The Legal Rendering of Immiseration

This chapter introduces the reader to the ideas and arguments that animate this wide-ranging book. Whereas many works focus on violations of international law, this book is concerned with the law itself. It seeks to demonstrate how the truth about the role and effects of the law in the creation and perpetuation of misery fail adequately to inform it. From its early inception to the present day, international law has always been predicated on private property and commodification and so the social and political values that are constitutive of economies as much as property and contract have, in important ways, been forsaken. In laying the ground, this chapter distinguishes fact from fiction in the nature and scale of harms and alienations, to introduce the pluralist approach taken in this critique of international law. In that diverse traditions from liberal to radical shed light on the problems and their possible redress, it is explained in this chapter how the book engages these various traditions. In calling for a ‘predistributive’ international law, the chapter foregrounds the need to move from mere redistribution to making international law just in the first place, in a structural sense. In its coverage of what this book is and is not about, this first chapter seeks to unshackle the reader from deep-rooted assumptions that frame the debates around economic globalization and to begin the critical project of exploring how international law is both constituted by capitalism and constitutive of it and with what implications for justice reasonably understood.