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Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen and the (In)ability to Speak International Law

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International Law's Collected Stories

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in International Relations ((PSIR))

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Abstract

Approaching international law through Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, this chapter investigates forms of exclusion from international law. Moving beyond a romantic understanding of international law, we build on the intricate power relations in Jane Austen’s work, which show how deeply linked the question of agency is to assumptions about the subjectivities of speakers and the wider plot. This illustrates why it matters how the story of international law is told, who appears as the main characters and how their agency is cast. Pride and Prejudice thus serves as a lens for us to reflect on exclusions in international law and to recover the story of international law beyond a romanticised drawing room imagery.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Penguin: London, 1994, first pub. 1813), p. 276.

  2. 2.

    Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 80; G. E. Boulukos, “The Politics of Silence: Mansfield Park and the Amelioration of Slavery,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 39, no. 3 (June 1, 2006): 361–83.

  3. 3.

    Susan Fraiman, “Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 4 (1995): 809.

  4. 4.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 254.

  5. 5.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 238.

  6. 6.

    Antony Anghie, “Finding the Peripheries: Sovereignty and Colonialism in Nineteenth-Century International Law,” Harv. Int’l. LJ 40 (1999): 3.

  7. 7.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 190.

  8. 8.

    John M. Hobson, “Is Critical Theory Always for the White West and for Western Imperialism? Beyond Westphilian towards a Post-Racist Critical IR,” Review of International Studies 33, no. S1 (April 2007): 91–116, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210507007413; Anghie, “Finding the Peripheries,” 6.

  9. 9.

    Rae Langton, “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1993, 315; see also Xavier Guillaume, “How to Do Things with Silence: Rethinking the Centrality of Speech to the Securitization Framework,” Security Dialogue, 2018, 1–17.

  10. 10.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 86.

  11. 11.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 86.

  12. 12.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 86.

  13. 13.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, pp. 87–88.

  14. 14.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 88

  15. 15.

    Anghie, “Finding the Peripheries”.

  16. 16.

    I. C. MacGibbon, “Scope of Acquiescence in International Law, The,” British Year Book of International Law 31 (1954): 143.

  17. 17.

    Tatiana Waisberg, “The Colombia–Ecuador Armed Crisis of March 2008: The Practice of Targeted Killing and Incursions against Non-State Actors Harbored at Terrorist Safe Havens in a Third Party State,” Studies In Conflict & Terrorism 32, no. 6 (2009): 478.

  18. 18.

    Organization of American States, “CP/RES. 930 (1632/08) Convocation of the Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Appointment of a Commission,” 2008, https://www.oas.org/council/resolutions/res930.asp.

  19. 19.

    Theresa Reinold, “State Weakness, Irregular Warfare, and the Right to Self-Defense Post-9/11,” The American Journal of International Law 105, no. 2 (April 1, 2011): 274, https://doi.org/10.5305/amerjintelaw.105.2.0244.

  20. 20.

    Kenneth Anderson, “Targeted Killing in U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy and Law,” SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, May 11, 2009), 20, http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1415070.

  21. 21.

    see for further discussion Elisabeth Schweiger, “Listen Closely: What Silence Can Tell Us about Legal Knowledge Production,” London Review of International Law 6, no. 3 (2018): 391–411.

  22. 22.

    J. Patrick Kelly, “The Twilight of Customary International Law,” Va. J. Int’l L. 40 (1999): 472; B. S. Chimni, “Customary International Law: A Third World Perspective,” American Journal of International Law 112, no. 1 (January 2018): 1–46, https://doi.org/10.1017/ajil.2018.12.

  23. 23.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 5.

  24. 24.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 5.

  25. 25.

    Kennan Ferguson, “Silence: A Politics,” Contemporary Political Theory 2, no. 1 (March 2003): 52; J. Maggio, “‘Can the Subaltern Be Heard?’: Political Theory, Translation, Representation, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 32, no. 4 (October 2007): 419–43; Anne Orford, “Feminism, Imperialism and the Mission of International Law,” Nordic Journal of International Law 71, no. 2 (2002): 275–296; Sophia Dingli, “We Need to Talk about Silence: Re-Examining Silence in International Relations Theory,” European Journal of International Relations 21, no. 4 (2015): 1354066114568033.

  26. 26.

    Cynthia H. Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 23; see also Orford, “Feminism, Imperialism and the Mission of International Law,” 279.

  27. 27.

    Lynn Janet Thiesmeyer, Discourse and Silencing. Representation and the Language of Displacement, 2003.

  28. 28.

    Dingli, “We Need to Talk about Silence”; Anghie, “Finding the Peripheries”.

  29. 29.

    Lisa Block De Behar, A Rhetoric of Silence and Other Selected Writings, vol. 122 (Walter de Gruyter, 1995).

  30. 30.

    Jean D’Aspremont, “Wording in International Law,” Leiden Journal of International Law 25, no. 3 (September 2012): 582.

  31. 31.

    K. Wolfke, “Some Persistent Controversies Regarding Customary International Law,” Netherlands Yearbook of International Law 24 (December 1993): 9.

  32. 32.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 17.

  33. 33.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 17.

  34. 34.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 35.

  35. 35.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 136.

  36. 36.

    Hilary Charlesworth, “International Law: A Discipline of Crisis,” Modern Law Review 65, no. 3 (May 2002): 377–92; Olivier Corten, “The Controversies over the Customary Prohibition on the Use of Force: A Methodological Debate,” European Journal of International Law 16, no. 5 (2005): 803–822.

  37. 37.

    Corten, “The Controversies over the Customary Prohibition on the Use of Force,” 811; see for a similar argument Christine Gray, International Law and the Use of Force, 2008, 117.

  38. 38.

    See, for example, Avery Plaw and Joao Franco Reis, “The Contemporary Practice of Self-Defense: Evolving Toward the Use of Preemptive or Preventive Force?,” in Preventive Force: Drones, Targeted Killing, and the Transformation of Contemporary Warfare, ed. Kerstin Fisk and Jennifer M. Ramos, 2016.

  39. 39.

    ICCT, “Towards a European Position on the Use of Armed Drones; International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, The Hague,” 2016; Nathalie Van Raemdonck, Vested Interest Or Moral Indecisiveness?: Explaining the EU’s Silence on the US Targeted Killing Policy in Pakistan (Istituto affari internazionali, 2012); Anthony Dworkin, “Drones and Targeted Killing: Defining a European Position,” 2013.

  40. 40.

    Xavier Guillaume and Elisabeth Schweiger, “Silence as Doing,” in Political Silence: Meanings, Functions and Ambiguity, ed. Sophia Dingli and Thomas Cooke, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2018); Margaret E. Montoya, “Silence and Silencing: Their Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces in Legal Communication, Pedagogy and Discourse,” U. Mich. JL Reform 33 (1999): 263.

  41. 41.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 272.

  42. 42.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 272.

  43. 43.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 273.

  44. 44.

    Ferguson, “Silence,” 56.

  45. 45.

    Steven E. Clayman “Answers and Evasions,” Language in Society 30, no. 3 (September 1, 2001): 422.

  46. 46.

    UN Doc S/PV.2674, “United Nations Security Council Debate (2674th Meeting),” 1986, 4.

  47. 47.

    Pierre Bourdieu, “Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field,” Hastings LJ 38 (1986): 835.

  48. 48.

    Martti Koskenniemi, “The Silence of Law,” in International Law, the International Court of Justice and Nuclear Weapons (Cambridge: Boisson de Chazournes and Sands, 1999), 496.

  49. 49.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, pp. 168, 179.

  50. 50.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 79.

  51. 51.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 273.

  52. 52.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 274.

  53. 53.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 276.

  54. 54.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 276.

  55. 55.

    Austen, Pride and Prejudice, p. 276.

  56. 56.

    Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1931, first pub., 1929), p. 111.

  57. 57.

    Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 111.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. York University, York, UK

    Elisabeth Schweiger

  2. University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Aoife O’Leary McNeice

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  1. Elisabeth Schweiger
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  2. Aoife O’Leary McNeice
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Correspondence to Elisabeth Schweiger .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. T.M.C. Asser Instituut / University of Amsterdam, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Sofia Stolk

  2. VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Renske Vos

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Schweiger, E., O’Leary McNeice, A. (2020). Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen and the (In)ability to Speak International Law. In: Stolk, S., Vos, R. (eds) International Law's Collected Stories. Palgrave Studies in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58835-9_2

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