SOAS Research Online

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Abstract

Although there have been many attempts to decipher the enigmas which inhere in Kelsen’s unfathomably vast body of work on international law, I explore a different mystery in this Chapter namely: how revolution - a homeless, aberrant, and pathological creature - comes to be clothed in the power of legality. To unravel this mystery, I delineate various legal practices that have brought the doctrine of revolutionary legality into being, sustained it, and allowed it to continue to occupy a place as a doctrine of international law. I begin by tracing how this doctrine has evolved through and been shaped by various competent performances of judicial and scholarly actors, and do so by excavating the social and interpretive practices these actors use to construct the concept of a revolution’s ‘legality’ in and after particular revolutionary moments with a focus upon the 1965 Rhodesian Revolution, its antecedents, and its immediate aftermath. Though I do so elsewhere, I do not address whether the Rhodesian Revolution was ‘in fact’ a revolution. My focus here is instead on those legal practices characterising an event as revolutionary. It is therefore an examination of how international legal practices have clothed revolution in legality. I argue that the doctrine of revolutionary legality is the product of the confluence and contestation of particular historically-contingent judicial and scholarly practices which have carried the doctrine across time and space, and which shape and have shaped the international legal imaginary on revolutionary change. This Chapter explores the role these competent practices play to dress revolution in legality.