Volume 412 of the
Recueil des Cours, Collected Courses of the Hague Academy of International
Law
is out. Contents include:
The design of empirical research and theory-building projects in the sociolegal literature on criminalization is often premised on a presumed dichotomy between domestic and international planes of criminal lawmaking. However, in a global era in which domestic processes of criminalization are increasingly shaped by norms, institutions, and actors developed and operating outside national borders, criminalization research should develop a new theoretical frame for studying how international and domestic practices of criminal lawmaking interact with one another. This article builds from the theory of transnational legal orders and the recursivity of law to propose a transnational processual theoretical framework for the study of criminalization. This framework provides tools for investigating how criminal prohibitions are constituted through recursive interactions between actors operating in international, national, and local sites of legal practice. It draws on empirical studies to show how the processes of constructing, applying, and contesting definitions of international and transnational crimes are embedded in broader structures of power. The article demonstrates how a processual theory of transnational criminalization sheds light on important sociolegal questions about the driving forces and consequences of current efforts to harmonize the definitions of criminal activities across national jurisdictions.
The latest issue of the International Community Law Review (Vol. 22, no. 5, 2020) is out. Contents include:
Volume 411 of the
Recueil des Cours, Collected Courses of the Hague Academy of International
Law
is out. Contents include:
The latest issue of the Stanford Journal of International Law (Vol. 56, no. 2, Summer 2020) is out. Contents include:
The latest issue of the International Criminal Law Review (Vol. 20, no. 6, 2020) is out. Contents include:
The latest issue of the International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law (Vol. 35, no. 4, 2020) is out. Contents include:
The latest issue of the Nordic Journal of International Law (Vol. 89, nos. 3-4, 2020) is out. Contents include:
Volume 410 of the
Recueil des Cours, Collected Courses of the Hague Academy of International
Law
is out. Contents include:
The latest issue of the Nordic Journal of Human Rights (Vol. 38, no. 2, 2020) is out. Contents include:
The latest issue of the Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy (Vol. 23, no. 3, 2020) is out. Contents include:
André Nollkaemper, Jean d’Aspremont, Christiane Ahlborn, Berenice Boutin, Nataša Nedeski, & Ilias Plakokefalos, with the collaboration of Dov Jacobs, Guiding Principles on Shared Responsibility in International Law (European Journal of International Law, Vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 15–72, February 2020)This article contains the 15 Guiding Principles on Shared Responsibility in International Law and Commentaries to the Guiding Principles, which are drawn from the main findings of the SHARES research project on shared responsibility in international law, that was conducted at the University of Amsterdam. These Guiding Principles and Commentaries will hopefully provide guidance to practitioners, government officials, and adjudicators, and shape and influence the current scholarly debate in international law on shared responsibility. This is necessary as the existing rules of international responsibility (2001 ARSIWA and 2011 ARIO) leave room for interpretation as to who can be held responsible in case multiple states and/or international organisations contribute to an injury of a third party.
Jessica Schechinger
PhD Candidate in International Law and Tutor
University of Glasgow
The latest issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution (Vol. 65, no. 1, January 2021) is out. Contents include:
Emma Irving, Multi-Actor Human Rights Protection at the International Criminal Court (Cambridge Univ. Press 2020)This monograph explores the involvement of the ICC, ICC States Parties, and the ICC host State in the protection of individuals, shedding light on ambiguity and uncertainty concerning the protection of individuals. By setting out the relevant obligations of the different actors, the book highlights potential problems in human rights protection of individuals at the ICC and proposes ways to mitigate them. Employing a critical and unique approach, the book is incredibly valuable for scholars and policy-makers interested in human rights and international criminal justice.
Johanna Trittenbach
Research and Teaching Associate
Kalshoven-Gieskes Forum on International Humanitarian Law
Leiden University
This illuminating monograph examines analytical and practical aspects of the relationship between international law and international politics, providing a comprehensive analysis of the foundations on which both the international legal system and international politics rest.
With an interdisciplinary perspective, Alexander Orakhelashvili compares and contrasts the methods of international legal reasoning with international relations as a discipline, focusing on timeless and central issues that connect the past, present and future. The book examines, through the use of both disciplines’ methodology, some more specific areas such as public authority, global space, and peace, with the overall outcome that political contempt towards the international legal system could have unexpected and costly adverse political consequences.
Lorenzo Cotula, (Dis)integration in Global Resource Governance: Extractivism, Human Rights, and Investment Treaties (Journal of International Economic Law, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 431–454, June 2020)I appreciate this article because it provides a comprehensive discussion of the inconsistencies that exist within and between national and international legal frameworks governing the exploitation of natural resources. The article contextualizes current controversies, for instance concerning the relationship between human rights and investment law, providing broader perspectives on divergent interests existing on the international, domestic and sub-national level, and identifying socio-economic linkages that are easy to miss when one studies legal questions within the boundaries of a single regime of law.
Johannes Hendrik Fahner
Researcher
University of Amsterdam
Attorney-at-Law
This book considers the significance of informed publics from the perspective of international law. It does so by analysing international media law frameworks and the 'mediatization' of international law in institutional settings. This approach exposes the complexity of the interrelationship between international law and the media, but also points to the dangers involved in international law's associated and increasing reliance upon the mediated techniques of communicative capitalism – such as publicity – premised upon an informed international public whose existence many now question.
The book explores the ways in which traditional regulatory and analytical categories are increasingly challenged - revealed as inadequate or bypassed - but also assesses their resilience and future utility in light of significant technological change and concerns about fake news, the rise of big data and algorithmic accountability. Furthermore, it contends that analysing the imbrication of media and international law in the current digital transition is necessary to understand the nature of the problems a system such as international law faces without sufficiently informed publics.
The book argues that international law depends on informed global publics to function and to address the complex global problems which we face. This draws into view the role media plays in relation to international law, but also the role of international law in regulating the media, and reveals the communicative character of international law.
How do states violate human rights norms after legalization? Why are these violations so persistent? What are the limits of legalization for protecting human rights norms? Conventional wisdom offers a variety of answers to these questions, but most often they conflate laws and norms and focus only on state actions that violate both. While this focus is undoubtedly valuable, it does not capture cases in which states violate human rights norms without technically violating the law. Norm breakers are not necessarily lawbreakers. Focusing exclusively on norm violations that are illegal obscures the possibility that agents could violate norms in a legal manner, engaging in actions that are awful but lawful.
Presenting rich case studies of the French expulsion of Roma immigrants from 2007 to 2017 and the Czech segregation of Roma children in schools for those with mild mental disabilities between 1993 and 2017, Evading International Norms argues that the violation of human rights norms often continues after legalization under the cover of technical legality. While laws and norms overlap, interact, and shape each other in many ways, they tend to reflect each other only selectively, which leads to the existence of norm-law gaps. Taking advantage of such gaps, states resist unwanted human rights obligations by transgressing international human rights norms without violating the laws designed to protect them—a process Zoltán I. Búzás names norm evasion.
Based on a wealth of evidence, including more than 160 interviews, the book shows that the treatment of the Roma by France and the Czech Republic violated the norm of racial equality in a technically legal fashion. Búzás cautions that the good news about law compliance is not necessarily good news about norm compliance and draws attention to racial discrimination against the Roma, one of the largest and most marginalized European minorities.
Prabhakar Singh, Indian Princely States and the 19th-century Transformation of the Law of Nations (Journal of International Dispute Settlement, Vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 365–387, September 2020)"Indian Princely States and the 19th-century Transformation of the Law of Nations" presents an interesting and never talked about account of the nineteenth century’s 600 Indian princely states in the transformation of "the law of nations" to the "international law." Engaging into the legal and political texts reflecting the semi-sovereign status of the Mughal and Maratha regimes, the claims in the study appears to have reversed the studies in the previous decades that have overlooked, under read and undervalued such bottom-up study in international legal history through native actors. It churns out some fascinating political and financial contributions of the "princely" states (as the "civilised" called it), in universalising the "European" law of nations. The transporting of civilizational values is vehemently refuted and the artificiality of the normative scarcity in the Indian subcontinent is highlighted.
The article scrapes off the layer that glossed the (European) international legal history and reveals a consciously glorified argument of European "law of nations" to have transformed into "universal" international law resting on the pillars of political and financial costs that the semi-sovereign states bore. An ingenious claim that is made through a novel style of reading international legal history through the "imperial jurisdiction," native litigations and petitions is an unsettling line of enquiry. The tightly placed arguments in a sharp tone is novel and seems to have taken Antony Anghie’s argument in Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law to one step ahead. The research, the style of writing and the thought provoking arguments are sure to make the reader see the imprudence of the previous Eurocentric scholarship.
Swati Singh Parmar
Assistant Professor
Dharmashastra National Law University, Jabalpur
In Lawmaking under Pressure, Giovanni Mantilla analyzes the origins and development of the international humanitarian treaty rules that now exist to regulate internal armed conflict. Until well into the twentieth century, states allowed atrocious violence as an acceptable product of internal conflict. Why have states created international laws to control internal armed conflict? Why did states compromise their national security by accepting these international humanitarian constraints? Why did they create these rules at improbable moments, as European empires cracked, freedom fighters emerged, and fears of communist rebellion spread? Mantilla explores the global politics and diplomatic dynamics that led to the creation of such laws in 1949 and in the 1970s.
By the 1949 Diplomatic Conference that revised the Geneva Conventions, most countries supported legislation committing states and rebels to humane principles of wartime behavior and to the avoidance of abhorrent atrocities, including torture and the murder of non-combatants. However, for decades, states had long refused to codify similar regulations concerning violence within their own borders. Diplomatic conferences in Geneva twice channeled humanitarian attitudes alongside Cold War and decolonization politics, even compelling reluctant European empires Britain and France to accept them. Lawmaking under Pressure documents the tense politics behind the making of humanitarian laws that have become touchstones of the contemporary international normative order.
Mantilla not only explains the pressures that resulted in constraints on national sovereignty but also uncovers the fascinating international politics of shame, status, and hypocrisy that helped to produce the humanitarian rules now governing internal conflict.
The latest issue of the Human Rights Law Review (Vol. 20, no. 4, December 2020) is out. Contents include:
Charles B. Roger, The Origins of Informality: Why the Legal Foundations of Global Governance are Shifting, and Why It Matters (Oxford Univ. Press 2020)I consider Charles B. Roger’s book The Origins of Informality to be not only most the most interesting, but also the most important book on international law that was published in 2020. Above all, Roger’s book makes perfectly clear that any account of global governance that does not take informal international organizations into account is inherently incomplete. Especially given that most of IR scholarship on international law is still focused on formal international organizations, this is a powerful message which is bound to change our thinking about global governance. Roger’s book is so compelling because it combines clear conceptualizations and straightforward theorizing with a rigorous and systematic empirical analysis. His theory convincingly locates the origins of (the proliferation of) informal international organizations within the domestic political arenas of powerful states. By arguing that the growth of political polarization over the last decades and the emergence of the regulatory state can account for the rise of informal international organizations, Roger enables us to understand how important political trends in Western societies have been affecting the shape of global governance. Important is also that Roger’s empirical findings challenge the functionalist approach to informal international organizations which has hitherto been dominating the IR literature on this topic. In sum, my expectation is that, in a few years, The Origins of Informality will be considered to be a milestone in the literature on global governance and international law not only by me, but by the scholarly community at large.
Dr. Benjamin Faude
LSE Fellow in Global Politics
Department of Government and Department of International Relations
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
Lukas Vanhonnaeker, Shareholders' Claims for Reflective Loss in International Investment Law (Cambridge Univ. Press 2020)The book by Lukas Vanhonnaeker puts a spotlight on a different type of “atypical” investor: shareholders. In particular, the book makes a strong case for allowing shareholders' claims for reflective loss under international investment law. It analyses the policy implications of protecting shareholders within the investment treaty regime and conducts a detailed review of the landmark cases and instruments that tackle the issue. It explains the legal and policy reasons why investment law recognizes and protects against reflective loss, and the means by which it does so. Some States, such as South Africa, have advocated restricting the availability of the investment treaty regime only for claims by the directly injured companies, which would precluding shareholders from raising claims. Indeed, many of these objections behind this position – including creating a disincentive to settle and the perils of parallel proceedings – are addressed by the author. The importance of the book stems from Vanhonnaeker’s meticulous attention to detail in laying out these objections, but also making concrete proposals as to if, and how, they can be overcome. Despite several recent tribunals that have addressed the matter, this book is among the first to comprehensively treat claims for reflective loss. Indeed, it is a must-read item for scholars and practitioners that are involving in researching or litigation such claims.
Dilini Pathirana
Faculty of Law
University of Colombo
This volume offers new practical and theoretical perspectives on one of the most complex questions regarding the formation of international law, namely that actors other than states contribute to the making of customary international law.
Notwithstanding the International Law Commission's valuable contribution, the making of customary international law remains riddled with acute practical and theoretical controversies that continue to be intensively debated. Making extensive reference to the case-law of international law courts and tribunals, as well as the most recent scholarly work on customary international law, this volume provides a comprehensive study of the contribution of international organisations and non-state actors to the formation of customary international law. With innovative tools and guidance for law students, legal scholars, and researchers in law, as well as legal practitioners, advisers, judges, arbitrators, and counsels, this collection is essential reading for those wishing to understand and address contemporary questions of international law-making.
Mark McLaughlin, Defining a State-Owned Enterprise in International Investment Agreements (ICSID Review - Foreign Investment Law Journal, Vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 595–625, Fall 2019)Despite the growing presence of state capitalism in the global economy, a unified definition of a state-owned enterprises (SOE) continues to elude regulators and academics. McLaughlin has made a well-reasoned attempt to establish a five-criteria framework by which States can distinguish SOEs from private investors, as well as other forms of sovereign investments. The value of the contribution is in recognizing that defining SOEs is an issue of great complexity due to the difficulty in neatly expressing their characteristics in terms of the orthodox dichotomy between the private interests of foreign investors and the public interests of host States. This dilemma has already raised questions as to the legitimacy of SOEs being able to access the conventional investment regime and the potential security concerns when they pursue non-commercial policy objectives. Formulating a shared framework for defining SOEs is highly significant for both substantive and procedural issues at national and international levels. The article exposes the inherent grey areas where SOEs are defined by the “effective influence” that home governments wield over enterprises operating overseas, while also convincingly arguing that “ownership” is no longer a suitable criterion to measure state influence. He does not impose a rigid definition, nor propose reactionary solutions to a growing US/EU-China divide but provides criteria through which states can meaningfully express their different perspectives. For this reason, this article contributes to legal discourse on the protection of sovereign investments, while addressing lack of a universal definition of SOEs. Therefore, it addresses a critical gap in international investment law created by the unprecedented rise of State capitalism.
Dilini Pathirana
Faculty of Law
University of Colombo
Changing Actors in International Law explores actors other than the ‘state’ in international law with a particular focus on under-researched actors or others that do not easily fit the category of a non-state actor (such as quasi-states, trans-government networks, Indigenous Peoples and self-determination claimant groups). It also examines less well studied aspects of otherwise well-researched actors such as individuals, corporations, NGOs and armed organised groups. In Part 1 of this book, authors examine the role and consequences of the participation of those actors in the process of international law creation. In Part 2, authors focus on the extent to which these actors can be held responsible under international law for its breach and their participation in traditional and non-traditional dispute resolution processes.
Mattia Pinto, Historical Trends of Human Rights Gone Criminal (Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 729-761, 2020)Perpetrators of human rights violations must be held criminally responsible for their conduct. How many times do we read this sentence as international lawyers? Probably too many that we do not even think of questioning it. But maybe we should. For anyone who wants to embark on this challenge, “Historical Trends of Human Rights Gone Criminal” by Mattia Pinto becomes a must-read starting point.
The article explores how, since 1970s, human rights have been used as drivers of penalty. Through a careful analysis of the interactions between the international, regional and domestic levels in this context, Pinto guides the reader through an extremely fascinating and complex historical, legal and sociological path. In doing so, he invites to reflect on the current normalisation of criminal law as one of the main tools for the protection of human rights. This paper will surely be one of those that cannot but be taken into account in dealing with the relationship between penalty and human rights.
Giulia Bosi
Ph.D. Candidate in Human Rights and Global Politics
Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies
Ntina Tzouvala, Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law (Cambridge Univ. Press 2020)This book is a true tour de force. It shows Tzouvala's admirable breadth of knowledge and sharpness of critical reflection. Tzouvala masterfully combines her fluency in cogent theoretical and critical thinking, with detailed technical understanding of ins and outs of law, and, additionally, with careful parsing of a wealth of historical materials.
This book is not only an important contribution to the critical tradition in international law, but, more importantly, to the theorizing of international law and our understanding of international law as a discipline in a historical context, more broadly. It bridges not only Marxist and TWAIL approaches, but also mainstream theorizing of international law. Her theoretical work is not, however, idealist or abstract but it is carried out through a careful and detailed historically materialist approach which is always attuned to the structures and mechanism of oppression and exploitation. This book productively updates the common disciplinary understanding of indeterminacy of international law in showing its deep links with global capitalism and imperialism. This gives the work an immense explanatory edge. Finally, Capitalism as Civilisation shows a possibility, and usefulness, of a Marxist approach to international law that does not fall prey to rigid structuralist or determinist assumptions and explanations.
The book deserves to be right up next to the other great defining works of international law of the last few decades.
Josef Ostřanský
Max Weber Fellow
European University Institute
