Arminius Rex: On the Postcolonial Uses of Imperial Languages in, and beyond, International Law

Despite its aspirational name, our discipline has slowly come to understand that ‘international’ law is anything but international. Increasingly, new waves of scholarship have dissected the famous image of the ‘invisible college’, revealing many of its implicit biases and hierarchies in terms of gender, race, or nationality. A promising example of this is the recent surge of interventions that question international law’s Anglo- or Franco-centric past, present, and future. This rising chorus of voices challenge the relevance of French or highlight the violence involved in making English a global lingua franca. While one can sympathise with this critique from a postcolonial perspective, I have grown increasingly wary that some of these contributions end up pleading for an essentialist understanding of local languages in their quest to undermine imperial tongues. Instead, in this essay, I draw from the Germano-Roman mythical figure of Arminius to reflect on the postcolonial uses of imperial languages. Instead of reclaiming the vernacular, I suggest that critical and postcolonial international legal scholars can strategically inherit the legacies of hegemonic languages for anticolonial purposes. Just as Arminius drew from Latin and Rome, the Négritude movement siphoned from French – and even Postcolonial Studies were themselves forged in the crucible of British rule over Egypt and India. We too, I argue, can attempt to use the master’s tools to dismantle his house, at least temporarily.