How did you come to choose your research topic?

A “PhD” is a journey, my supervisor, Professor Andrea Bianchi, always tells to aspiring scholars, and mine proved a rather windy one, in both senses of the term. Initially, I was doing research in international humanitarian law, a continuation of the questions that arose while writing my master thesis at the Graduate Institute. Soon, however, I was drawn into international legal theory, and into the broader questions of what is distinctive, what shapes our discipline of international law. While I was grappling with how to combine my old and new interests, my second reader, Professor Fuad Zarbiyev, suggested a “more radical change”, and proposed “indeterminacy” as an entry point to these broader questions of international legal theory. Indeterminacy, conventionally understood, would touch upon the open texture of legal language, upon the flexible interplay between abstract principles and concrete rules in legal argument, or upon Hart’s famous saying that “legal rules have a central core of undisputed meaning and a penumbra of uncertainty” where the law-applier must choose between alternatives – all foundational and recurring problems in legal theory.

I chose, however, to focus my PhD research on structural indeterminacy, and in particular the indeterminacy as it was advanced in two books published in the late 1980s: International Legal Structures by David Kennedy (Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1987) and From Apology to Utopia by Martti Koskenniemi (Lakimiesliiton Kustannus, 1989). I chose to do so for two reasons. First, both books marked a very peculiar episode in the intellectual history of international law, in that they performed an analysis of international law as a language in accordance with the tenets of structuralism. In its turn, structuralism can be traced to Saussure’s structural linguistics, but it extended well beyond, to revolutionise modes of analysis in anthropology (most notably in the work by Claude Lévi-Strauss), and then on, in literature, cultural studies, and social and critical theory. Not least, structuralism also preceded and led to poststructuralism and deconstruction, both movements that further radicalised theoretical approaches in critical and social theory – for instance, from Derrida to Spivak. And so, my choice to engage with the structural indeterminacy of International Legal Structures (ILS) and From Apology to Utopia (FATU) seemed to me a unique opportunity to both explore myself what the intriguing method of structuralism entailed, as well as to examine in detail how it was applied in international law by Kennedy and Koskenniemi. The second reason why I chose to focus on these two books was that both their authors grew to become two of the most prominent scholars in contemporary international legal theory, while both ILS and FATU grew out of their own doctoral theses. Thus, my own PhD journey began, now with indeterminacy and structuralism.

Can you describe your thesis questions and your methodology?

Schematically speaking, the questions driving my research were threefold:

1. To grasp what was the state of the field in international legal theory in the late 1980s, so as to better understand what sort of scholarly intervention the structural experiments in ILS and FATU were
2. To familiarise myself with the broader literature on structuralism and the structural method, and, against this background, examine how the structural analysis of international law was performed in ILS and FATU
3. To inquire into its aftermath and how it influenced contemporary legal theory

My methodology was primarily library research, while I also benefited from discussions with Kennedy and Koskenniemi, in order to get more direct insights into their structural endeavour and how they perceived the international legal field in the late 1980s.

What are your major findings?

Through my own engagement with structuralism and my research into the state of international legal theory in the late 1980s, I realised that – contrary to how the two books are usually received with an emphasis on indeterminacy as the inconclusiveness and absence of substantive resolution in legal argument – both ILS and FATU were meant as exercises to instil order in international law, while, at the same time, both aspired to launch a project of innovation of the discipline. Moreover, they did so even though they had very different groups of international lawyers in mind. Kennedy was writing against the background of US international legal academia, characterised by postrealism, antipositivism and antiformalism, marked by an eclectic interdisciplinarity and all sorts of theoretical approaches, while law – without losing its own distinctiveness – is ordinarily viewed as the most efficient tool of statecraft. Against such diversity, ILS was meant to abstract a single structural scheme which underlay all these various schools of thought (e.g., the New Haven School, the Columbia School or the Manhattan School). As a next step, ILS was intended as a project of innovation that would open – through the reconceptualisation of international legal language – new career paths and novel engagements with international law beyond the US State Department and international institutions. By contrast, Koskenniemi was targeting what he termed as the “unreflective pragmatism” of international lawyers, who tended to focus solely on the everyday practice of the profession, while shying away from philosophy and from grappling once again with the foundational questions of international law. Hence, FATU was meant to demonstrate the power and the capaciousness of international legal language to re-engage with theory, and it was intended as a call to legal scholars to do so – in a sort of resuscitation of a critical natural law tradition.

In terms of the aftermath of ILS and FATU, I would say that, in combination with the critical scholarship that emerged more forcefully since the 1990s – especially with feminist, queer and postcolonial approaches – indeterminacy today stands for an increased acceptance of diverse epistemologies in international law, as well as for an increased use of the structural method of contradictions in scholarly analyses of the discipline. 

What are you doing now?

I am currently a postdoc researcher at the Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) at Harvard Law School, and I work on two projects. First, on turning my PhD dissertation into a book. Second, on a smaller project in which I attempt myself a structural analysis of international environmental law. By analysing the persisting contradictions which structure this field of international law, I intend to bring forth some novel insights and to contribute to our current debates on climate change, which is admittedly one of the most pressing questions of our time.

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Aliki Semertzi defended her PhD thesis in International Law in June 2022. Associate Professor Fuad Zarbiyev presided the committee, which included Professor Andrea Bianchi, Thesis Supervisor, and Professor Outi Korhonen, Faculty of Law, University of Turku, Finland.

Citation of the PhD thesis:
Semertzi, Aliki. “The Thesis of Indeterminacy of International Law.” PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 2022.
Members of the Geneva Graduate Institute can access the PhD thesis on this page of the Institute's repository. Others can contact Dr Semertzi at aliki.semertzi@graduateinstitute.ch.

Interview by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.
Banner picture: excerpt from an illustration by ephst/Shutterstock.com.