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Cynicism And Guilt In International Law After Rwanda, Luigi Russi

Luigi Russi

Framing the Rwandan genocide as a “failure” of international law forces one to approach it as an unintended consequence of an otherwise benign system of formal relations between states. The present article looks at it instead as a physiological product of international law, disclosing the possibility to contemplate the latter as a fundamentally imperialistic system pegged on the controversial notion of “rule of law”. International law embodies a system of legalised extraction swaying between cynicism and guilt: despite its real face showing on occasions like Rwanda, it keeps revamping itself so as to prevent a fundamental appraisal of the contradictory …