The Scandal of Enlightenment and The Birth of Disciplines: Is International Law a Science?

Prabhakar Singh, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain

Abstract

Today’s mainstream international law scholarship (MILS) is concerned, primarily, with the issue of its scientificity. This brings us to larger epistemological questions of West sponsored linear modernity, Southern narrative of circular progress, role of colonisation and rejection of pre-science. International Law is not a self-contained regime as it draws insights from all the other disciplines that were born after the European project of enlightenment. This paper makes a psychological investigation using Nandy’s psycho-political framework and Foucault’s logics under the Third World’s Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). It also sees, as a case in point, the invasion of modernity via late scientific capitalism into tribal life as an apology for third disenchantment. International Law’s evolutionary scientificity, therefore, has been examined through psychology, history and semiotics.