Interstellar Justice Now: Back to the Future of International Law

Abstract

In order to reclaim international law’s emancipatory potential for better futures, we need to take stock of the ways in which our understanding of time, and of time in international law, has informed the development of the discipline. The movie Interstellar (Nolan, 2014), with its illustration of masculine historicity and feminist potentialities of time, provides an apposite material to uncover our current standard view of international law as a periodicized and crisis-oriented narrative, which constantly oscillates between peace and violence (while saying otherwise). A postcolonial and queer feminist exploration of the complexity of our being in time and in international law builds a radical case for the recovery and/or articulation of strong ethics of responsibility for international lawyers now and tomorrow. Through its technological engendering, Our time has often been the negation of the Others’ time, both directly (vis-à-vis the colonial project) and indirectly (vis-à-vis the neo-colonial humanitarian messianic project). It is therefore more than timely that we come full circle and acknowledge both the backward- and forward-looking transgenerational decolonial indebtedness as the only way to really make sense of (international) justice. © 2024 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.