Sovereign marks

This chapter analyses a treaty made on behalf of the Association Internationale du Congo (the infamous private company of King Leopold II of Belgium) with roi Né-Do’ucoula of Boma on 19 April 1884. Whereas legal analysis would usually focus on the content of the treaty and its provisions to establish legal facts, this chapter moves the attention to the signatures at the bottom. It argues that they constitute an important object of international law, as they provide a counter narrative to the popular Standard of Civilisation as the founding doctrine of the Family of Nations in the nineteenth century. As objects of international law the signatures—or rather marks or crosses—embody at the same time the condition of possibility of the nineteenth-century international legal order, and undermine its defining framework (that is, constitute its condition of impossibility).