-
‘English in taste, Indian in blood’: caste hegemony in the making of British international legal thought London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2024-03-24 Ahmed Memon
In this article, I argue that caste was a central factor in the development of British international legal thought in the subcontinent. Specifically, I contend that British international legal thought entrenched caste hegemony into the broader racial civilisation hierarchy of international law in the nineteenth century.
-
Ethical challenges of using trial transcripts for research purposes: A case study of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2024-02-02 Marina Veličković
Drawing on three years of empirical research, the article explores four ethical challenges of working with trial transcripts: lack of participant consent; impossibility of research reciprocity; the risk that one’s use of these materials can be harmful to the local communities, and the risk that this use might be harmful to the researchers themselves.
-
International law as shibboleth: the continued appeal of heroic narratives in support of military intervention London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2023-12-09 Lynsey Mitchell
Political debates on the use of force draw on Manichean narratives which are legitimated by legalistic language. Overreliance on such narratives devalues international law as a safeguard against the illegal use of force, silences criticism that militarism is not the solution to international crises, and blurs legal and non-legal justifications for intervention.
-
International economic institutions after neoliberalism: the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity as a blueprint? London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2023-11-06 Rémi Bachand
The framework of global trade has been undergoing important transformations in the last few years. This article will defend the thesis that these events form the background of a possibly significant transformation of US capitalism that will be accompanied by new and profoundly different types of trade agreements and institutions.
-
‘Transforming our world’? A historical materialist critique of the sustainable development agenda London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2023-09-28 Matheus Gobbato Leichtweis
Questioning the transformative potential of the Sustainable Development Goals, the article mobilises elements of critical theory in order to demonstrate how contemporary forms of global sustainability governance refrain from tackling the capitalist roots of unsustainable development. For this reason, they remain incapable of delivering on their promises of world transformation.
-
Money, magic, and machines: International Telecommunication Union and liberalisation of telecommunications networks and services (1970s–1990s) London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2023-08-13 Negar Mansouri
This paper studies the liberalisation of telecommunication networks and services in the last quarter of the twentieth century, focusing on the role that the International Telecommunication Union played in creating the material, normative and ideological foundations of the pro-market global telecommunications order.
-
The land in sight: waiting for a Libyan government London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2023-07-09 Renske Vos
The article reconstructs the waiting of EU officials for a Libyan government to partner with, amidst the broader 2015 European Refugee Crisis. Methodologically, it takes recourse to two iconic stories of waiting—Homer’s Odyssey and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot—to push on the multiple im/materialies of waiting and of sovereignty. This illuminates the situation as one of Libya maintaining its sovereignty
-
Proportionality rhetoric and neoliberal rationality in the ‘fundamental social rights’ adjudication of the Court of Justice of the European Union London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2023-07-07 Juan J Garcia Blesa
This article studies the rhetorical construction of proportionality discourse in controversial social rights cases at the Court of Justice of the European Union. It argues that neoliberal rationality controls the Court’s proportionality discourse. That rationality operates through eliding social conflict and excluding egalitarian approaches to social rights, which are rhetorically re-imagined as subsidiary
-
Rhetorical militarism, humanitarian law, and public space: a study on military interventions in Brazil London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Renata Nagamine, João Roriz
In Rio de Janeiro, the laws of war have contributed to the transformation of symbolically and materially violent means and practices into an experience of everyday life. Political actors contribute to rationalizing violence in certain areas of Brazil, disregarding expectations related to citizenship and human rights.
-
Business as unusal: a materialist critique of international criminal justice London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2023-04-27 Sinja Graf
Christine Schwöbel-Patel, Marketing Global Justice: The Political Economy of International Criminal Law (Cambridge University Press 2021)
-
Locating humanity in crimes against humanity London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2023-04-27 Christine Schwöbel-Patel
Sinja Graf, The Humanity of Universal Crime: Inclusion, Inequality, and Intervention in International Political Thought (Oxford University Press 2021)
-
The many beginnings of Operation Sophia: international law and literature in the governance of the EU London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2023-04-25 Renske Vos
Borrowing from literary studies, this article revisits a series of interviews conducted with EU officials who narrated many beginnings of an EU military counter-migrant smuggling operation. The article asks what these many beginnings do together. It argues they together constitute a mode of (un)governance geared towards leaving open maximum room for manoeuvre.
-
Toward a democratic theory of contagion: virality and performativity with Eve Sedgwick, JL Austin, Hortense Spillers, and Patricia Williams London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Bonnie Honig
In Euripides’ Bacchae, the 2015 film The Fits, and John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971), refusal is depicted as worryingly contagious and efforts are made to contain it. But each represents a different model of contagion. In the Bacchae, refusal breaks out all-at-once; in The Fits, a contagion passes through a community in a sequence, mutating as it travels; in A Theory of Justice, refusal is contagious
-
The justice archive: transitional justice and digital memory London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2023-03-07 Iavor Rangelov, Ruti Teitel
This article introduces the justice archive as a concept and set of practices emerging from recent developments in transitional justice, memory, and digital technology. Drawing on evidence from the Americas and the Balkans, it examines digital archiving and memory activism and considers the role of international law and regulation.
-
Problematising diversity: The change that international lawyers (do not) want for international courts London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-12-28 Juliana Santos de Carvalho, Justina Uriburu
Scholars working on international courts and tribunals (ICTs) have recently seized the agenda of the diversity of the international judiciary and international institutions more broadly. Focusing, above all, on the lack of women in the different international benches around the world, they have criticised and proposed reforms to the composition of ICTs. This paper argues that the burgeoning literature
-
Sensing suffering: on common-sense and compassion in the legal imagination and recognition of torture London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-12-05 Ergün Cakal
Emotion and imagination are central to recognising another’s suffering—aiding in evaluating what is seen, heard, and registered. Tending to torture’s adjudication, this article connects the ‘law and torture’ jurisprudence to two areas of ‘law and emotion’ scholarship, namely common-sense and compassion (and, with the latter, empathy).
-
Grand theft in international law London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Lys Kulamadayil
Commonly subsumed under the legal concepts of corruption and money-laundering, the theft of public wealth on a massive scale with the aid of transnational financial institutions has, so far, largely been neglected by legal scholarship and legal practise. Drawing on two grand theft cases, this article’s objectives are threefold. Firstly, it explains the concept of grand theft by illustrating how it
-
Building (of) the international community: a history of the Peace Palace through transnational gifts and local bureaucracy London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-09-06 Tanja Aalberts, Sofia Stolk
The Peace Palace in The Hague is more than a mere venue where international law is practiced. Initiated after the 1899 Peace Conference it provided a material home for the emergent international community and as such, we argue, helped to sing this community into existence. This article traces the process of materialising the grand international ideal of ‘peace through justice’ by shedding light on
-
Unclosure: The international law of seabed mining and the systemic cycles of capital accumulation London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-08-18 Michele Tedeschini
The growing electric vehicle industry is heavily reliant on minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper. As corporations scramble to access vast deposits of those minerals lying in the ocean floor, the international law of seabed mining has come under scrutiny. This article situates negotiations concerning that law, which took place between 1973 and 1994, within Giovanni Arrighi’s historiographical
-
Subaltern subjectivity and embodiment in human rights practices London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-08-01 Shaimaa Abdelkarim
This article problematises the representation of subaltern resistance in practices of human rights. It critiques the normative framing of the subaltern by those practices, a framing which it argues contributes to their subjugation. Against such framing, the article follows the 2011 Egyptian uprising through the film Rags & Tatters, offering a practice of freedom beyond human rights and through self-recollection
-
Of violence and (in)visibility: the securitisation of climate change in international law London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Eliana Cusato
Drawing upon critical security studies, I explore the political stakes involved in characterising climate change as a peace and security issue. I argue that international law is involved in the constitution and embedding of specific climate security discourses, which have an impact on whose violence is seen and, thus, condemned.
-
History and self-reflection in the teaching of international law London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-05-17 Henry Jones, Aoife O’Donoghue
This article is about how international law, and specifically its history, is taught. The article critiques the pedagogy in this area by analysis of textbooks, and then considers the contexts in which international legal texts are written, taught and read. In light of this we suggest how to teach the history of international law, and international law in general, better.
-
Review Essay: Implicated in violence: Socio-legal approaches to international humanitarian law and international criminal law London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-04-23 Christiane Wilke
Kamari Maxine Clarke, Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback (Duke University Press 2020). Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press 2019). Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire (University of California Press 2020). Craig Jones, The War Lawyers: The United
-
Rituals of (dis)possession: appropriation and performativity in the early modern law of nations London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-03-24 Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa
This article makes a contribution to the history and theory of international law by looking at instruments, institutions, and practices of the Spanish Conquest. Instead of analysing the canonical texts of the ‘Spanish fathers’ of the law of nations, as has been done several times in the literature, it focuses on the legal forms of territorial acquisition and analyses the performative character of the
-
Bad for business: the construction of modern slavery and the reconfiguration of sovereignty London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-03-21 Judy Fudge
Although the UN calls on governments to end modern slavery, Walk Free, a private foundation connected to the faith-based abolitionist movement, leads the private-public network to eliminate slavery from transnational supply chains. Examining the network’s governance techniques reveals how scale and governance are reconfiguring sovereignty beyond the territory of the nation state and aligning it with
-
International criminal law and the slave trade: the past and the present London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Michael Lobban
-
Writing the recaptive: a response London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Emily Haslam
-
The precarious agency of racialised recaptives London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Christine Schwöbel-Patel
-
Celebrating international criminal justice: a sociology of the twentieth anniversary of the International Criminal Court London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-02-16 Christensen M.
AbstractThe article analyses events that marked the twentieth anniversary of the Rome Statute. Building on sociological methods and original data, the article shows how these events were dominated by particular elites and by an orthodox perspective on international criminal justice that excluded other points of view and professional groups.
-
The right to live: response to the commentators London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-02-16 Marks S.
I want to begin by expressing my heartfelt thanks both to the editors of the London Review of International Law for organising and publishing this symposium on my book A False Tree of Liberty, and to the three commentators—Anna Chadwick, Ben Golder and Kasey McCall-Smith—for their generous and astute readings of the book. There is something deeply moving about being read in a way that perfectly grasps
-
A critical appraisal of the concept of climate migration London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-02-16 Lauria G.
AbstractThis article analyses international legal scholarship and policy developments on the climate-migration nexus through the lens of the relationship between international law and crisis. It argues that legal and policy debates on climate-related mobility reflect an oscillation between two dimensions associated with crisis narrative: catalyst and decoy.
-
The writing on the wall London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-02-16 McCall-Smith K.
In the opening of A False Tree of Liberty Susan Marks offers a brief vignette of Thomas Spence inscribing on a wall a claim to the rights of man against a private landlord.11 Using this as a jumping off point, Marks crafts a multidimensional tale of how property rights served as an entry point to debates about many of the claims British commoners made on the state during the seventeenth and eighteenth
-
In the present state of things London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-02-16 Golder B.
In the Introduction to A False Tree of Liberty: Human Rights in Radical Thought, patently and impressively an intellectual history of the ways in which human rights have been understood in the English radical tradition from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, its storied author modestly declares: ‘I am not an historian’.11 Several pages prior to this curious admission, Susan Marks suggests that
-
Protecting foreign investments in revolution and civil war: critiquing the contemporary arbitral practice London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-02-16 Greenman K.
AbstractThe protection of foreign investment during times of revolution and civil war, and especially against acts of non-state forces, has a history—both recent and longer past. The issue has re-emerged as a result of the series of revolutions and civil wars, known as the Arab Spring. This is demonstrated by several recent awards against Libya, Egypt and Syria, as well as a number of pending claims
-
Engaging an infrastructure of time production with international law London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2022-02-16 Gordon G.
AbstractThis article explores international legal entanglements with the infrastructure of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), a socio-technical construction that comprises the globally definitive measure of seconds, minutes and hours working in lockstep around the world. UTC is produced and maintained with international law, through international administration with social, political, material and technical
-
The tyranny of strangers: transformative occupations old and new London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2021-12-04 Craven M.
AbstractIn the aftermath of the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003, considerable attention was given to the apparent emergence of a new type of belligerent occupation—the ‘transformative occupation’ which apparently challenged the traditional assumptions of the law of occupation. The suggestion here is that, as an examination of the British occupation of Mesopotamia between 1914-1924 reveals, the ‘transformative
-
International law, politics and opposition to the Iraq War London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2021-12-04 Knox R.
AbstractA key feature of the Iraq war was the prominence of international legal argument. This article argues that the motif of the ‘illegal war’ was crucial in mobilisations against the war. It traces the reasons for the prominence of this ‘illegal war’ motif and the wider political consequences of its adoption.
-
Public invocations of international law and legacies of the Iraq War London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2021-12-04 Chiam M.
AbstractThis essay reads three texts: Charlotte Peevers’s The Politics of Justifying Force: the Suez Crisis, the Iraq War and International Law, the 2016 Report of the UK Iraq Inquiry, and Ayça Çubukçu’s For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal On Iraq. It explores what each of the texts tells us about the role of international law as a public language and suggests how we might think of the texts
-
Maritime demarcation in the Gulf after 2003 London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2021-12-04 Heathcote G.
AbstractThis paper uses the Iranian detention of twelve British naval and marine personnel in the Northern Gulf in March 2007 as a prompt to examine the place of the 2003 invasion of Iraq within the continuities and ruptures of the international legal imagination, including that of critical international lawyers.
-
Symposium Introduction: The 2003 Iraq War: history, legacy, resistance London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2021-12-04 Grady K.
The articles in this symposium issue—on the 2003 Iraq War: History, Legacy, Resistance—arise out of the Society of Legal Scholars Annual Seminar 2018 which was held in London for the fifteenth anniversary of the start of that war.11 The aim of the seminar, organised jointly between SOAS University of London and the University of Sheffield, was to examine the continuing relevance, and resonance, of
-
Re-appropriating the Rights of Man: some reflections on A False Tree of Liberty by Susan Marks London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Anna Chadwick
-
War and order: rethinking criminal accountability for the Iraq War London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2021-10-14 Grady K.
AbstractPublic calls for the criminal accountability of UK and US politicians for the 2003 Iraq war are part of the war’s legal legacies. This article questions whether criminal sanction can be a corrective to war by considering whether the relationship between the two might be understood as symbiotic.
-
The museum and the border: the Merseyside Maritime Museum and the construction of the migrant and refugee London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2021-08-07 Anne Neylon
This article examines how the state imagines and represents migration. Using the Merseyside Maritime Museum as a frame, it provides key insights into how perspectives of time and particular constructions of colonial history have contributed to a system of immigration law that is characterised by a policy of institutional forgetting.
-
The Polish Rider: CH Alexandrowicz and the reorientation of international law, Part II: declension and the promise of renewal London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2021-06-28 Landauer C.
AbstractThis article is the second of a two-part analysis of the work of the international legal historian, CH Alexandrowicz. Part II analyses Alexandrowicz’s narrative of the decline of international law represented by 19th-century positivism and the scramble for African territory, where legal principles such as the protectorate became mere tools for acquisition, and treaties bereft of obligation
-
The law of the global economy and the spectre of inequality London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2021-06-12 Ingo Venzke
Drawing on my inaugural lecture, I argue that the spectre of inequality haunts international law. The presence of the spectre first of all draws attention to what is rotten in the global economic order: how the law of the global economy has contributed to high levels of inequality while, at the same time, abdicating responsibility for it. Second, like all spectres, international law’s spectre of inequality
-
Normalising global commerce: containerisation, materiality, and transnational regulation (1956–68) London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2021-03-15 Daniel R Quiroga-Villamarín
Despite their importance in globalised trade, shipping containers have been neglected in legal scholarship. Our disciplinary fascination with written forms of legal activity has come to the detriment of the study of regulatory practices that operate beyond textual mediums. In this article, I argue that processes of containerisation created transnational patterns of material normalisation. By reconstructing
-
Painting international law as universal: imperialism and the co-opting of image and art London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2021-03-06 Kate Miles
Visual international law tells stories. Image and art supporting imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also projected the authority and universalism of international law. This article argues that depictions of treaty-making, of international legal theorists, and of conferences were about painting European international law as ‘successful’—telling stories of an authoritative, universal
-
The radical ideation of peasants, the ‘pseudo-radicalism’ of international human rights law, and the revolutionary lawyer London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2021-02-22 Margot E Salomon
This article questions the use of international human rights law in realising social transformation. It studies the new United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, drawing on the commodity-form theory of law. Through this lens, foregrounding the relationship between capitalism and law and their shared constituent form, the contradiction in what is at
-
Of sex and war: carceral feminism and its anti-carceral critique London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2021-01-20 Pinto M.
AbstractIn the last three decades, wartime sexual violence has become one of the main concerns for feminists engaged with international law. This essay reviews Karen Engle’s monograph on the causes and implications of today’s common-sense narrative about sexual violence in conflict. It shows how Engle’s powerful critique of ‘carceral feminism’ may represent a starting point for a new discussion of
-
The 1993 World Conference on Human Rights and the retreat of a redistributive rights vision London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2020-12-26 Burke R.
AbstractThe 1993 UN World Conference on Human Rights, the second held in the history of the UN, and the sequel to the 1968 conference in Tehran, was convened as the faith in the liberal democratic human rights order was renascent. Economic and social rights, one of the dominant notes of Tehran a quarter century earlier, were—in comparative terms—marginal to Western priorities. This paper draws on new
-
Humanising not transformative? The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and economic inequality in OECD countries 2008-19 London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2020-12-24 Ragnarsson K.
AbstractAfter leaving the issue mostly unaddressed, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has in the last few years increasingly raised concerns about economic inequality, recommending progressive taxation to finance social spending. However, emphasising tax-and-transfer to ensure sufficient provision risks humanising and legitimising neoliberalism, leaving deeper structures untouched
-
Introduction: ‘Redistributive Human Rights?’ symposium London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2020-12-17 Dehm J, Golder B, Whyte J.
We are writing this in a moment of global pandemic. Both lives and livelihoods are at stake, and the impact of decades of neoliberal restructuring on public health systems is only too clear. Despite banal assertions that COVID-19 is a great leveller, and the clichéd insistence that ‘we are all in this together’, in reality the spread of the virus has laid bare the profound inequalities that now, as
-
Contested language in the making and unmaking of Western Sahara’s extractive economy London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2020-12-11 Irwin R.
AbstractThis article considers the battle over resource extraction in the non-self-governing territory of Western Sahara. I analyse how the language of human rights has simultaneously been used by the Moroccan state to justify its extractive operations in the territory while Saharawi refugees use it to challenge these operations. Such competing invocations of human rights generate insight into how
-
Fourteen ways of looking back at the Treaty of Versailles† London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2020-03-01 Dino Kritsiotis
Abstract: This article examines the idea of the Treaty of Versailles as a readily quantifiable corpus of provisions as set down in a readily identifiable document that was signed at the Palace of Versailles on 28 June 1919. It does so by recalling the pre-history to that peace that stretches as far back as US President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of January 1918, for the German Government accepted
-
-
Visuality of a treaty: reflection on Versailles London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2020-03-01 Kate Miles
Abstract This article revisits one moment in international law through the prism of visual culture, analysing paintings, photographs and political cartoons of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. It considers the historical representation of treaty-making, narratives of international law as beneficent universal regulator and spectacle, and the projection of ‘successful’ international law through
-
The corporation and three Cokes London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2020-03-01 Susan Marks
-
-
The League of Nations, autonomy and collective security London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2020-03-01 Nigel D White
Abstract This article tests the assumption that in institutional and legal design the League of Nations was incapable of providing collective security. The lens through which this issue is scrutinised is the concept of institutional legal autonomy, in other words the legal separation of the organisation from its member states. The thinking is not necessarily that the greater the autonomy the greater
-
The Corporation, Law and Capitalism: reflections on capitalist law and queer resistance London Review of International Law Pub Date : 2020-03-01 Emily Jones