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Abstract

This dissertation focuses on a specific episode in the theory of international law: the publication of two books in the late 1980s, David Kennedy’s International Legal Structures (1987) and Martti Koskenniemi’s From Apology to Utopia (1989). Their theoretical innovation lay in that they advanced a structural analysis of international legal language. What this entailed was to disengage structural dualisms which prescribed the movement of international legal argument. Indeterminacy followed in that, across history and space, such structures recurred and organized legal thought without closure or substantive resolution. My study approaches this structuralist episode as follows. Chapter 1 investigates contemporary international legal scholarship and explores the impact that structural indeterminacy has exercised upon it. Chapter 2 situates structural indeterminacy in its own time and differentiates it from the realist critique of international law which had shaped the field after the two World Wars. Here I also develop my own analysis of structuralism, as it emerged and got shaped in anthropology, linguistics, cultural studies. Chapter 3 presents how a structuralist analysis of international law was performed by Kennedy and Koskenniemi. I assess what this analysis achieves; what sort of new information it reveals. Chapter 4 explores how eventually structuralism got intertwined with existentialist philosophy. I close with my reflections beyond indeterminacy and with two fields of inquiry that I see emerging in its aftermath: (i) the importance of the work of the international lawyer; (ii) the reworking of the linkage between the individual human subject and the form of law.

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