lation from 1970 to the 2008 Discrimination Act. She constructs an archive that captures what she calls the “transformational moment”, the moment when political values are formalized into legal categories.20 Through a genealogical reading organized around a set of discursive themes (such as universalism, legalism, majoritarianism, and expert knowledge), she shows how the Swedish legal understanding of equality has been progressively channelled into a formal equal-treatment imperative, often at the cost of substantive equality ambitions.21 What does constructing an “archive” mean in this context? Both Otter Johansen and Nääv explicitly refer to a methodological reflection by Anne Orford on her genealogical investigation of the doctrinal international legal work and the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (“R2P doctrine”).22 Inspired by Foucault and Wittgenstein, Orford suggesteddescriptionas a method for critical legal studies as it is about “making visible what we already see” and organizing “what we have always known.”23 But how to do this in practical terms? Orford solved this by ceasing the attempt to answer the question of whether theR2P doctrine she was examining was legally binding or not; Orford defied what she calls an essentialist impulse to “unveil what the concept really meant at some deeper level” and instead began to focus on the concept as an “articulation of international authority's consciousness of itself.”24 During her investigation of the R2Pdoctrine, Orford found that a more fruitful methodological approach was to work closely with her material, which she delimited to a specific archive.25 By limiting the 109 petter danckwardt 19 Johansen, Förvaltning som verksamhet: bidrag till offentligrättens allmänna läror (above, note 10), p. 68 f. See also, ibid., p. 269: “The idea that administration should primarily be regarded as activity has been both the driving idea and, at the same time, that which must be substantiated and made credible. Concrete administrative activity has indeed long been a blind spot within general administrative law and, more broadly, within public law’s treatment of public administration.” My translation. 20Nääv, (O)likabehandling. Likabehandling och jämlikhetsförbättrande åtgärder i den svenska diskrimineringslagstiftningens genealogi (above, note 10), p. 47 ff. 21 Ibid, p. 280: “What takes place in the archive […] is that formal rationality – that is, claims to legitimacy that derive their authority by communicating with the legal system – prevails over substantive rationality, which would entail the realization of a political aim of equality at the expense of the internal logic of the legal system.” My translation. 22 See Orford, Anne, International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect, Cambridge 2011. 23 Anne Orford, ”In Praise of Description”Leiden Journal of International Law2012, p. 618. 24 Ibid, p.612. 25 Ibid, p.615.
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