Robert Louis Stevenson and the White Mythologies of International Law - Christopher Gevers

Robert Louis Stevenson and the White Mythologies of International Law

Christopher Gevers, Lecturer at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal School of Law

 

About the seminar

In the mid 1870s Robert Louis Stevenson completed a handwritten draft of his would-be first novel, which told ‘the most absurd story of a lot of young Cambridge fellows who are going to found a new society’ by colonising the Navigator Islands in the South Seas. These ‘Cambridge fellows’ decide that in order to ‘break with old traditions’ they require a new ‘conscience’, specifically an ‘international’ one. Around the same time, the story that was too absurd for Stevenson to publish as fiction became the basis for the ‘re-invention’ of International Law by a group of white men who established the Institut de Droit Internationale (led, in part, by an actual ‘Cambridge fellow’: John Westlake). These ‘Men of 1873’ – as Martti Koskenniemi affectionately calls them – inaugurated a ‘modern’ international law through their own new ‘international’ conscience, and constituted a new society as well: the ‘international society of the white race’ (as Westlake called it).

 

Through mapping the concatenations of the 19th century worldmaking projects of Stevenson and the ‘Men of 1873’, this talk will illustrate how they fabricated a ‘White International’ – an imaginary that was racial, historical and geographical – that became the International order in the 20th century. It will argue that the White Mythologies that constituted that imaginary outlived formal decolonisation and continue to structure the worlds and worldmaking practices of international law today.

About the speaker

Christopher Gevers is a Lecturer at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal School of Law. Christopher teaches international law, Jurisprudence/legal theory and Foundations of Law in the School of Law. His research focusses on Pan-Africanism, International law & ‘decolonisation’, Third World Approaches to International Law, Critical Race Theory, and Law & Literature. Since 2015 he has been a faculty member of the Institute for Global Law & Policy at Harvard Law School, and has held visiting Fellowships at the University of Oxford and Harvard Law School. At present he is co-convening an interdisciplinary project on ‘Literature & International Law At the Edge’, with Prof. Joseph R. Slaughter (Columbia University), Prof. Vasuki Nesiah (New York University) and Prof. Gerry Simpson (London School of Economics & Political Science). His more recent publications appear in the Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law (2020), the London Review of International Law and Alternation. 

 

In association with the Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law, and the Reversing the Gaze project at Edinburgh Law School

 

This event will take place in Teaching Room 07, Edinburgh Law School, Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh, EH8 9YL

To attend this event virtually please register on ZOOM - HERE