The State and International Law: A Reading from the Global South

Abstract

In this essay, we redescribe the relationship between international law and the state, reversing the imagined directionality of the flow that sequences nation-states coming first and international law second. At its most provocative, our argument is that, rather than international law being a creation of the state, making and remaking the state is a project of international law. We pay particular attention here to the institutionalized project of development in order to illuminate the ways in which international law creates and maintains nation-states, and then recirculates from a multiplicity of points “within” them.