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The Crisis of Modernity and the Turn to Time in International Law

When: Monday, June 16, 2025, 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Where: Online or in-person at Room 313, Third Floor, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London Mile End Road London E1 4NS

David M Scott (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Law, Queen Mary) will present their Fellowship research on 'The Turn to Time in International Law' with Ruth Fletcher (Professor, School of Law, Queen Mary) and Tanzil Chowdhury (Senior Lecturer, School of Law, Queen Mary) as discussants.

Abstract

International law has long been sustained by an orientation of progress. Yet around the turn of the twenty-first century, the discipline appears to have lost its certainty in itself. All of a sudden, it had to turn to history to understand how the past held back the present; or rethink the present in terms of the ‘Anthropocene’ and environmental collapse; or imagine radical and fundamental transformations of the discipline into a new and ‘global’ future. Few scholars within these fields, however, have reflected on why the twenty-first century has prompted this need to reposition the discipline within time.

In this paper, I aim to situate international law’s ‘turn to time’ within a broader crisis of modern time that historians, cultural theorists, and anthropologists have identified over the past half century. Drawing on the work of Reinhart Koselleck and subsequent writers who have utilised his theory of historical time, such as Francois Hartog, Aleida Assmann, and Fredric Jameson, I reposition the emergence of contemporary international legal history within a wider perceived crisis of modernity, wherein the past, present, and future are no longer linearly separated from one another, but instead become mixed, recombined, and re-emphasised in new ways.

Repositioning the turn to time in this way not only aims to recontextualise recent international legal thought within cross-disciplinary engagements with time and temporality, but also asks deeper questions about how international law, and legal thought more generally, registers and articulates notions of time—that is to say, what is distinct about law’s engagement with contemporary time compared to historiography, cultural theory, and other disciplines.

This event is co-organised with The Centre for International Law (CeILa) and the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context (CLSGC) at Queen Mary.

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