Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law: Series Number 137: The Process of International Legal Reproduction : Inequality, Historiography, Resistance

That all states are free and equal under international law is axiomatic to the discipline. Yet even a brief look at the dynamics of the international order calls that axiom into question. Mobilising fresh archival research and drawing on a tradition of unorthodox Marxist and anti-colonial scholarship, Rose Parfitt develops a new 'modular' legal historiography to make sense of the paradoxical relationship between sovereign equality and inequality. Juxtaposing a series of seemingly unrelated histories against one another, including a radical re-examination of the canonical story of Fascist Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, Parfitt exposes the conditional nature of the process through which international law creates and disciplines new states and their subjects. The result is a powerful critique of international law's role in establishing and perpetuating inequalities of wealth, power and pleasure, accompanied by a call to attend more closely to the strategies of resistance that are generated in that process.

Stand: conditionality and sovereign inequality; Frame: history as shadow-box and the process if international legal reproduction; 1. The 'Abyssinia Crisis' and international law; 2. State colony, individual: the Longue Duree of international legal reproduction; 3. International legal reproduction and the League of Nations; 4. Empire des Negres Blancs: the emergence of the Ethiopian empire as a subject of international law; 5. Interpellation and resistance: Ethiopia and the allure of the League; 6. Reconnecting the crisis; Lid: discipline, resistance and the process of international legal reproduction today; Sources.