The Process of International Legal Reproduction: Inequality, Historiography, Resistance

That all states are free and equal under international law is axiomatic to the discipline. Yet even a brief look at the dynamics of the international order calls that axiom into question. Mobilising fresh archival research and drawing on a tradition of unorthodox Marxist and anti-colonial scholarship, Rose Parfitt develops a new 'modular' legal historiography to make sense of the paradoxical relationship between sovereign equality and inequality. Juxtaposing a series of seemingly unrelated histories against one another, including a radical re-examination of the canonical story of Fascist Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, Parfitt exposes the conditional nature of the process through which international law creates and disciplines new states and their subjects. The result is a powerful critique of international law's role in establishing and perpetuating inequalities of wealth, power and pleasure, accompanied by a call to attend more closely to the strategies of resistance that are generated in that process.

• Draws on radical historiographical, legal, linguistic and anti-colonial theory to create a new methodological framework that challenges some of the key assumptions underpinning the contemporary international order.
• Engages with some of the international order's most pressing concerns, from escalating civil conflict to global warming to the struggle for Indigenous self-determination on Indigenous terms.
• Mobilises a new archive of primary materials gathered in Addis Ababa, Rome, Geneva and London to explore the legal dynamics of oppression and resistance, from the Ethiopian Empire's efforts to resist fascist annexation to anticolonial struggles ongoing for more than four centuries.