I am deeply grateful to Murad Idris for his generous and searching review of Boundaries of the International, and especially for his reflections on the importance of the differently situated nature of the critiques of international law I canvass in the book. Idris displays his characteristic way with words in the review. “Legal discourse’s structural weaponization” and “global asymmetries in discourses about global asymmetry” get to the heart of what I hoped to convey in my too cursory examination of responses by figures such as Hamdan Khodja and Lin Zexu to the legal languages used to justify their countries’ subjugation to European imperial power. The rules have indeed constantly changed to reinforce asymmetry.

Idris is also right to note that by proposing differently situated thinkers as a set of critical resources, I did not address how, “as resources,” they might “authorize different political projects,” with some offering critiques and others active resistance to imperial domination. I take this point to heart and offer here what amounts to a provisional response. His claim might be read as an assertion that only authors of a particular (anti- or postcolonial) identity are in a position to contribute to resistance; or it might be to say that critics’ ideas are invariably shaped by their relation to structures of power, so that we should not be surprised to find the limitations I noted among the early European critics, with their privileged, sometimes even interested, relations to European imperial power. The latter reading certainly seems right; I am less sure about the former, given the myriad ways in which texts speak to and are taken up by readers in new contexts, as in C. L. R. James’s famous vignette of Toussaint L’Ouverture reading “over and over again” the passage in Raynal’s History of the Two Indies: “A courageous chief only is wanted. Where is he?” Further, wherever the critics’ location, it is worth noting that the audiences of these critiques were generally in the imperial metropole. Hamdan Khodja, as much as Anquetil-Duperron, shaped his arguments to appeal to a French audience to whose preconceptions and partialities both were alert, for instance by deploying tropes of “backwardness” but insisting that urban elites like himself, not European rulers, should be the ones to civilize the Algerian hinterland.

Idris’s related point that two distinct sorts of critique, ethical and structural, jostle together in the history I narrate is likewise astute. This point gets to an issue central to the critical history of international law and political thought of the sort I attempt in much of my work, namely the vexed relationship between structural dynamics of the capitalist world system and the conceptual and normative arguments that agents acting within (replicating, challenging) these structures rely on to navigate them, to make sense of their own actions and the world around them, and to interact with others. Although some lines of criticism may indeed emphasize the vices—presumption, bigotry, hypocrisy — associated with imperialism, the critics I discuss generally conjoin such arguments with more structural ones, as in Burke’s various arguments that global empires were by their nature (distance, nonaccountability to the governed) inclined to abuses of power. Attention to both is arguably necessary given that structures shape the self-understandings and ultimately the actions of the agents who perpetuate them and are likewise enabled and shaped by those self-conceptions.