Jean d’Aspremont (Sciences Po Law School and University of Manchester – School of Law) has posted The Interwar Otherwise: Rewriting Liberal Histories of International Law (4 Iranian Journal of International and Comparative Law 3-18 (2026)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This article critically examines the mainstream international legal narrative of the interwar period, arguing that it functions not as a neutral recounting of the past but as a strategic intervention that governs the present. The conventional story—centered on collective security, codification of restraints on war, the mandates system, and minority protection—is shown to be a distinctly liberal construction. It presumes a liberal concept of law and treats peace and security as law’s natural horizon, thereby sidelining the era’s competing legalities: economic ordering and technocracy, racialized governance and imperial extraction, social rights internationalism and labor constitutionalism, emergency as a legal technology, and administrative internationalism across finance, health, and trade. In this sense, the interwar as conventionally narrated is largely a self-description of liberal legalism, not a transparent periodization. The article advances two claims. First, that this narrative framing narrows what counts as international legality and naturalizes particular institutional forms. Second, that in 2025—amid fraying constitutional democratic orders, notably in parts of the Global North—we must reinvent our narratives. This means foregrounding legal architectures that structured social conflict and authority beyond the security frame: debt, trade, and resource governance; race and empire within international administration; emergency and technocratic expertise; and rival internationalisms. Rewriting the interwar is not antiquarian labor but a practical intervention to enable the strategic work of history in constituting the horizon of the possible.
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