Aggression, Capitalism, and International Law: Missed Opportunities or Structural Constraints?

Abstract The recent revival of geopolitical competition has been accompanied by the meteoric rise of military spending across the globe. In light of this development, this article advances three claims. First, I posit that the political economy of war should be of concern to international lawyers and to anyone who is committed to peace. Second, I show that international law has been consistently unsuccessful and is currently singularly unambitious when it comes to naming, regulating, and sanctioning the political economy of war. Finally, I argue that the consistent failure of the field cannot be wholly attributed to historical contingencies. Rather, this is because armaments exist in the intersection of two logics, the logic of the state and the logic of the market, that have mystifying effects, even though the modalities of obfuscation are markedly different. The logic of the state makes the political economy of war hard to counter by law because it treats it as too exceptional, while the logic of the market does the same but by treating it as too pedestrian and ordinary. This convergence of logic creates layers of obfuscation that are not reducible to (international) law, but (international) law can nevertheless play a role in making it more or less opaque.