is usually for worse), many of international law's most productive formative moments have been in response to calamitous occurrences understood to be crises, and efforts by scholars to map the development of the law, through the lens of those “incidents” or “events” that count as crises, abound. While emergency law-making was a regular feature of colonial governance, the productivity of crisis for international law intensified in the afterm..