Reframing the “Universality” of International Law in a Globalizing World
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this essay, I highlight the historical use of notions of universality and objectivity in international law to advance First World economic interests, primarily through the codification of conditions that sustain ongoing Third World dispossession. I argue that these interests have taken on a transnational character and are being pursued through an elaborate network of meta-regulatory regimes beneficial to an emergent transnational capitalist class. These regimes are used to diffuse neoliberal economic reform on a global scale, resulting in the embedding of various neoliberal precepts both in legal machinery and in social meaning. Finally, I suggest that while instances of resistance are observable, critical international legal jurists appear ambivalent in their efforts at crafting proposals for reform of the global legal order. While some champion a type of global legal pluralism that would recognize the legitimacy of lawmaking as executed by non-institutional actors, many remain perplexed as to how we might reconcile the pursuit of a universally and objectively just order in a pluralist, subjective, and highly stratified world. I conclude by applying Nancy Fraser’s “political dimension of justice” to conceptualize and structure more representative participatory transnational lawmaking processes, the kind that would promote both parity of participation and actor subjectivity, and possibly further the cause of global justice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.098 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.027 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".