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Empire des Nègres Blancs: The Hybridity of International Personality and the Abyssinia Crisis of 1935-36

Parfitt, Rose (2011) Empire des Nègres Blancs: The Hybridity of International Personality and the Abyssinia Crisis of 1935-36. Leiden Journal of International Law, 24 (4). pp. 849-872. ISSN 0922-1565. E-ISSN 1478-9698. (doi:10.1017/S0922156511000409) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:64757)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.
Official URL:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0922156511000409

Abstract

The ‘Abyssinia Crisis’ of 1935–36 – in which one League of Nations member (imperial Ethiopia) was annexed by another (Fascist Italy) – presents one of the clearest twentieth-century illustrations of international law's ‘progress narrative’. International lawyers are encouraged to draw a salutary lesson from the crisis: namely that Ethiopia's sovereignty – and, indeed, the peace of the entire world – might have survived the 1930s if only international law had been properly enforced. Yet, the assumption upon which this lesson depends – to the effect that Ethiopia's only discursive contribution to the crisis was passively to regurgitate the relevant clauses of the Covenant – is profoundly ideological. For this assumption effects a double suppression: erasing Ethiopia's strategic construction of a hybrid, partially Abyssinian international law from the discipline's memory; and concealing from scholarly view the possibility that Ethiopia's annexation might have resulted from actions that were in accordance with, rather than in violation of, interwar international legal norms regarding sovereignty and the use of force.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1017/S0922156511000409
Subjects: K Law
Divisions: Divisions > Division for the Study of Law, Society and Social Justice > Kent Law School
Depositing User: Rose Parfitt
Date Deposited: 27 Nov 2017 11:53 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 10:24 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/64757 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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