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CIAO DATE: 1/5/2007
Beyond Power Politics: International Law and Human Rights Discourse in the Post-9/11 World
J. Peter Pham
November 2006
Abstract
In the early 1970s, legal scholars1 began reexamining the dominant legal paradigms within Western polities with a skeptical view of their underlying doctrines and arguments. While the critique was radical in the context of its time, the critical legal movement itself, both inside and outside academia, has largely become somewhat passé as its valid insights have either been absorbed into mainstream juridical scholarship or largely superseded by newer fields of legal inquiry that it had nurtured, including feminist jurisprudence, critical race theory, and postmodern scholarship.2 More recently, some of the intellectual heirs of what is essentially a contemporary revival of legal realism have delved deeper into their hermeneutical approach, venturing to expand their critique to encompass the power relations embedded within the narratives and discourses of global human rights and within the very foundations of international law itself.
