The Discipline as a Field of Struggle: The Politics and the Economy of Knowledge Production in International Law - Akbar Rasulov
Location:
Virtual Event
Date/time
Thu 28 January 2021
14:00-15:30
*** Please note the change of date to the 28th of January 2021 ***
The Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law presents
The Discipline as a Field of Struggle: The Politics and the Economy of Knowledge Production in International Law
Dr Akbar Rasulov, Senior Lecturer, University of Glasgow School of Law
About the event
This essay is an inquiry into the discipline of international law taken as a social form. What is that content which is contained within and expressed by this form? What sort of social structure does it presume and what are its main defining features? Taking as its point of departure the concept of knowledge as a process of production, this essay develops a critical account of international law as a field of theoretical practices and ideological contestations. The argument it puts forward has two parts. First, the process of international law’s knowledge production is essentially a labour process. Second, the relations of production that form within the context of this labour process are characterised by a series of deep tensions and contradictions. How is international law’s theoretical labour process set up in practice? What are those basic products which it produces? What kind of added value is added to them in the course of their production? How is this value extracted and appropriated? Using Karl Mannheim’s theory of ideology, this essay seeks to explain the disciplinary politics that surrounds these and other related questions as a product of discursively sublimated inter-group conflicts. The origin of the groups in question is indigenous to the discipline’s internal social space. The object of their conflict is control over certain types of institutionally inscribed economic resources. The ultimate prize is the terms of the intra-disciplinary division of labour and the power to determine the general parameters of disciplinary imagination.
Image credit: Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash