Questions....

Mieville makes a compelling case for thinking about international law and its relationship to imperialism when making the point that “capitalism is juridical capitalism” (260).   There are a lot of arguments happening in this text with histories (political theory versus international relations theory, for example) that I’m not well versed, which makes it difficult to find a solid entry point into this conversation beyond mere summary.

However, many things stood out for me as questions rather than as responses per se.  The statement that “without violence there could be no legal form and without imperialism there could be no international law” (293) is an assertion that I agreed with as I was reading the text, but am trying to get some critical distance to understand the implications more deeply.  He doesn’t mention Weber’s well known definition of the state: “an entity which successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence” (or I’ve read elsewhere interpreted as “legitimate use of physical force in a given territory”).  Given this definition, is Mieville interested in redefining the state?  It seems like this widely accepted definition of the state accepts that violence is inherent to it.  He does seem to gesture toward Weber on page 286 in this citation: ‘International law comprehends as actors only continuing monopolies of force’, but he quickly leaves that and goes on to criticize the interpretation of force, like in the Gulf War in the 1990s.  Is he arguing for a dismantling of the state? 

His argument from there seems to suggest that the state and the law mutually constitute one another and actually anticipate international law.   I guess I’m getting lost in the logic being employed as he separates the state from international law at certain points in the argument when talking about “imperialism as a structuring process of the modern international system” (291) in his discussion from pages 291-293.  It's like he thinks the state is structurally important to his argument, but he doesn't critique the state due to his focus on international law...but there is no international law without the state.  So, I'm just trying to get my head around what the implications are for the state in this argument.  In equating the law with capitalism, does he think that communist states would abolish the need for law?  Because then you are still left with the state issue, right?

Another basic question I have is: how is Mieville’s investment in a Marxist approach to international law rooted in class struggle in tension with a postmodern approach, which would seek to breakdown the framework?  His argument about civilization is provoking this question:  “It would be a postmodern commonplace to claim that civilization (or anything else) is defined by its ‘other’, in this case the ‘uncivilised’.  However, in this instance the crucial antithesis of ‘civilised’ was semi-civilised—those states which were neither beyond the purview of law, nor sovereign, but ‘quasi-sovereign’” (247-248).  He concludes that section by stating that “because ‘civilisation’ is not a discursive strategy for ‘othering’, but a result of the paradoxes of actually-existing sovereignty (248).  I understand that he is rooting this in a historical and specific moment and thus, he is suggesting that its specificity means that it isn’t discursive, right?  But it seems to me that the need for interpretation in some ways implicates its discursivity….?  I was left puzzling over what the advantages of a postmodern approach might be in this discussion.

Finally, this is totally random, but all I could think of at certain points when thinking about how "the law is constituted by relations of violence" (286) was how these questions relate to the issues that Judith Butler raises in "Burning Acts".