Teemu H. Ruskola

There is no sustained historical and analytic treatment of China’s place in the making of modern international law. In broad outline conventional scholarship represents the modern Sino-Western encounter as a tragic cultural “misunderstanding” by China of such core Western values as sovereign equality and free trade among states. This project instead examines the encounter as a meeting between two different imperial formations, both of which classified states and peoples according to civilizational criteria, albeit with distinctive discursive justifications--Confucian and liberal. More broadly, it analyzes Western international law as an epistemological and cultural project the goal of which has been to turn the entire planet into a juridical formation consisting of nation-states.