Policing Critique

Abstract

Can fiction fan the spark of hope in Martti Koskenniemi’s critical international law writings? In the course of a critical reading of Wouter Werner, Marieke de Hoon, & Alexis Galán, The Law of International Lawyers: Reading Martti Koskenniemi (Cambridge University Press, 2017), this review article argues against the hermeneutics of suspicion and for a more reparative approach to doing international law critically. Drawing on work in Literary Studies, it identifies the limiting effects suspicion has on critique and suggests that fiction offers a way of grounding abstract concepts and thinking through their detailed implications. It illustrates this technique by reading Koskenniemi’s thinly drawn figure of the critical professional alongside the trope of the maverick cop in TV police procedurals, with special reference to The Wire.