![]()
1
Backstage practices of transnational law
Lianne J.M. Boer and Sofia Stolk
This book starts with a story.
In September 2015 the annual European International Studies Associationās conference took place in Giardini Naxos, Sicily, in one of those large hotels eminently suited to conferencing.1 The programme unfolded as usual. There were panels, keynotes and papers, but also plenty of social events and evenings dining out with colleagues from all over who slowly but surely were turning into friends. Next to the larger rooms hosting the plenaries, hotel staff had turned several of the suites into conference rooms: the standard furniture ā bed, desk, chairs and nightstands ā had been taken out and replaced by six or seven rows of seats for the audience and a larger table at the front of the room behind which the panel members could take place. As we attended the conference, these suites-cum-panel rooms came to represent the meeting point of the normal and the absurd of conferencing: the discussion of our latest ideas and papers, in a hotel suite with an ocean view.
This is not the only example of a conferencing practice which is simultaneously peculiar as well as completely normal. The same people attend the same panels with the same presenters, who, on the next round of panels, switch from speaker to audience member. Attendance at most panels is fairly low: a crowd of 15 is a good one. Moreover, and more curious still, this doesnāt just happen once: it happens in parallel fashion, throughout the entire conference. For three or four days, the same people are in the same rooms listening and talking to the same people, with hardly any mix in participation from one stream to the other; and this runs in parallel about eight times (or, in case of the International Studies Association, 86).2 And, next year, the same thing will happen again. We go to conferences, anticipating to meet our friends and friendly colleagues; we know who will be there, and make our way over to a big event to do the same thing over and over again. This has brought some to a by now familiar critique of conferencing: one that takes aim at the inefficiency of the panel format for the actual exchange of ideas, and questions whether public money should be spend on events such as these.3 Yet, the average conference goer will, in turn, point out that the exchange of ideas is only half the story; that one should not underestimate the importance of attending these conferences for developing and maintaining oneās network ā which has turned into a crucial skill, if one is to survive in academia at all.
This book deals with the practices, habits and routines that make up the lives of those involved in the field of transnational law. We go to conferences and at the beginning of our careers we take up internships with large law firms; we write journal articles and chapters for edited volumes and we make our way over to meetings in Brussels to interview EU officials. All of this matters to what the transnational field looks like: it matters to whom we meet, who we talk to and to what we write when we sit down behind our computers. Yet, in and of themselves these ādoingsā seem too trivial to be subjected to academic scrutiny. These are our travels, our walks, our networking opportunities: in doing them we are on our way to something else, either literally or metaphorically. So why bother?
Legal scholarship for the large part focuses on treaty-making, judicial decisions, the practice of states: it is concerned with what happens on the surface of transnational law. This makes sense: when we look at the transnational field, after all, these are the things we encounter first. But what happens on this stage of the transnational is facilitated, surrounded and supported by a plethora of backstage activities. What we see at first glance doesnāt tell us how the field comes to look the way it does; it doesnāt tell us what happens behind the scenes to make this play possible in the first place.
This book speaks to precisely that: to the backstage of transnational legal practice. We aim to shed light on what happens before the curtain rises, or after it falls, on the frontstage of what it is we do and study as legal scholars and practitioners. These doings are not usually part of the conversation when we consider what the field at large looks like; what kind of knowledge or output is produced within the discipline and how this comes about exactly. Here, however, we consider that which is crucial to what happens on the frontstage, but which is never, in and of itself, in the spotlight. For example, our contributors analyse the personal branding of legal academics, the Twitter account of the International Criminal Court, and the moot court exercises prospective lawyers engage in.4 These activities operate on the backstage of their respective frontstages: academic knowledge production, a courtroom in The Hague and a future lawyerās attempt to persuade a judge or jury. These backstage doings are so engrained in our daily lives, so much part of the everyday, that precisely ābecause of thatā5 we fail to notice them as worthy of study in their own right. Yet it is their obviousness that merits close observation.
Therefore, this edited volume started with an invitation to our contributors to come up with a backstage practice that they themselves were involved in and/or curious about: the starting point was a sense of wonder at a very concrete ādoingā in the transnational field. The word ābackstageā was meant to serve as a trigger or facilitator to open up the scope of inquiry to that which annoyed, fascinated, or disconcerted them, personally, but which basically had escaped the attention of scholarship so far. What this means for this edited volume, first, is that we propose a new way of looking.6 To write in this way is to be personally invested or involved in that which is opened up for exploration. The aim here is not to scrutinize the doings of others; rather, we purport to scrutinize our own. Each chapter thus opens with a description of that which is close to home, or at the very least, that which others working in this field may recognize as their own practice or part of a āmundaneā routine.7 In this way this book presents a series of stories which havenāt been told before in scholarly writing but which can be recognized immediately by those working in the transnational field; mostly as academics, but also as practitioners of law.
In other words: what do we see, when we look at the backstage, what does it look like?8 By these means we may make the familiar, unfamiliar. Each and every contributor seeks to bring to our attention something which we hadnāt thought of before as being part of and relevant to the makeup of our field: be it airplane travel, visa restrictions for academics, or (a side event of ) the Assembly of States Parties to the International Criminal Court.9 In doing so, each contributor manages to turn the mundane into the not-so-obvious: first, by making it the topic of their chapter and thereby taking it out of obscurity, and second, by pointing out how it matters to transnational legal practice; how it represents or carries in itself something reflecting the field at large. In this way they show what our habits and routines do and how they matter to the field.
This means that this edited volume is also more than a collection of stories. The contributors to this volume show the kind of scholarship this new way of looking entails: it cannot be achieved solely with the tools and language provided by legal scholarship. The contributors to this volume had to turn to critical geography and theatre studies (to name a few) to be able to comprehend what it was they were looking at ā how these ādoingsā could be understood, drawing on other disciplines. As it turns out ā and as we ourselves found out, as the chapters started to come in ā there is such a thing as ānew walking studiesā and somebody once wrote a book on āthe history of rehearsing in European theatreā.10 We mention this to stress what is required in order for us to understand our own field in a more profound way. At heart, this edited volume is a plea for curiosity and wonderment, both at what we consider worthy of our research as academics and how we do so.
In so doing we position ourselves in an emerging and ongoing conversation about the makeup of the field of transnational law and the lines along which legal scholarship may proceed.11 Recently, scholars have turned the lens on their own discipline to consider what it is they themselves are doing in terms of academic knowledge production ā by focusing, for example, on the function of indicators and rankings ā or by turning the normal into something which suddenly gains relevance, as is done in the recently published book on International Lawās Objects.12 The affinity between these works and the current edited volume lies in what they look at and how they do so. Rather than presenting configurations of āthe world out thereā13 we are dealing with what it is we ourselves, as academics and practitioners do on a daily basis. In the words of Fleur Johns, our concern is with the āmundaneā, that which ādaily animatesā our work as scholars and/or lawyers.14
The chapters in this volume demonstrate at least three different ways of thinking about the backstage. First, they describe backstage practices that constantly move from the meaningful to the mundane and back. A handshake is an almost mechanical gesture, but when the International Criminal Court (ICC) tweets a picture of the Chief Prosecutor shaking hands with the head of the UN Mission in Libya, accompanied by #endimpunity, it suddenly conveys a statement about legitimacy and accountability.15 In short, something happening on the backstage may turn out to be worth looking at, if only we take the trouble of looking a little closer. But by extension, a consideration of the āmundaneā also potentially exposes the occasional banality of the field. To have hashtags such as #endslavery and #genocide accompany āthe photos and videos [the ICCās Twitter page] sharesā, is to ā[load] these images with a weight, of promise and expectation, they cannot bear.ā16 Here, something as mundane as a tweet turns into a very banal way of propagating the project of international criminal law.
Secondly, every backstage has its own backstage. What happens at a conference panel is preceded by the conference organization; what happens at a moot court session is preceded by in-class preparation, which is preceded by preparations of the moot court instructor. And so on. We cannot therefore always clearly distinguish between the front- and backstage. For example, the building of an international institution ā say, of the European Commission ā is a very visible and therefore potentially very frontstage quality of an international practice.17 Alternatively, the building (as an office space) could also figure as the backstage where āthe actual workā is done; in this case, the frontstage may not be the building itself but what comes out of it. As phrased by Sarah-Jane Koulen in her chapter, this raises the question what āthe real workā of transnational legal practice is. At what point do we feel we are engaged in the ācore businessā of our respective professions, and how do we know?18
Finally, the term ābackstageā therefore triggers our thinking about its related āfrontstageā: a practice might be relevant to study because it facilitates that which happens on the frontstage. A moot court is in many ways different from actual international litigation, but it reveals a great deal about the norms and values that are held within the discipline of international law. As such it might provide opportunities to alter the way in which international law is taught and understood, for example by exploring the disruptive potential of litigation.19 Ultimately, this points at the rationale of this volume: to scrutinize how what we do is facilitated, surrounded, made possible by something else ā and in so doing, to open up the possibility for reflection on and critique of transnational legal practice. We will return to this in the last section of this introduction.
Reading this book
When you are allowed to āgo backstageā there are many different ways in which you can encounter the space you enter. You can walk around and visit the areas with otherwise limited access; you can talk to the performers when they are already in their costume but not performing just yet; watch them do their warming-up exercises, touch the technical equipment that creates the magical lighting, and see how rough the pieces of set-dressing look in close up. Depending on the doors you open, the people you talk to, and your own preconceptions, interests, baggage and focus, a backstage visit will be experienced differently by different people.
Equally so, there are different ways to navigate this book. You can skim-read one chapter with an interesting topic or an author that you like; you can read the whole book in one go; or you can just randomly pick and choose. For the remainder of this chapter, we will take up the role of editorial tour guide to give some clues on possible directions and connections. In that capacity, we would like to suggest four routes through which you can explore the backstage of transnational law as presented in this volume. The chapters within these routes share a way of looking, a theoretical starting point, a methodology, or a sensibility towards a certain subject. All chapters can be read in multiple ways, and are part of different routes. We would like to invite you to simply walk around on the back- and frontstages...
