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67 UCLA L. Rev. 1652 (2020-2021)
"Unwhitening the World": Rethinking Race and International Law

handle is hein.journals/uclalr67 and id is 1691 raw text is: Unwhitening the World: Rethinking Race and International Law Christopher Gevers ABSTRACT International law was invented in 1789 when Jeremy Bentham introduced the term to replace the outmoded Law of Nations. Since then, international lawyers have spent a lot of time thinking about whether international law is in fact law, and little or no time considering how international law is international, or what international actually means. In this Article, I want to suggest that, with the reinvention of international law in the late nineteenth century, the term international came to incorporate elements of both the terms world and global: as an imaginary, a world international lawyers lived inside (and produced), and a global perspective they took of (and used to take from) its Others. In particular, I aim to show that this international was a racial imaginary-a White International (or White World in W.E.B. Du Bois's terms)-that emerged from and reinforced Global White Supremacy. This White World was consecrated as the de jure international order with the founding of the League of Nations after World War I, and the sociopolitical system of Global White Supremacy (or Racial Contract in Charles Mills's terms) underpinning this international survived its formal demise with decolonization. The whiteness of this international-both historically and in the present-has been rendered invisible to most international lawyers, however, in part because of the current conceptualization of race by both mainstream and critical accounts of the discipline. In order to begin to unwhiten it, Part I of this Article rereads existing historical and theoretical accounts of the discipline, arguing that aside from the racial aphasia that characterizes the mainstream, critical scholarship is prone to either overparticularize, or underhistoricize, the role that race has and continues to play. Part II of this Article then reconsiders the reinvention of international law in the late nineteenth century, arguing that it was only thinkable and possible because of the racial imaginary-the White World or the international-that its founders (that is, the Men of 1873) assumed and reproduced, one that was based on a particular biological conceptualization of race. It aims to show how, paraphrasing W.E.B. Du Bois, the Men of 1873 discovered that they were white and international, and, by that token, wonderful, at the same time. 67 UCLA L. REv. 1652(2021)

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