SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Mohammad Shahabuddin’s book is a comprehensive and much-needed historical study of the role of ethnicity in the making of international law. It calls for a heightened attention to a pair of opposites: the nineteenth-century Romantic idea of the nation-state as a living organism and the liberal tradition that rejected it in favour of a peculiar project of post-ethnic universalism, albeit with Europe as its omphalos. The book attends to the idea of ethnicity as it travels through the following historical incarnations: the nineteenth-century Romantic and liberal discourses on the ‘self’ and the ‘other’; German and French colonialism; the inter-war minority protection regime; Cold War and post-Cold War international law; and, finally, contemporary international legal responses to so-called ‘ethnic conflicts’. Walking along the thus-charted historical trajectory, this brief review interrogates the salience of the proposed analytical dichotomy between the Romantic and liberal traditions for our understanding of international law’s consistently troubled relationship with ethnicity. At a certain point, an apparition joins the walk.