Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2018
What would happen to our understanding of international law and its relationship with violence if we collapsed the distinction between our supposedly post-colonial ‘present’ and its colonial ‘past’; between the sovereign spaces of the twenty-first century global order, and the integrated, hierarchical space of fascist imperialism? I respond to this question through an investigation into the physical contours of a precise ‘imperial location’: 30°31′00″N, 18°34′00″E. These co-ordinates refer to a point on the sea-edge of the Sirtica that is occupied today by the Ra's Lanuf oil refinery, one of Libya's three most important such facilities. In the late 1930s, however, during Libya's period of fascist colonial rule, this was the point at which a state-of-the-art motorway, the Via litoranea libica, was crossed by a giant triumphal arch, the Arco dei Fileni. Through a chronotopic reading of the temporal, spatial and interpellative aspects of this point, its architecture and its history, I suggest that fascist lawyers, officials and intellectuals accepted a horrifying truth about the relationship between international law and violence – a relationship that twenty-first century doctrinal international law is loath to confront, concerning the inherently expansionist logic of the sovereign state, and the inevitably hierarchical ordering of the ‘international community’ which stems from it.
Lecturer in Law, Kent Law School / Australian Research Council Discovery (DECRA) Research Fellow, Melbourne Law School [[email protected] / [email protected]]. I would like to thank the many friends and colleagues whose comments, research assistance and encouragement contributed so much to the arguments presented here, including Noha Aboueldahab, Nesrine Badawi, Maddy Chiam, Tomaso Ferrando, Emily Grabham, Richard Joyce, Sara Kendall, Philip Kenrick, Martti Koskenniemi, John Morss, Luigi Nuzzo, Liliana Obregón, Alice Riccardi, Kerry Rittich, Lulu Weiss and, most of all, Luis Eslava. I am also extremely grateful to the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at Melbourne Law School, the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School, and the participants at the Law and Time Workshop at Kent Law School and at the Legal Theory Workshop at Melbourne Law School. The research presented here was funded by the Australian Research Council's Discovery programme, to which institution I extend my deepest thanks. The ideas and errors are all my own.
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