The book provides an original and captivating perspective on international law and Giorgio Agamben’s work. The manuscript is profoundly aesthetic-textual in its approach, as exemplified in its deft and insightful close readings of drama (Goethe’s Faust), prose fiction (Melville’s Bartleby and Benito Cereno) and lyric, be it devotional (Laudes Regiae, Handel, ‘The Lord is a Man of War’) or otherwise (Edwin Starr’s ‘War’, Boy George’s ‘War Song’). Attentive to language, plot, theme and characterisation, these readings not only read the texts in question, but they also read them anew, yielding fresh, innovative, and unique cultural legal interpretations.

International law as political theodicy - via Faust and Agamben - is rendered new and strange in Edwin Bikundo’s bracing book on the intimacies of law and violence. -- Gerry Simpson, London School of Economics and Political Science

Edwin Bikundo is Senior Lecturer at the School of Law at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. His teaching and research interests focus on international and comparative law and critical legal theory. Edwin has written a number of journal articles and is author of International Criminal Law: Using or Abusing Legality? (Routledge, 2014).