Mitchell on The Narrative Fragmentation of International Legal History

Ryan Mitchell, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law, has published The Narrative Fragmentation of International Legal History at 27 Journal of the History of International Law 57 (2025). Here is the abstract.

The historiography of international law is highly pluralistic and resistant to unifying master narratives. This pluralism is reflected in diverging authorial strategies. To categorize such strategies, this article borrows Hayden White's typology of 'emplotments', or narrative logics, as a useful method of classification. As the article shows, leading accounts of international law's history have often involved conflicting forms of subjective identification with protagonists and forces. This article also suggests that the turn from a relatively homogeneous understanding of international legal history to one characterized by inescapable fragmentation can be dated to the geopolitical, ideological, and cultural transitions of the 1950s-60s. Entrenched ideological conflict and decolonization resulted in a stubbornly diverse historiography that remains the essential condition of the field today. For modern historians of international law, it is crucial to recognize this narrative fragmentation as well as the resulting choices it imposes upon authors making sense of the past.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.