Why the Faustian pact? Why international law? Why now? Inquiring into whether international law is quintessentially Faustian and how to deal with that – as this book seeks to do – does not necessarily explain and justify itself. To start with, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust dangles the tantalising possibility of frustrating Faustian pacts, and two lines from it sparked and have spurred and sustained this project on. The first was Mephistopheles’ description of himself as:

where he represented himself – and indeed was presented – as somehow a servant of God or at the very least as doing God’s work for Him. The second, and related to this, was Mephistopheles’ sly and ironic observation to God that Faust ‘serves You in a curious way’, which may well have been simultaneously description and self-description. Whether taken together or separately, these lines say a good deal about the Mephistophelean character and role, which claims to bring good and evil together in some sort of productive and somehow mutually reliant relationship, all the while couched in a consciously bottomless ironic register.