The Trajectory of the Democratic Entitlement Thesis in International Legal Scholarship: A Reply to Akbar Rasulov

Akbar Rasulov’s provocative discussion of the ‘The Curious Case of the International Law of Democracy and the Politics of International Legal Scholarship’ makes two remarkable assertions: i) that the critics of the democratic entitlement thesis won a decisive victory in the contest to influence ‘the conventional wisdom’ within international legal scholarship; and ii) that the critiques objectively served ‘a fundamentally reactionary political agenda’. Beyond overstating both the critiques’ harshness and their impact, Rasulov is too quick to associate their methodological orthodoxy with ‘right-wing’ outcomes, neglecting to appreciate that their authors’ primary objective was to resist neo-colonialist tendencies. Whereas departures from standard source doctrines may in an earlier era have been directed towards redress of power imbalances inherited from colonialism, the ‘pro-democratic’ departures of the post-Cold War era tended to license impositions on the self-government of the poorer and weaker states. The democratic entitlement’s critics sought precisely to conserve gains that had earlier been won by sectors of the international community resistant to neo-colonialism.