‘Opium as an Object of International Law: Doctrines of Sovereignty and Intervention’
- Publisher:
- Hart Publishing
- Publication Type:
- Chapter
- Citation:
- International Law and… Select Proceedings of the European Society of International Law, 2016, pp. 277-288
- Issue Date:
- 2016
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9781509908165.ch-016.pdf | Published version | 109.53 kB |
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The study of international law is highly text-based. Whether as practice, scholarship or pedagogy, the discipline both relies on and produces a wealth of written material. Cases, treaties and volumes of academic writing are the legal sources through which most of us working in international law relate to the subject, and at times we might feel such texts are our major project and output.
Yet international law has a rich existence in the world. International law is often developed, conveyed and authorised through objects or images. From the symbolic (the regalia of the head of state), to the mundane (a can of dolphin-safe tuna certified as complying with international trade standards), international legal authority can be found in the objects around us. Similarly, the practice of international law often relies on material objects or images, both as evidence (satellite images, bones of the victims of mass atrocities) and to establish authority (for instance, maps and charts).
Drawing on these insights, this paper seeks to investigate two questions. First, what might studying international law through objects reveal? What might objects, rather than texts, tell us about the way international law constructs notions of sovereignty, the way it authorises practices of intervention, or the way it justifies participation in the international community through rights to trade?
Second, what might this scholarly undertaking reveal about the objects—as aims or projects—of international law? How do objects reveal, or perhaps mask, these aims, and what does this tell us about the reasons some (physical or material) objects are foregrounded, and others hidden or ignored?
In this chapter, I will investigate these questions through one specific material object: opium. Opium, the drug produced from the seed pods of the opium poppy (papaver somniferum), has long been traded between states and peoples.[1] Thus it has long been a subject of states’ international relations. However, I will frame my argument around specific ‘moments’ when opium has surfaced as an object of international law in the last three centuries: first, in the Opium Wars fought between Britain and China in the 1800s, second, the United States (US)-led ‘War on Drugs’, and finally, the ‘War on Terror’. Other moments might have been selected, and these might have illustrated quite different facets of international law, but they remain to be analysed on a future occasion.[2]
Each of these moments in which opium has emerged as an object of international law has revealed tensions between the legal doctrine of sovereignty under international law, and the commitments of the international system to particular forms of trade, and to certain moral norms. In this way, international law’s relationship with opium’s production, trade and even the morality of its use reveal particular fissures and discontinuities in international law, which remain hidden in text-centred accounts.
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