Capitalism As Civilisation

Ntina Tzouvala is a Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University College of Law. Her research focuses on the political economy, the history, and the theory of international law.

• 1. The standard of civilisation in international law: politics, theory, method; 2. The standard of civilisation in the nineteenth century: between the 'logic of improvement' and the 'logic of biology'; 3. The institutionalisation of civilisation in the interwar period; 4. Arguing with borrowed concepts: 'The sacred trust of civilisation' in the South West Africa Saga; 5. From Iraq to Syria: legal arguments for the civilising missions of the twenty-first century; 6. Thinking through contradictions on a warming planet.

'This is an elegant analysis of the historical role of international law in reproducing the conditions of global capitalist expansion. Tzouvala demonstrates that the late-nineteenth-century notion of the 'standard of civilisation' never really went away. It was simply an early embodiment of persistent ideas about modernist 'improvement' and biological difference that continue to structure the production of global inequality to this day. Throughout, the author's discussion is sophisticated, and, above all, legal. Tzouvala focuses on key institutions and moments from the League of Nations to the judicial treatment of apartheid and the wars in Iraq and Syria. Through changing political contexts, she argues, international law was used to discipline and subordinate potential challengers to the capitalist global order. This is an original, powerful treatment of the role of international legal argument in the construction and maintenance of a fundamentally unequal world.' Martti Koskenniemi, Academy Professor and Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, University of Helsinki