Afterword: Martti Koskenniemi and His Critics

• Iurlaro, Francesca 1

Abstract

In this article I address the question of what Martti Koskenniemi refers to in his EJIL Foreword as Hugo Grotius’ legal imagination – the type of values he was trying to convey and the strategies he meant to pursue while constructing his idea of an international legal order. As a matter of fact, focusing on such an apparently narrow aspect is not just relevant to those with a historical interest in Grotius. It also tells us something about the inveterate relationship between international law and historiographic practices. What I want to suggest here is that the history of international law is not just an a posteriori critical reflection on the international legal order – a subgenre for lovers of intellectual escapism in search of a distraction from the many problems of the contemporary world – but, rather, that one of the many successful projects of international law was (and still is) the ambition to order the world through histories.

• 1Global Postdoctoral Fellow, New York University (NYU) School of Law, USA