ABSTRACT
Early 20th-century positivists sought to abstract and distance legal knowledge from ‘the concrete legal experience on which it was based. Traditional dogmatic scholarship has attempted to produce systematic accounts of legal rights and obligations, or of the principles to be found in any legal system. Critical scholarship about international has in turn often sought to maintain a studied distance from its object of knowledge, whether through taking the sociology of the profession or the history of the discipline as its focus, or through producing sweeping accounts of the structure, function, grammar or ideology of international law. Like any theatrical performance, much of the most important work that goes on in its staging happens in what we might conventionally overlook as merely ‘backstage’ preparations for the real event. The successful reproduction of transnational law, whether in the form of international institutions like the International Criminal Court/academic events, depends upon facilitating the participation of some groups and the dispossession/exclusion of others.
