Narrative Contingency and International Humanitarian Law: Crimes against humanity in Cixin Liu’s post-humanist universe

Amanda Alexander writes:

International humanitarian law (IHL) is the term which names, and also conceptualises, the current regime of the laws of war. The name belongs to a particular narrative about the history and purposes of this regime. In the orthodox narrative that was built as this regime emerged in the 1990s, modern IHL was born when Dunant witnessed, with horror, the inhumanity of the Battle of Solferino. Dunant and the International Committee of the Red Cross went on to develop a humanitarian system of law, aimed at protecting the hors de combat and limiting the brutality of war.1 One of the archetypal offences of this contemporary regime is crimes against humanity— that is assaults on civilian populations, whether they occur in international conflict or not. This offence makes the protection of civilians and the value of humanity a more powerful concern than the traditional respect for sovereignty in international law.

The emergence of this humanitarian law of warfare and its shifting interpretation of crimes against humanity, from the Nuremberg Trials until the current day, has been dependent on the narratives that could be told about the law. These legal narratives are often informed by extra- legal discourses, such as strategic, moral, philosophical, or fictional narratives. As the narrative possibilities change, so too does the ethical and aesthetic framework of IHL and, consequently, the interpretation and implementation of the provisions of law. This can lead to dramatic, yet often invisible, changes to the laws of armed conflict.

Critical international lawyers have, overtly or obliquely, acknowledged the importance of narrative as a source of meaning that shapes the interpretation and practice of international law. In their genealogies of the discourses of international law, these lawyers have argued that, although the prevailing narratives make universal claims, they are predominantly Western— arising from Western interests and facilitating Western hegemony.4 Human rights and humanitarianism have not been exempted from this critique.5 They are described as a language which has been shaped by Western concerns and imposed on others,6 a language which legitimates some subjects of history and erases others,7 while justifying imperialist and neo- imperial projects.8 As a result, an important part of the critical approach to international law has involved challenging these dominant narratives with alternative accounts and interpretations of international law.9 Some critical lawyers have sought a form of emancipation in such work— but many are less hopeful.10 They have warned that attempts at counternarratives will always be undermined or co- opted by existing power arrangements.

Moreover, they have questioned whether it is even possible to shape new narratives within international law without adopting Western structures and liberal values. The difficulty of developing new forms of narratives is not just a problem for international law. It affects even the possibilities of the histories that underpin law and legal theory. In Hayden White’s narrative theory of history, the possibilities of historical narratives are limited; only certain humanist approaches will count as ‘History’.13 Thus, IHL may be contingent on narrative possibilities, but it is hard to see these narratives, hard to change them, and even harder to imagine a different range of aesthetic and ethical possibilities.

Cixin Liu’s science fiction epic, Remembrance of Earth’s Past,14 however, gives us an unusual opportunity to explore a vision of what such an alternative international law might look like if it were not based on Western narratives or humanist thinking. Science fiction provides an opportunity to create new worlds and, in Liu’s case, to present new aesthetic forms.