“International Law is what international lawyers make of it”.  Thus ends the new epilogue to the second edition of Martti Koskenniemi’s From Apology to Utopia (hereinafter FATU), a seminal work on international law, originally published in 1989 and now republished in 2005.  Shortly thereafter, he also notes the inherent situatedness of all international legal practice, citing Outi Korhonen, which has a decisive influence on how international lawyers practice their trade, whether they are formalists, antiformalists, positivists, pragmatists or naturalists.  Finally, Koskenniemi notes that the main political point of FATU is an empirical one, that the system of international law has a structural bias, wherein it favors some outcomes or distributive choices over others, especially showing a bias against the South or the Third World.

These three observations give a good sense of Koskenniemi’s approach to international law, which has, I would argue, transformed significantly between 1989 when the first edition was published and 2005 when the second edition has been published.  I would also suggest that these statements reveal the limits of his approach to international law in FATU but which he has since tried to address in his subsequent work.  But before engaging in this task, I would like to offer some meditations on the encounter between FATU and my own work, which needs to be seen in the context of my cultural identity, historical experience and intellectual training.  Coming from a largely Anglo-Saxon tradition of legal culture, but with a dramatically complex cultural repertoire and a strong tradition of anti-colonialism in India, FATU did not initially register on my critical compass.  It was too European, too abstracted from real world politics or questions of justice and too weak in its vision of what needs to be changed in international law.  Many of its central arguments, such as the critique of indeterminacy, struck me as being interesting but largely inconsequential to the subaltern condition with which I was intensely familiar.  I found...