Violence and the international world.

AuthorHalewood, Peter
PositionConceptualizing Violence: Present and Future Developments in International Law

The language of international law is changing. Violence against persons and force among nation states are, of course, endemic to domestic societies and to the international order, but international law has begun to reflect and promote a novel concern for the status of individuals in law, and for their right to bodily integrity and dignity free from violence. The classical international law prohibition on the use of state force is being analogized and extended to other forms of violence ordinarily thought to be matters of domestic law. Violence in this sense is a new subject for international law and is, in part, our 1subject in this Symposium. The Symposium's other subject is the violence of international law itself--the specific harms which international law either itself causes or in which it acquiesces.(1)

Robert Cover claimed that the language of law and of legal interpretation carries within it real violence against law's subjects.(2) The normativity (and to some extent the legitimacy) of the law, Cover argued, lies in its ability to coerce a defendant's compliance with judicial pronouncement, by actual violence when necessary and always by implication.

Legal interpretive acts signal and occasion the imposition of violence

upon others: A judge articulates her understanding of a text, and as a

result, somebody loses his freedom, his property, his children, even

his life.... When interpreters have finished their work, they frequently

leave behind victims whose lives have been torn apart by these

organized, social practices of violence. Neither legal interpretation

nor the violence it occasions may be properly understood apart from

one another.(3)

The defendant's acquiescence to his "official" role as defendant, and his apparent recognition of the legitimacy of the theater of his own trial, at least in the form of his physical presence in the courtroom, is not, Cover said, the product of his principled acceptance of the legitimacy of the law.(4) Rather, it is the result of his calculation that resistance is futile, escape impossible and that violence, perhaps even death, would follow any direct challenge to or rejection of the validity of the proceedings or of the law itself.(5)

This understanding of legal normativity evolves from the work of Michel Foucault, who found in the history of criminal courts and prisons a set of normalizing practices aimed at disciplining, surveilling and ultimately reconstituting the individual, the body, the human subject of the law.(6) Foucault pioneered the notion that the medical and social scientific discourses accompanying early modern judicial and penal practices (for example, psychiatry; psychopharmacology; abnormal, forensic and social psychology) were themselves practices ("discursive practices") exerting a productive or constitutive form of power over the subjects of their inquiries in an attempt to rehabilitate them.(7) To conceptualize law and power as productive and constitutive of subjects and persons, rather than destructive of them, was a novel idea. The latter had been the conventional view of power as an exercise of sovereignty, most often taking the form of coercion or elimination of enemies. Foucault pointed out that in earlier periods the prescriptive and punitive was, quite literally in some cases, inscribed upon the bodies of the condemned, as in the case of "Damiens the regicide,"(8) condemned on March 2, 1757 to be taken

to the Place de Greve, where, on a scaffold that will be erected

there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves

with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he

committed the said...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT