The Time of Revolution: Decolonisation, Heterodox International Legal Historiography and the Problem of the Contemporary

In focusing upon the pervasive theme of temporality that marks RP Anand’s seminal New States and International Law (1972) it is argued that one of his central pre-occupations was a concern for what it meant for the peoples of the Third World to live contemporaneously with those in the North. Noting the significance of a universal temporal calculus (clock time) for processes of both nation-building and global capitalism it is suggested that the temporal disjunctions that appeared to structure Anand’s account of ‘contemporary’ international law was to foreground the limits of both. For just as each depended upon putting into operation a temporal technology – engendering a ‘fictional presentness’ by the measuring of life against the clock – so also did that technology both reveal the asymmetrical conditions of life in the world, and the scale of the challenge placed before the world by the utopia of ‘presentness’