Turntablism in the History of International Law

This article uses the metaphor of turntablism to shed light on the confinement of international lawyers’ engagement with history to the terms, vocabularies, and categories of the very historical narratives they seek to evaluate, disrupt, or displace. For the sake of this article, turntablism is understood here as the art of creating new music and sound effects by using one or several turntables on which a record is placed. This article argues that twenty-first century international lawyers engaging with the history of inte