Time Travel in the Law of International Responsibility

Abstract

This paper grapples with the temporality which international law produces and puts the emphasis on the role which the doctrine of international responsibility plays therein. This paper particularly argues that the doctrine of international responsibility, while preserving the seriality and linearity of the temporality of international law, suspends the latter’s one-directionality by allowing anyone invoking or mobilizing the doctrine of international responsibility to travel back and forth between the past of the wrongfulness and the present of responsibility. According to this argument, international responsibility thus enables a two-directional temporality. This paper shows that such two-directional temporality constitutes a discursive device at the service of the narrative function of international responsibility.

Keywords: International law, State Responsibility, Time, International Law and Time, literary theory, fiction, the imaginary, the real