In Praise of Disorder: Conceptualising Events in International Law

Abstract

Important moves have been made in international legal scholarship to uncover and challenge the dominant-linear and unidirectional-approaches to time that have dominated international legal thought and practice. These dominant approaches have been robustly criticised for drawing on a temporal relationship where the past, present, and future are interconnected by a unidirectional causality. In order to successfully break with such approaches, however, one crucial move is missing in this scholarly endeavor. In order to rigorously analyse, and possibly break with such approaches one must pay closer attention to events, to the way in which events punctuate international legal narratives and to how they are conceptualised in such narratives. This paper critically examines how events are conceptualised in international legal scholarship, challenging the conventional treatment of events as short-term markers of historical shifts. It argues that traditional accounts often reduce events to isolated milestones-such as treaties, court rulings, or resolutions-that seemingly demarcate progress in a linear narrative. The article further explores how even critical histories, while challenging linearity, often inadvertently reproduce reductive temporalities by treating events as convenient entry points for broader structural analyses. By contrast, the paper suggests that events should be seen as complex, polymorphous constructs, shaped by a network of discourses, power relations, and practices that unfold and possibly overlap over time. This conceptualisation allows for a more textured understanding of international legal history, one that embraces both long-term continuities and short-term ruptures without relying on simplistic temporal frameworks. Ultimately, the paper advocates for a historiographical approach that recognises events as dynamic phenomena with their own internal complexity, offering a more generative and disorderly account of international law's evolution.

Keywords: international law history, events, temporality, constructivism, historiography, critical legal theory