The Narrative Fragmentation of International Legal History

Abstract The historiography of international law is highly pluralistic and resistant to unifying master narratives. This pluralism is reflected in diverging authorial strategies. To categorise such strategies, this article borrows Hayden White’s typology of ‘emplotments’, or narrative logics, as a useful method of classification. As the article shows, leading accounts of international law’s history have often involved conflicting forms of subjective identification with protagonists and forces. This article also suggests that the turn from a relatively homogenous understanding of international legal history to one characterised by inescapable fragmentation can be dated to the geopolitical, ideological, and cultural transitions of the 1950s-60s. Entrenched ideological conflict and decolonization resulted in a stubbornly diverse historiography that remains the essential condition of the field today. For modern historians of international law, it is crucial to recognise this narrative fragmentation as well as the resulting choices it imposes upon authors making sense of the past.