Thomas Schultz (King’s College London; University of Geneva) has posted Like a God That Doesn’t Exist on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
What if international law were like a god that doesn’t exist? It has no material being to fall back on — no mind-independent reality whose nature could be accurately described the way a rock’s hardness can be. And yet it is entirely real: it moves armies, founds institutions, settles disputes. It is real in the only mode available to it — through belief, performance, repetition, and the ongoing labour of the community that sustains it. Enactively, not materially.
This paper asks what follows, for international legal thought, from taking that seriously. If there is no independent object out there to be captured, then some of the questions the field has long found profound — is international law really law? does it bind non-consenting states? — may be a bit like asking after the bone density of an inexistent god: not quite wrong, but asking of the object a kind of answer it is not there to give. Truth-as-correspondence gives way to truth-as-orientation; the question shifts from what is this really? to what does construing it this way make us do?
Along the way: why certain questions feel interesting and others dull (economies of interestingness); how noetic things persist, wither, compete, and unravel differently than material ones (their political ecology); why a scholar might be richly rewarded precisely for changing nothing; and why the arrival of the machine — by revaluing what only humans can do — may quietly push international law towards a more human form. Or not.
The argument is offered as a caricature, in the artist’s sense: a deliberate distortion that tries to reveal by exaggerating.
Recommended!