General Synopsis. The present enquiry takes issue with the notion of progress in public international law discourse. The objective is not to develop a scientific theory, technique, method, or standard to help one determine what is progress in international law, nor to tell whether a given development really constitutes progress, although the possibility of such tools will be touched upon. Nor is the intention to conduct an exhaustive historical or other survey of the use of the idea of progress in public international law debates. This is therefore neither an ontology nor a genealogy of progress. The objective is much more modest, namely to explore what makes a given development appear as constituting progress in international law. It is an investigation of how meaning about progress may be produced in international law texts; and an investigation of the consequences of the production of such meaning. The term ‘vocabulary of progress’ is used throughout to refer to the conglomerate of discursive structures that produce meaning about progress in international law argument. The enquiry puts forward and defends intellectual propositions (theses) relating to the role of the notion of progress in international law discourse. The basic contention is that although progress may be a convenient label to caption a certain international law event (argument, development, action, etc.), it is ultimately a notion devoid of meaning unless placed in the context of a narrative – a story about how things were, how things are, and how things need to be. Such narratives, it is argued, do not ‘speak themselves’: their plot is not objectively true. Instead, their plot is constructed by the author, based on concrete (epistemic, ideological, other) choices and is manifested through a vocabulary – a set of assumptions, images, metaphors, and other discursive structures. As a consequence, such narratives of progress compete with and exclude alternative accounts of progress. They also constitute the basis for policies and decisions that produce tangible effects on everyday life. In this light, progress narratives are no longer descriptions of an objective reality but powerful rhetorical strategies of (de)legitimation. Although this claim may be considered self-evident by some, it is at loggerheads with the claim of objectivity (truth, universality, determinacy, neutrality, etc.) common to many of international law’s progress narratives. Engaging this feature of international legal argument leads to a...
