LCIL Friday Lecture: Psychoanalyzing International Law

In this lecture, which is based on his 2017 German Law Journal article, Matthew will argue for a reading of the work of Martti Koskenniemi—arguably the most significant international legal thinker of the post-Cold War era—as an exercise in (Lacanian) psychoanalysis. Excavating the links between Koskenniemi and French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and analyzing the origins of those links in Koskenniemi’s debt to the Harvard branch of the American Critical Legal Studies (‘CLS’) movement, Matthew will argue that over almost thirty years Koskenniemi has employed psychoanalytic techniques to rebuild the self-confidence of international law(yers). The success of this confidence-building project explains the acclaim Koskenniemi’s work enjoys. As international law’s psychoanalyst he has defined the identity of the international lawyer and mapped the structure of international legal argument, stabilizing international law’s present reality by synchronizing it with narratives of its past. Any attempt to destabilize that reality or depart from present structures into an alternative future must start from an analysis of Koskenniemi’s methods and it is in this sense, and not out of a more pure interest in Koskenniemi’s work, that Matthew seeks to deconstruct Koskenniemi’s oeuvre. This lecture seeks to situate Koskenniemi’s method, reveal his choices and explore their limits in an effort to develop (tentative) proposals for a “new” international law(yer) and an international legal future outside the structure that Koskenniemi has mapped so effectively and affectively. Dr Matthew Nicholson joined Durham Law School as Lecturer in International Law in September 2016. Before joining Durham he worked at the University of Southampton as Lecturer in Public International Law (2012-2016), having completed his PhD at UCL in 2013. Matthew's work has been published in specialist and generalist law journals with international reach. His 2015 article 'The Political Unconscious of the English Foreign Act of State and Non-Justiciability Doctrine(s)' won the International and Comparative Law Quarterly's 'Young Scholar Prize'. He has also published in Law and Literature, Law and Critique, and the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly. His research and teaching interests cover all aspects of international law, with particular interests in international legal theory, international environmental law and policy (climate change in particular), and the relationship between national and international law.