International Community

This annotated bibliography, preoccupied with Anglo-American scholarship, analytically distinguishes several very different competing senses of an international community. The scholarship exemplifies a serious tension between the universalism of the international community and the particularism of state members, non-state organizations, the global markets, and excluded communities such as nomadic and indigenous peoples. A fundamental paradox has characterized the scholarship. On the one hand, the universalism of an international community includes everyone everywhere. And yet, on the other hand, historically contingent, context-specific particularities have fragmented the universality into a more realistic critique of the universality. Each of the five approaches to a sense of an international community has been preoccupied with this paradox. First, the international community has been considered a structure of texts and principles justifying judicial decisions. By grounding or taking for granted that a commonality, such as humanitas, dignity, human species, or shared values, is shared among human beings, the ambition has been to elaborate general principles and a rational methodology that intellectually transcend the contingent particularity of a state member of the community. A second image has continued this line of argument by portraying the international community as cosmopolitanism. Here, the particularism of state members in a cosmopolitanism has left the international community to be an “add-on” to the aggregate of the wills of the state members. A third image has highlighted a global civil society constituted from a network of regulatory treaties, contracts, corporations, cultural organizations, and adjudicative and administrative tribunal decisions. These three forms of an international community have led to a fourth sense of an international community. Here, there is a critique of the very idea of a universal international community. The critique has highlighted two themes: first, the exclusionary character of the international community; and second, the exclusionary international community has disguised the dark (or ant-universal human rights) moments manifested by the particularism of states. The fourth form of an international community has continued in a more affirmative tone by emphasizing how the particularity of a social-cultural ethos manifests shifts through time, raising the possibility of a universal international community grounded in a shared ethos. The final theme in recent scholarship has turned to an inquiry about the ontological character of a world before the existence of law and before the international community have taken form.