Legal Modernities : conceptual transformations around the management of human mobility in international relations

• The discussion about the situation of the Roma in Europe and their exceptional legal standing when it comes to the right to movement is a telling example of both the legalization of politics and politicization of law within the EU. This text seeks to contribute to the project to re-frame our understanding of international law[1]by looking at how a drive to order coupled with a particular idea of the location of sovereign power that is dependent on particular historicist assumptions and a constantly re-produced separation between different levels of analysis (especially national and international) pervasive within the discipline of international law often enough make such a re-conceptualization impossible despite the best of intentions. It is by tracing this type of human rights discourse internal to international law that we can start to produce constructive criticism of the structures and processes of international law.[1]In 2002, for example, Richard Falk, Lester Edwin J. Ruiz and R. B. J. Walker (on behalf of the journal Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems) gathered some of the field’s most prominent scholars in order to engage the question of what it might mean to re-frame international law for the 21st century. Accepting its role as a millennial product and at the same time finding the temporal and spatial structures upon which the question as such was framed, the collection explicitly began by asking what was at stake in ‘framing’ anything in terms of ‘re-framing’. In so doing, the authors located a current disciplinary sensitivity in “a loss of confidence in the adequacy of the world” which is reflected both in doubts about the possibility of interpreting the world and also in the actual normative structures of the world. According to the authors, the effect of lost confidence could be seen in how the academic interpreters of international law “tack uneasily between a conventional wisdom about a world of sovereign jurisdictions coexisting in an increasingly responsible and cooperative system and a sense of profound disorientation.” Falk, Ruiz, Walker, p. 4. – 5.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Statsvetenskap -- Globaliseringsstudier (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Political Science -- Globalisation Studies (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

European Union

legal development

Roma

post-colonial

Chakrbarty

Social Sciences

Samhällsvetenskap

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