An International Legal Theory of Reification: The Ideological Process and its Application in International Investment Law

Abstract The application of ideology as a concept has long been a feature of the Marxist analysis of law. Marxist scholars have used ideology to investigate the various ways law features as a part of capitalism’s epiphenomenal superstructure which reproduces its economic base. In the years following globalisation’s rabid expansion of capitalist social relations across time and space, this formulation of both ideology and law has grown increasingly obsolete in capturing the various ways in which concept, practice, time and power relations overlap to reproduce our material world. This paper contributes to the reformulation of ideology and (international) law by offering an international legal theory of reification. In Marx’s words, reification describes how social relations between people take on ‘the fantastic form of a relation between things.’ By formulating an international legal theory of reification, this paper theorises ideology not as a definable concept or thing, but as a process. The ideological process occurs as a dialectical relationship between the material practices of actors and their conceptualisation of these practices under the hegemonic power relations of a given time and space. Specific to the practice of international law, the ideological process reifies the exploitative social relations found in globalised capitalism. The paper provides an example of the ideological process by examining the reification of ‘development’ as it is found in the practice and conceptualisation of international investment law.