The Other ‘Other’: Moors, International Law and the Origin of the Colonial Matrix
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historiographies of international law have set as a breaking point with the medieval Respublica Christiana the crucial moment of the “discovery” of the Americas. In these historiographies, the defining “Other” of Europe is conceived by the thinkers of the Spanish Salamanca School as the “Indios” of the Americas, whose encounter powerfully contributed to the shaping and extension of international law outside of Europe. It is argued, however, that the thought of the School of Salamanca was based on a prior normative apparatus already contained in late medieval thought. This proto-modern world view was focused on the Muslim Other, as the “enemy in the mirror”. By its proximity, this “Other” unsettled Christendom’s very identity through its difference and rejection of Christianity. Europe’s encounter with its Muslim Other remains curiously absent from international law’s historiography. This suggests that international law is conspicuously not a history of the relation between Europe and its Muslim Other, and perhaps even based on a tentative erasure of that relation. This chapter will question this accepted historiography and provide a short genealogy of the thought of the School of Salamanca in relation to medieval Europe’s other “other”; “infidels”, “Saracens” and “Moors”. We argue that Christianity’s complex engagements with Islam at its borders constituted a laboratory for international legal concepts, including in their most colonial dimensions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 teacher head, 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".