Perimeters of possibility: legal imagination and structural indeterminacy in international legal thought

Ntina Tzouvala’s book Capitalism as Civilisation offers a critical analysis of the ‘standard of civilisation’ in international law. By combining historically situated Marxist analysis with structural linguistics the book makes a powerful contribution to the landscape of legal theory. This essay engages with Tzouvala’s methodological intervention and her proposition of a materialist theory of international law. While concurring with Tzouvala’s starting point that ‘critiquing law while avoiding its reification is one of the biggest challenges for materialist legal theory’, the essay questions Tzouvala’s insistence on linguistic structuralism as yet another form of reification through dialectic predetermination. It is this assumed predetermination, as a habit of thought of dialectical thinking, that makes it difficult to relate affirmatively to progressive practices in international law. To develop an alternative understanding of international legal practice that defies the perimeters of possibility of linguistic structuralism, this essay draws on scholarship loosely related to new materialism.