Revolution in the Americas

Abstract

What can Hannah Arendt’s treatise On Revolution tell us about the formation, practices and limits of international legal knowledge about revolution in the Americas? This chapter answers this question by examining Fidel Castro’s 1959 visit to the United States, Hannah Arendt’s treatment of “good” and “bad” revolutions, and an allegorical reading of Third World revolutions in Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua. It argues that Arendt’s account of the Cuban Revolution operates, in a Jamesonian sense, as an allegory exposing the epistemic limits of international legal knowledge and scholarly understandings of the field’s development and foundations. Those limits reveal that the field has overlooked how these revolutions both expose struggles against forms of domination that inhere in the international legal order (past and present) as well as act as authors and agents shaping the development of international law through revolutionary struggle.