Theorising the Turn to History in International Law

This chapter focuses on the question of what was required for the productive representation of the past of international law as ‘history’ to become a meaningful activity, given the need for historical discourse and practice to be organized in temporal terms, and its past ‘found’ or ‘uncovered’. This historical consciousness fundamentally reshaped the conceptualization of what would become known as ‘international law’, and placed at centre-stage the problem of the historical method. Furthermore, not only did the emergence of this historical consciousness have specifiable theoretical and practical dimensions, it would become, as Foucault puts it, a ‘privileged and dangerous’ site, both providing theoretical sustenance to the discipline, and a space for critical engagement