Rule of Law and Translation

The rule of law has become a shared concern and common object linking disparate professional groups, including human rights activists, development experts, legal practitioners, and security analysts. Their professional work takes place in a transnational field of ‘rule of law promotion’ populated by organizations such as the United Nations (UN), the World Bank, the European Union (EU) and bilateral donor agencies, including the USAID, where consensus on the virtues and importance of the rule of law for good governance and the protection of fundamental rights is reached because – and not despite – of the rule of law's polymorphous and ambiguous meaning. I show in this chapter how translation as an analytical lens enables the identification and articulation of contestation and frictions in law. Analytically, translation begins with the instability and indeterminacy of meaning to trace practices, processes, and actors in attempts to stabilize meaning in situ and over time. This chapter outlines how ‘translation’ enables the unsettling and decentering of persistent claims to law's – in particular international law's – assumed impartiality and universality. Focusing on translations within and across professional and institutional bounds reveals frictions in law when legal concepts, institutions, and arguments travel across divides and under conditions of uncertainty.