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Palazzo del Quirinale e piazza antistante

Palazzo del Quirinale e piazza antistante

Repetition and international law

"Chapter one starts from my embarrassment when teaching sources of international law. Following conventional wisdom, I inform students that international law is grounded on a limited set of sources. However, at some point, I also have to explain that it is possible for new sources of international law to emerge. How is this possible, given that international law is grounded on a limited set of sources? I try to deal with this uneasiness by comparing discourses on sources to rituals that prevail in what I call "cyclical societies, " organized around the belief in the eternal return of transcendental ideas, acts or events. To apply sources, I argue, is to perform a double act of repetition. First, historically contingent events are turned into manifestations of pregiven and repeatable categories. Second, sources are used as placeholders for something that will always escape positive international law: the foundational categories that underlie the sources of law. These foundational categories, I argue, work somewhat like celestial Gods in cyclical societies: Most of the time they stay dormant and aloof, but they can always be called upon in exceptional times"--Acts of repetition abound in international law. Security Council Resolutions typically start by recalling, recollecting, recognising or reaffirming previous resolutions. Expert committees present restatements of international law. Students and staff extensively rehearse fictitious cases in presentations for moot court competitions. Customary law exists by virtue of repeated behaviour and restatements about the existence of rules. When sources of international law are deployed, historically contingent events are turned into manifestations of pre-given and repeatable categories. This book studies the workings of repetition across six discourses and practices in international law. It links acts of repetition to similar practices in religion, theatre, film and commerce. Building on the dialectics of repetition as set out by Soren Kierkegaard, it examines how repetition in international law is used to connect concrete practices to something that is bound to remain absent, unspeakable or unimaginable.

Online Cambridge University Press