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The 'New' International Law

Name: The 'New' International Law
Brand: Routledge
SKU: 9781138656475
Price: 1324.05 HKD
Availability: InStock
Author: Richard Joyce
ISBN: 9781138656475

By Richard Joyce

Routledge January 2026

Specifications

ISBN-13: 9781138656475
Publisher: Routledge
Publication: January 2026
Format: Hardback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Countri(es) for reference only

Details

This book analyses the tendency in international law scholarship and criticism to seek a ‘new’ international law. Drawing and building on scholarship around the political significance of theological ideas, it argues that underlying this tendency is a relationship between international law and messianic thinking. Demonstrating that messianism has been, and continues to be, a telling quality of much international legal thought, the book also traces its broader implications; particularly with regard to the use of violence and the perpetuation of global inequalities. The temptation to project onto international law the hoped-for realisation of a new world obscures both the failures of international law and a proper appreciation what it can achieve. As such, international law, it is argued, must be radically reconceived if it is to avoid the traps of determinism and the false universalism inherent within the dominant form of messianism in international law.

Introduction

Part 1: Apocalyptic Messianism

Chapter 1: Columbus: the New World and the Apocalypse

Chapter 2: Hobbes, Milton and the eschatology of sovereignty

Chapter 3: A new politics of the apocalypse?

Part 2: Utopic Messianism

Chapter 4: Kant and the universal history of international law

Chapter 5: Calling for the ‘new’: International law’s discipline of progression

Chapter 6: The limits of progressive universalism

Part 3: Benjamin and the weak messianic power of international law

Chapter 7: The power of the ‘weak’ messiah

Chapter 8: Fighting the phantasm of the Universal