Muhammed Beheşti Aydoğan

Celal Nuri (1882-1936) asserts that “international law is defective.” Through Celal Nuri’s critique of international law in the early 1900’s, I introduce a Turkish historical counterpart to contemporary critiques of international law and explore potential points of convergence with TWAIL. This quest reveals that the rampant Eurocentric positivism that plagued the Turkish legal education on international law runs counter to the historical critical engagement. The unequal encounter, the centre point of TWAIL, is reflected in Celal Nuri’s critique through the multi-layered geography of Türkiye, which I preferably capture as “geography within geography.” His critique of international legal scholarship is directed both at his European and Ottoman contemporaries. Without subscribing to a strictly territorialized epistemology, Celal Nuri calls for a critical Ottoman school of international law that is multidimensional with both theoretical and pedagogical components. Celal Nuri’s nuanced critique of colonial enterprise in the context of international law generates a historical precedent for my convergence thesis. This historical Turkish critique establishes the self-contradictory monstrous character of colonial international law through the juxtaposition of the purported civility of European colonialism and its colonial practices. This historical rejection of the racialised duality of international law should constitute the basis of the convergence of the Turkish scholarship with TWAIL and the revitalization of its criticality.