At the Vanishing Point: Encounters with the Souvenirs, Merchandise & Memorabilia of International Law
A Curatorial Essay
by Emily Crawford, Jessie Hohmann,
Daniel Joyce and Jacqueline Mowbray
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE EXHIBITION
International law is generally studied through its legal texts (treaties or judgments) or its institutions (the UN and related international bodies). This exhibition offers an alternative way of looking at international law: through the lens of its merchandise, memorabilia and souvenirs.
Bringing together forty significant artefacts from a larger collection, the exhibition highlights the different ways in which international law and its institutions are memorialised, commodified and represented in the public sphere. The collection includes souvenirs available for purchase in the gift shops of international institutions; products sold by commercial partners with the permission or collaboration of these institutions; products which otherwise engage with international law (including advertisements which invoke the power and prestige of international law to sell particular items); and written collections which memorialise the histories, institutions and characters of the international legal system. Befitting the exhibition space, in Fisher Library’s Rare Books section, this latter category includes a number of old and rare books.
The exhibition invites viewers to consider the social lives of these artefacts and what these tell us about international law and its institutions. How do international organisations present themselves to the world (by way of their gift shops or commercial collaborations) and how does society at large perceive of international law and international institutions? What do these artefacts say about the role of international law in the social and cultural zeitgeist? How do objects become memorabilia, relics or fetishes for international law and international lawyers? And how do these objects tell a different story about international law’s claims to authority and relevance from the traditional narrative presented through texts and institutions?
Brought together by four international lawyers from three different institutions, this collection uses the material products of international law as a window through which viewers – lawyers and laypersons alike – can explore the everyday life of international law.
Figure 1: Hermés scarf commemorating the 50th anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Charter © Joachim Metz for Hermés 1995
THE SOUVENIRS, MERCHANDISE AND MEMORABILIA OF INTERNATIONAL LAW: CURATORIAL ESSAY
This exhibition asks us to look carefully at the souvenirs, merchandise and memorabilia of international law’s institutions. What functions do these items serve, for the institutions, for the public, and for international law as a whole? How is international law represented? Who is international law’s consumer? Juxtaposed against the texts of the Fisher Library’s rare books collection, these international legal objects invite reflection on and engagement with the blossoming interest in international law’s material culture, marketing, memorabilia, sentimental and touristic practices.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, academics around the world were forced to move their teaching online, live-streaming lectures that would have otherwise been delivered in person. During those awkward five minutes at the beginning of a Zoom, we waited for students to electronically file into our virtual waiting room, before starting the lecture. To ‘kill some time’, one among us (Emily) began showing the students some of the souvenirs she had collected in her international travels, specifically those ones related to international law. Over the course of 13 weeks, students were introduced to the Lego United Nations building, the Barbie doll version of Eleanor Roosevelt, depicting the former US First Lady in her role as one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and a Christmas tree ornament, in the shape of the United Nations building in New York. During Zoom chats accompanying the lectures, and in the anonymous student feedback at the end of the semester, many in the cohort commented on the objects, with students remarking on how fun they found it, and how it made international law somehow more ‘real’ to them.
Figure 2: Barbie as Eleanor Roosevelt – commemorating her involvement in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from the Mattel 'Inspiring Women' Doll Line.
As scholars of international law, we have long been interested in the disconnect between international law’s deep embeddedness in the world around us on the one hand, and the perception that international law is ‘remote and technical: something that happens only far away at the UN, or when world leaders shake hands at lavish, highly securitized summits’¹ on the other. We each have an interest in the material dimension of international law: its objects, its aesthetic qualities, its public consumption and commodification. This exhibition builds on the material turn in international legal scholarship and longstanding critiques of its commodification and connections to time and memory.
Stemming from these engagements in our teaching and research, we began to look more critically at the souvenirs we had all accrued because of our professional careers as international lawyers – the various pens and mugs from international organisations and scholarly centres, the postcards and notepads and other ephemera we had collected while on research trips to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the United Nations in New York and Vienna, or the International Committee of the Red Cross headquarters in Geneva. We were struck by the notion that, like a museum or art gallery, but unlike many institutions of government (for example, domestic courts of law), international law merchandises itself – there are gift shops at the International Criminal Court, the Peace Palace, and the UN that sell manifold varied and different items from clothes to office supplies, to homewares, and luxury goods. For example, a visit to the UN Headquarters in New York can be both a professional and a touristic experience with UN stamps, memorabilia, chocolates, and iconography all for sale. Suitably for an institution grappling with the digital era there is also an online gift shop.²
Figure 3: A Vintage UN 'People of the World' Paper Doll Book
In reflecting on the material objects of international law institutions like the UN and ICJ, we wanted to interrogate international law and international institutions through the lens of merchandise, memorabilia, and souvenirs. How do international organisations present themselves to the world (by way of their gift shops or commercial collaborations) and how does society at large perceive of international law and international institutions (through invocation of international law in commercial imagery and objects)? What do such objects and imagery say about the role of international law in the social and cultural zeitgeist? In this, we connect with vibrant and emerging strands of international law scholarship that focus on its objects and material culture,³ its marketing and marketization,⁴ sightseeing and tourism,⁵ and its everyday impact and experience.⁶
Figure 4: A LEGO model of UN Headquarters in New York
Our exhibition, At the Vanishing Point, takes its name from an article written by Hersch Lauterpacht for the British Yearbook of International Law in 1952, in which he reflected on the recently adopted Geneva Conventions of 1949, relating to the treatment of persons in situations of armed conflict.⁷ At the end of his paper, Lauterpacht called on international lawyers to continue the process of developing and reaffirming the law of armed conflict, an area still beset with ‘diverse problems’⁸ that ‘will require clarification.’⁹ Lauterpacht implored his colleagues to undertake this task:
... regardless of dialectical doubts – though with a feeling of humility springing from the knowledge that if international law is, in some ways at the vanishing point of law, the law of war is, perhaps even more conspicuously, at the vanishing point of international law.¹⁰
At first glance, Lauterpacht’s statement alludes to a common critique levelled at international law – that it is not ‘really law’ and thus exists in a liminal space on the edges of law so-called. Lauterpacht’s scholarly project was in part to gain wider acceptance for international law - despite the centrality of states, he saw it as operating as a system of private law grounded in consent. His institutional efforts to solidify international law and to ground its practice in official reports, a developing jurisprudence and scholarly analysis, all point to a broader concern with the field’s otherwise ethereal and political dimensions.¹¹ Without wishing to rehash rather tired subsequent debates as to whether international law really is law, it is notable that in countering this critique, international institutions have turned to the solidity of architecture, infrastructure and to affective tools of publicity and merchandising.
Figure 6: A UN Hello Kitty Keyring
Situating the Exhibition
within the Field
Focusing upon the material dimension of international law’s souvenirs, merchandise and memorabilia, allows us to explore and develop new ways of understanding the field. By engaging with questions of popular understanding of international law, publics can engage with otherwise technical and professional concerns, and international lawyers can see their concerns mediated through the symbolic, the sentimental, the mediated and in commodified forms. In this exhibition, we explore how international law’s symbolic capital is supported through souvenirs and other material objects. How is authority tied to objects and iconography? How does international law’s merchandise allow us to comment on the relationship between capitalism and international law? How do objects become memorabilia, relics or fetishes for international law and international lawyers? And how do souvenirs allow for different readings of international law’s claim to authority and relevance? Are memorabilia suggestive of a personal connection to a field which can appear grand, distant and abstract? Do souvenirs point to the historical and temporal qualities of international law and its contingent evolution? We posit that in concentrating on the 8 material things of international law, we can begin to understand the ways that international law structures and disciplines its subjects.¹²
As Eslava and Pahuja have written, international law is not just ‘an ideological project with material consequences’, but also ‘a material project in itself.’¹³ Although this material turn is broad, we focus on material culture and material histories, ‘beginning with objects, from the mundane to the museum piece’ to ‘think through how material things and laws are co-constituted, and to decentre text as the main arena for legal interpretation’. ¹⁴ We are prompted by the questions¹⁵ and research agenda proposed by Hohmann and Joyce, among others, to investigate what we might learn about international law and the way it works in the world if we begin with objects, things or material culture.¹⁶ Scholars working in this vein have focused on the role of everyday actors in the legitimisation, contestation or practice of international law and have harnessed artefacts and the world as tangibly experienced to consider international law as a material practice.
Further engaging international law’s sites and places is a turn to explore the touristic and sightseeing practices of international law. Important here are Renske Vos and Sofia Stolk’s work on legal sightseeing, Hilary Charlesworth’s engagement with the UNESCO Human Rights Exhibition, and Maria Elander’s work on the ECCC and Cambodian Genocide Museum.¹⁷ These scholars ask thought-provoking questions about modes of engaging with international law, sites of engagement, and everyday representations of international law. Another important strand of scholarship explores the marketing and marketization of international law. Christine Schwobel- Patel’s important work critically assesses the now normalised branding and marketisation of international criminal justice, asking how its dominant figures and its core business have come to take on the techniques and language of brand and market.¹⁸ Our project extends these questions to merchandise and memorabilia, along with the commercial partnerships that these now entail, in other regimes of international law.
Turning then to the aims of At the Vanishing Point and its location: the aim of the exhibition was to examine how international law’s symbolic capital is supported through souvenirs and other material objects. In hosting an exhibition, rather than producing a more traditional research output (like a research article), At the Vanishing Point aims to examine international law’s objects as memorabilia, relics and souvenirs - allowing for different readings of international law’s claim to authority and relevance. It rests on the understanding that the possibility of seeing – and sometimes even touching – an object enriches the experience of it and allows a deeper and more tangible experience of it.¹⁹
A Reflection on Place & Curation
The process of curating, and of displaying, represents an attempt ‘to account for and order our own professional context.’²⁰ Curation is an activity of increasing interest to international lawyers who have become familiar with the popular deployment of the term in relation to social media, while also international legal scholarship and practices seek to better engage with publics. Clearly as lawyers we are not professionally trained to collect, archive, preserve, analyse or even to write about objects. But the material turn in international legal scholarship, accompanied by longstanding engagement with historical, cultural and sociological questions, has better equipped and motivated international lawyers to consider their own object- oriented practices.
While there will be those who deliberately seek out At the Vanishing Point, most of its audience will be accidental and incidental – people already in the library undertaking their own research, or on their way to jobs and appointments, or otherwise seeking the reflective calm of the library environment. The University of Sydney’s Fisher Library serves as a repository of knowledge and education. The site of the University of Sydney Camperdown campus has always been a place of knowledge and learning – it was built on the ancestral lands of the Gadi people – with the original site of Fisher, the Quadrangle, built on ‘land on which the Gadigal have been teaching and learning for thousands of years’.²¹ At the Vanishing Point seeks, among other objectives, to educate and challenge its viewers, by interrogating its subject field through the use of and lens of material objects. It does this by displaying these material objects in a place of education and learning - in a working and publicly accessible university library, an institution expressly designed for the collection, dissemination, and communication of knowledge and understanding, as well as a venue for challenging and interrogating traditional or conventional knowledge and understanding.
At the Vanishing Point draws on the well-established museum and gallery practice of thematic display. Thematic display has been theorised as a break from the traditional ‘chronological’ method of display that typified museum and gallery practice up until the 19th century,²² and allows for a more selective approach. Thematic displays frequently have ‘strongly education goals’²³ and allow for non-expert viewers to engage with the material without requiring discrete specialised disciplinary knowledge.²⁴ The academic study of gallery and museum spaces is deeply rooted in the idea that:
[t]o display something is an act, and the way that museums and galleries display their collections sets up and frames the visitor’s encounter, not just with individual objects but with the past more broadly … the act of display can never be neutral for it produces particular ways of knowing and valuing objects.²⁵
As noted by Moser,²⁶ how one displays items is as important and informative as the why and the what of the items being displayed: ‘allocations of space are often based on understandings of value, so that the collections, key objects or displays deemed to be most significant receive the most attention (e.g., by being placed in prominent or magnificent locations, or because they are given large quantities of space).’²⁷
There is something therapeutic and fresh about curating international legal objects, though museum professionals might query our approach to curatorial practices. This is a beginning not the end, and we hope here to experiment with ways of collecting, displaying and understanding the material culture of international law. Yet the pull of traditional practices remain. It is hard to write this curatorial essay as ‘curators’ when we are trained to footnote and develop article, chapter or book length outputs. The temptation remains to turn this into a traditional output, though we seek here to develop interest and engagement in non-traditional outputs such as the exhibition and this accompanying essay. There is then the exhilaration and shock of the new involved in what we have collectively set out to do. ‘Making’ the exhibition itself forces us to confront the practical limits of certain of our conceptual desires. What stories will each visitor generate in this exhibition and does it make sense for non-lawyers?
And yet the items on display in this exhibition are not ones that you would typically find in museums or galleries. These items were found in second-hand and thrift stores, in gift shops, in old bookstores, and online vintage shops. Displaying the ordinary in a location dedicated to high knowledge presents an interesting juxtaposition of prosaic and privileged. Brought together these seemingly ‘ordinary’ artefacts become vehicles and signifiers of an internationalist sensibility. Their thematic display generates points of critique, connection and self-reflection. While curating international law involves new and challenging methodological territory and practices, there are aspects of curation which are deeply familiar. In scholarship, advocacy, teaching and professional development we each learn to select and inhabit aspects of international legal identity and form. We understand that lawyering involves selection, narrative and performance. Connoisseurship whilst initially seeming beyond the scope of the traditional international legal research skill set is in fact strongly tied to notions of expertise and judging.
Figure 6: A UN Hello Kitty Keyring
Curation of this exhibition has been a social and collective experience, but it also draws on the personal, highlighting generative connections between objects and subject formation. These objects on display can tell us important stories about international institutions and actors. Our collections reveal the interior worlds contained within professional lives. Here we invite our audiences to reflect on their own connections to and collections of international law souvenirs, merchandise and memorabilia. These talismanic objects become place markers in deeper personal trajectories and this can subvert or shift their institutional or thematic concerns. Curation is a fundamentally public activity and reminds us of the challenge involved in locating international legal publics. For whom have these objects been crafted and for what purpose? Curation allows us each to critically analyse the institutional politics and commodification involved in the creation and distribution of these objects, but also to re-interpret them through altering and at times even subverting their intended contexts and audiences. If international law is in part a project of ordering and understanding the world, then making an exhibition of international legal objects provides the opportunity for staging a play within a play.²⁸
Figure 7: A Toy 'Soldier' Figurine of a UN Worker Aiding an Injured Child
references
¹J Hohmann and D Joyce, ‘Introduction’ in J Hohmann and D Joyce (eds), International Law’s Objects (Oxford UP, 2018).
² Official UN Gift Shop: https://shop.un.org/.
³ Hohmann and Joyce, International Law’s Objects; R Vos and S Stolk ‘Law in Concrete: Institutional Architecture in Brussels and the Hague’ (2020) 14(1) Law and Humanities 57; D R Quiroga-Villamarin, ‘Beyond Texts? Towards a Material Turn in the Theory and History of International Law’ (2020) 23(3) Journal of the History of International Law/Revue d’histoire du droit international 466.
⁴ C Schwobel-Patel, Marketing Global Justice: The Political Economy of International Criminal Law (Cambridge UP, 2021).
⁵ A Perry-Kessaris, ‘The Pop-Up Museum of Legal Objects Project: An Experiment in “Socio-Legal Design”’ (2017) 68(3) Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 225; S Stolk and R Vos, ‘International Legal Sightseeing’ (2020) 33(1) Leiden Journal of International Law 1.
⁶ L Eslava Local Space, Global Life: The Everyday Operation of International Law and Development (Cambridge UP, 2015).
⁷ Hersch Lauterpacht, ‘The Problem of the Revision of the Law of War’ (1952) 29 BYBIL 360.
⁸ Ibid, 381.
⁹ Ibid.
¹⁰ Ibid, 381-2.
¹¹ See further M Koskenniemi, ‘Hersch Lauterpacht (1897-1960) in J Beatson and R Zimmermann (eds), Jurists Uprooted: German-Speaking Emigré Lawyers in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2004) 601-661.
¹² Hohmann and Joyce, ‘Introduction’, 2.
¹³ L Eslava and S Pahuja, ‘Beyond the (Post)Colonial: TWAIL and the Everyday Life of International Law’ (2012) 45(2) Journal of Law and Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America - Verfassung und Recht in Übersee 195, 202.
¹⁴ J Hohmann, ‘Diffuse Subjects and Dispersed Power: New Materialist Insights and Cautionary Lessons for International Law (2021) 34 Leiden Journal of International Law 585,
¹⁵ Ibid, 589-91.
¹⁶ Hohmann and Joyce, ‘Introduction’, 1; Hohmann and Joyce, International Law’s Objects; M Chiam, L Eslava, GR Painter, RS Parfitt and C Peevers, ‘Introduction: History, Anthropology and the Archive of International Law’ (2017) 5(1) London Review of International Law 3; see also the contributions in (2017) 5(1) London Review of International Law, special issue on History, Anthropology and the Archive of International Law; R Vos, ‘Walking Along the Rue de la Loi: EU Façades as Front- and Backstage of Transnational Legal Practice’ in LJM Boer and S Stalk (eds), Backstage Practices of Transnational Law (Routledge, 2019); and A Perry-Kessaris, ‘Legal Treasures’ and ‘Pop Up Museum of Legal Objects’ projects: https://legaltreasure.wordpress.com/; https://econosociolegal.wordpress.com/2017/04/08/sociolegal-model-making-8-pop-up-museum of-legal-objects/.
¹⁷ Legal Sightseeing project: https://legalsightseeing.org/; H Charlesworth, ‘The Travels of Human Rights: The UNESCO Human Rights Exhibition 1950–1953’ in S Chalmers and S Pahuja (eds), Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities (Routledge, 2021) 173-190; M Elander ‘Images of Victims: the ECCC and the Cambodian Genocide Museum’ in M Elander and D Manderson (eds), Law and the Visual: Representations, Technologies, and Critique (Toronto UP) 210-228.
¹⁸ Schwobel-Patel, Marketing Global Justice.
¹⁹ J Hohmann, ‘The Treaty 8 Typewriter: Tracing the Roles of Material Things in Imagining, Realising and Resisting Colonial Worlds’ (2017) 5(3) London Review of International Law 371. See also Joyce reflecting on cabinets of curiosity as motivated by the notion that knowledge was best obtained through first-hand encounters with an object. D Joyce, ‘International Law’s Cabinet of Curiosities’ in J Hohmann and D Joyce (eds), International Law’s Objects (Oxford UP, 2018) 21.
²⁰ Joyce, ‘International Law’s Cabinet of Curiosities’, 16.
²¹ The University of Sydney, Walanga Wingara Mura Design Principles, 8: https://www.sydney.edu.au/content/dam/corporate/documents/about-us/values-and visions/aboriginal-and-torres-straight-islander-community/walanga-wingara-mura-design principles-plain-text.docx.
²² Rhiannon Mason, Alistair Robinson and Emma Coffield, Museum and Gallery Studies: The Basics (Routledge, 2017) 168.
²³ Louise Ravelli, Museum Texts: Communication Frameworks (Routledge, 2005) 3.
²⁴ See further Stephanie Moser, ‘The Devil is in the Detail: Museum Displays and the Creation of Knowledge’ (2010) 33 Museum Anthropology 22.
²⁵ Mason, Robinson and Coffield, Museum and Gallery Studies, 167.
²⁶ Moser, ‘The Devil is in the Detail’, 25-6.
²⁷ Mason, Robinson and Coffield, Museum and Gallery Studies, 173.
²⁸ W Werner, ‘Framing Objects of International Law’ in J Hohmann and D Joyce (eds), International Law’s Objects (Oxford UP, 2018) 57-71.