Social Movements and Rethinking Utopia in International Law

Walther Schücking Institute for International Law · University of Kiel, Germany

Paper presented after receiving the institute's scholarship — an early articulation of the utopian register inside international law's own grammar.

This was the first time the argument went on a board in front of an audience that didn't share its language. Kiel — the Walther Schücking Institute — is one of those rooms where the European tradition of international law is taken very seriously. Bringing in social movements, and using the word utopia without irony, was not what people were expecting.

The paper's claim, roughly: the utopian register isn't a deviation from international law's grammar — it is one of its oldest dialects. The institutions of the post-war order were built around the not-yet. Movements that argue for an unfinished international law are not romantics; they are reading the text carefully.

I left Kiel with the conviction that the argument needed more historical weight. Three years later it became the Heidelberg paper. Six years later it became the dissertation. The work is mad'ouk.