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INTERNATIONAL LAW AND ITS OTHERS, EDITED BY ANNE ORFORD (CAMBRIDGE, UK: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2006) 434 PAGES. PRICE AU$199.00 (HARDCOVER) ISBN 9780521859493.
International Law and its Others is a pleasure to read, and a struggle to review.1 In 're-viewing', one claims to be looking again at something earlier surveyed. And the authority to which a review essay lays claim seems to depend in part upon this unreported pre-reading - a pre-reading from which the reader of the review is always barred. A review essay also purports to recommend. In that sense, it looks forward: anticipating the reader's subsequent encounter with the reviewed text, or asking the reader to relive their prior reading of the same. Occasionally, a review will ask readers to swallow a book whole, but usually it will attempt to dismember and reassemble a book for the reader's ready consumption. Any allure of the offer of 'guidance' a review lays on this cutting board depends in part upon that clandestine pre-reading of which it boasts. Looking back while looking forward, a review essay whispers: 'I know something you may not know'.
What a review essay often claims to know is the wholeness of the book reviewed: its (partially secreted) 'meaning' and its 'proper' placement in a discipline. This is a hard claim to make at the best of times. It is a particularly difficult claim to make in this instance, when the book in question is comprised of 15 rich and challenging essays. Many of these, moreover, seem to be probing quite distinct accounts of 'international law', and quite divergent senses of its 'others'.2 The 'reciprocal stating of the law' that Costas Douzinas identifies with the institution of the demos in classical democracy, often seems to break down here.3 This book enacts no community. Readers looking for a definitive statement of a 'school of thought' should look elsewhere. Readers seeking experiences of international legal reading charged with 'a stimulating sense of danger',4 and open to the risk of being baffled, disturbed and/or captivated, would do well to open this book.
I THE ORDER AND THE ADDRESS
Anne Orford's introductory essay announces International Law and its Others as 'part of a broader movement seeking to regenerate the exchange between international law and the...