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Vol. 44 (2024)
General Articles

Resisting Chrononormative International Law

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  • Lucas Lixinski
Lucas Lixinski
University of New South Wales

Published 2025-11-14

Keywords

  • time and international law,
  • cultural heritage law,
  • linearity,
  • static time,
  • intangible cultural heritage

How to Cite

Resisting Chrononormative International Law. (2025). Polish Yearbook of International Law, 44, 11-36. https://doi.org/10.24425/PYIL.2025.156712

Abstract

This article argues that better engagement between international law and 
time requires us to unpack the contingent memories and imaginaries that underpin 
international legal regimes and processes. We as a field need to move away from 
thinking of time as static and linear. International Cultural Heritage Law (ICHL) is 
an ideal case study to think through these relationships, given the subfield’s connection 
to identity and its relative openness to different epistemologies. This article assesses the 
work that time does in shaping international law, working through the three linear 
dimensions of time (past, present and future) to highlight the limits of internation
al law, and in shaping the heuristics of these three linear dimensions. ICHL offers 
a pathway to simultaneously showcase the shortcomings of our international legal 
understandings of time (which I dub chrononormative), and to imagine different 
possibilities that better advance the human goals that should be the foundation and 
the goal of international legal norms and regimes.

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