Emotions play an important role in cognition and have a significant and all too often neglected influence on (international) law-making processes. Fear, in particular, can be a driver of reasoning and decision-making. Fear of terrorism / immigrants / health threats / food contamination / environmental hazards – to give a few notable examples – influences the perception of risks associated with these issues and consequently impacts international policy- and law-making. International law rules and doctrines are often adopted – if not overtly justified – on the basis of fear and other emotions. This article aims to explore how fear – as both an individual and collective emotion – may affect decision-making processes, be determinative of normative outcomes, and shape security policies at the domestic and international levels. This approach deviates from traditional rationalist understandings of law and emphasizes the role of emotions in apprehending the nature and functioning of legal processes. Hopefully, this exploration will open up interesting avenues for further research on the role of emotions in international legal processes.

This article uses the metaphor of the hall of mirrors to produce three distinct images of the international lawyer. The hall of mirrors refers here to the extent to which international legal discourses are built on self-referential mechanisms tantamount to mutually reflecting mirrors, by virtue of which movements and postures are reproduced ad infinitum without disclosing the origin thereof. According to the first image produced by virtue of the metaphor, the international lawyer feels invincible and fully makes use of the hall of mirrors to allow international legal discourses to obscure their origins and thrive in foundationlessness. The second image depicts a vulnerable international lawyer who is deprived of self-referential mechanisms for the production of international legal discourses because the mirrors have been shattered or the light turned off or simply because she has closed her eyes. The third image is that of a self-reflective international lawyer who is neither invincible nor vulnerable but consciously standing between the mutually reflecting mirrors wearing fissured spectacles and with no intention to smash the mirror, turn off the light or close her eyes. By developing these three distinct images, this article sheds light on how the contingency of legal doctrines, modes of legal reasoning and legal categories is experienced by international lawyers.

This article lays the groundwork for a Marxist theory of the international law of land-grabbing. It argues that any comprehensive politico-economic analysis of land-grabbing must also be a politico-economic analysis of the law of land-grabbing. It argues further that Marx’s account of ‘primitive accumulation’ in Capital – an account it presents as an historical explanation of the transition to capitalism as well as a general theory of ‘extra-economic’ force deployed through state power, including, crucially, the power of law – is helpful for developing an analytical framework for understanding the legal facets of land-grabbing. Political economists, rural sociologists, and social and political theorists have argued for and against the applicability of Marx’s theory of ‘primitive accumulation’ to the contemporary wave of global land grabbing. Intriguingly, though, no international lawyers have grappled with the question of whether a specifically Marxist approach to the phenomenon can or should be developed. This article does so, contending that contemporary land-grabbing is unintelligible absent a theory of capitalism, and that the processes whereby capitalism transforms land and labour are unintelligible absent a theory of the periodic waves of legally mediated ‘primitive accumulation’ that propel it forward. The article pays particular attention to the work produced by Olivier De Schutter during his tenure as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

International climate law is often represented as a set of rules and institutions that scholars have tracked for nearly 30 years, whether to document them, assess their effectiveness, or prescribe reforms. This article, in contrast, adopts a critical perspective to uncover the everyday life of international climate law. From this viewpoint, international climate law is a purposive endeavour that is grounded in the small places where people create and live out the law. ‘International climate lawyers’ are among those who produce the law within these sites, and they propagate international climate law across multiple institutions. Using legal-ethnographic description, the article shows how lawyers operationalize the law in the United Nations climate regime, World Bank, and international human rights system. In each case, lawyers effect some overlapping aspirations for the law as well as legal techniques, but they also adapt their practices to the places where they work. In the process, they simultaneously build and diversify their professional community. Both in their field and community then, lawyers generate heterogeneity and homogeneity through the proliferation of international climate law. They do so on multiple registers, in terms of diverging ethical commitments, multivalent legal forms, and relative authority to speak the law, notably between institutions and the Global North and Global South. If lawyers reproduce sameness and difference in international climate law, moreover, this article suggests they may reify analogous traits in the broader field of international law, including persisting power relations.

This article establishes the normative connection between Japan’s responses to regional hegemonic order prior to the nineteenth century and its subsequent engagement with the European standard of civilization. I argue that the Japanese understanding of the ‘standard of civilization’ in the nineteenth century was informed by the historical pattern of its responses to hegemony and the discourse on cultural superiority in the Far East that shifted from Sinocentrism to the unbroken Imperial lineage to the national-spirit. Although Japanese scholars accepted and engaged with the European standard of civilization after the forced opening up of Japan to the Western world in the mid-nineteenth century, they did so for instrumental purposes and soon translated ‘civilization’ into a language of imperialism to reassert supremacy in the region. Through intellectual historiography, this narrative contextualizes Japan’s engagement with the European standard of civilization, and offers an analytical framework not only to go beyond Eurocentrism but also to identify various other loci of hegemony, which are connected through the same language of power.

This article discusses the law and practice of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a little-known but important international organization. The article aims to illuminate what it is the IOM does; how it influences its member state practices while simultaneously working on member state assignments; and how this affects the dominant theory underpinning the law of international organizations, i.e., the theory of functionalism. The article concludes that the IOM takes functionalist thought to extremes, and in doing so makes visible the latter’s ideological nature.

Since 2008, a global ‘land rush’ has been unfolding and so have efforts by international, national and regional actors to position themselves as the principal authorities in the determination of appropriate usages of land. This article examines three of the most influential ‘soft law’ instruments: the Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment; the Principles for Responsible Investment in Agriculture and Food Systems and; the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure. Despite their substantive differences, all three documents share a specific form of state-centrism. They imagine the host state of such large-scale investments as internally unitary and externally independent and entrust it with the bulk of responsibilities regarding the management of land investments. However, I argue that this particular form of state-centrism obscures the legal and administrative realities of the post-colonial state that is often legally bifurcated and subject to pervasive forms of international authority. Rather, an appreciation of the multitude of actors who claim jurisdiction over the lands of the South enables a better understanding of the legal mechanics of land-grabbing. Sierra Leone, which has been positioned as a ‘poster child’ for the implementation of such ‘soft law’ instruments, serves as the focal point of this jurisdictional approach to land-grabbing. In this context, the promise of ‘soft law’ instruments to make the post-colonial state the guarantor of universally beneficial large-scale land acquisitions is shown to be a false one.

The rules of treaty interpretation are ordinarily met with scepticism not only by critically-minded international law theorists, but also by mainstream international legal scholars who otherwise believe in international law’s normative power. The objective of this article is to inquire whether, despite their much-discussed shortcomings, the rules of treaty interpretation have any ‘cash value’ in the sense given to this expression by one of the founding fathers of the philosophy of pragmatism William James, in other words, whether they make any practical difference. To do so, this article revisits the traditional understanding of the rules of treaty interpretation and argues that they cannot directly bridge the gap between the signifier and signified, but rather are designed to impose a ‘common discipline’ with respect to the admissible means that can be used in treaty interpretation.

To what extent do rules of general international law apply between international organizations and their members? The article tackles this question by distinguishing between two categories of relations: those that take place on the international plane and those that are, rather, situated on the institutional plane constituted by the organization’s internal law. I argue that general international law applies by default to relations belonging to the first category, only being displaced when the internal law of an organization contains applicable lex specialis, but that it cannot claim a similar role at the level of internal institutional relations. The question there becomes one concerning the dialogue between relatively autonomous international legal orders, so that it is the internal law of each organization that defines the terms on which rules of international law are allowed in. At the same time, a normative argument can be made for a ‘monistic presumption’ for the application of general international law in cases where the rules of the organization are silent. By delving into such questions of applicable law and identifying the relevant analytical frameworks, the article aims to help international lawyers dealing with complex disputes opposing international organizations and their members to structure the legal analysis.

In recent years, the academic field of international institutional law has taken a clear ‘constitutional’ turn. In this normative endeavour, liberal ‘rule of law’ ideals are being reinvigorated, translated and projected onto international organizations. This article trades this well-trodden path for a socio-legal inquiry into how the ‘rule of law’ is produced, practiced and performed in the everyday political and operational life of one specific international organization (the World Bank) during one contentious historical episode. To grasp what it means for ‘law to rule’, I argue, we need to expand our archives to the daily praxis of legality: the actors that embody it; the consciousness that drives it; the politics that rely on it; and the fragile institutional balances that give it meaning. Grounded in this pragmatist perspective, I retrace the intervention of legal expertise during the Bank’s turn to state reform in the wake of the Cold War. Descending from principles to practices, from norms to acts, from abstract heights to situated performances, the article not only strives for an enhanced understanding of the ‘rule of law’ within the World Bank, but also aims at a critical methodological intervention in the field of international institutional law.

The quest for universality in international economic law has met many obstacles. This article begins from the proposition that there are various ways to conceive of universality in international law, for example whether the rules are accepted widely among states (omnipresence) or whether they are broadly coherent (generality). Homing in on trade and investment law, the article assesses how each of these areas has functioned as a testing ground for these different conceptions. An in-built quasi-universality characterizes international trade law with the WTO as a seemingly centralized universal institution. Such universality, however, has often been achieved through differentiation of rights and obligations (e.g., the Enabling Clause and regional trade agreements). In investment law, attempts at universalization through the construction of centralized institutions have failed. Nevertheless, certain common standards have emerged in this fragmented regime. There is also a debate around the use of the MFN clause as a universalizing tool and renewed efforts to universalize investment law are afoot. More generally, it is clear that there is little appetite for codification of international economic law, and that states wish to control its content through the conclusion of treaties. In the final analysis, this article asks whether it is time to conceive of universality differently, and particularly whether equity and collective preferences should be a more central part of the quest.

The environmental and economic realities of Arctic climate change present novel problems for international law. Arctic warming and pollution raise important questions about responsibilities and accountabilities across borders, as they result from anthropogenic activities both within and outside the Arctic region, from the Global North and the Global South. Environmental interdependencies and economic development prospects connect in a nexus of risk and opportunity that raises difficult normative questions pertaining to Arctic governance and sovereignty. This article looks at how the Arctic has been produced in international legal spaces. It addresses the implication of states and Indigenous peoples in processes of Arctic governance. Looking at specific international legal instruments relevant to Arctic climate change and development, the author attempts to tease out the relationship between the concepts of Indigenous rights and state sovereignty that underlie these international legal realms. What do these international legal regimes tell us with respect to the role of Arctic Indigenous peoples and the role of states in governing the ‘global’ Arctic? It is argued that while international law has come a long way in recognizing the special status of Indigenous peoples in the international system, it still hesitates to recognize Indigenous groups as international law makers. Comparing the status of Indigenous peoples under specific international regimes to their role within the Arctic Council, it becomes evident that more participatory forms of global governance are entirely possible and long overdue.

This article explores how Luxembourg and Nauru put their sovereignty to use in order to become global players in what can be considered extraterritorial landgrabs – the turning of the deep seabed and outer space into realms of commercial exploitation. It shows how the international legal framework puts states, however small, into a position to facilitate private enterprises’ endeavours to obtain extraterritorial exploitation rights. The article further enquires into the public interest justifications put forward by governments to legitimate their support for the expansion of private resource extraction into the deep sea and outer space. It finds that these justifications are very tenuous; that governments refer to vague notions of economic growth and benefits that may accrue from extraction to an undefined humanity while it remains unclear whether their own populations will obtain any concrete gains. Both case studies illustrate how states, on the basis of international law, facilitate the expansion of private value extraction, thus perverting the redistributive ambitions that may once have motivated the negotiations of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Outer Space Treaty.

On 27 June 2017, in the Stichting Mothers of Srebrenica case, The Hague Court of Appeal applied the effective control test in determining attribution and found that the Netherlands was responsible for the failure of the Dutch battalion (Dutchbat) acting as a part of the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) to protect civilians from the Srebrenica massacre in 1995. This judgment is of considerable significance because the court renounced the preventive approach to the effective control test, to which the Dutch courts had repeatedly declared their adherence, and reverted to the traditional (presumptive) approach. The preventive interpretation was originally proposed with a view to justifying much broader attribution to troop-contributing nations (TCNs). However, quite interestingly, the Court of Appeal reached the conclusion that the Dutchbat’s conduct was attributable to the Netherlands without recourse to the preventive approach. The present study argues that the legal framework for the attribution of UN peacekeepers’ conduct has developed in such a manner that the fair allocation of responsibility and the effectiveness of UN peacekeeping operations are in equilibrium. In that sense, the effective control test should be located at the interface between the law of international responsibility and the law of international organizations. It is illustrated that not only does the preventive interpretation fail to strike a fair balance between the institutional considerations and the need to provide remedies for victims of peacekeepers’ misconduct, but also the presumptive approach may lead to effective remedies while having due regard for the institutional considerations.

This article concentrates on a particular controversy during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa; the mass cancellation of flights to and from affected countries. This occurred despite authoritative advice against such restrictions from the World Health Organization (WHO). During a public health emergency such as Ebola, the airplane sits at a site of regulatory uncertainty as it falls within the scope of two specialist and overlapping domains of international law; the WHO International Health Regulations (2005) and the Convention on International Civil Aviation. We explore how legal technicalities and objects, by promoting functional interactions between these two specialized regimes of law, were utilized to deal with this uncertainty. We show how the form and function of these mundane tools had a significant impact; assimilating aviation further into the system of global health security as well as instrumentalizing the aircraft as a tool of disease surveillance. This encounter of regimes was law creating, resulting in new international protocols and standards designed to enable the resumption of flights in and out of countries affected by outbreaks. This article therefore offers significant and original insights into the hidden work performed by legal techniques and tools in dealing with regime overlap. Our findings contribute to the wider international law literature on fragmentation and enrich our understanding of the significance of relational regime interactions in international law.

The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) governed Iraq from 2003 following Resolution 1483 of the UN Security Council. This Resolution affirmed that Iraq was in a state of occupation and that there were occupying powers. The Resolution referred to the United States of America and the United Kingdom as ‘occupying powers under the unified command of the “Authority”’, the ‘Authority’ being the CPA. However, the legal status of the CPA and its relationship to the US (the focus of this article) is not entirely clear, both under US domestic law and international law. This lack of clarity could have significant implications for the US’s responsibility for the CPA’s conduct. As with private military companies, a CPA-style administration of territory could become a tool for states to quarantine their risk under the law of occupation. This article contends that the theory of occupation by proxy may help clarify the legal status of the CPA and its relationship to the US and could assist in closing the identified gap in responsibility. To support this argument, this article establishes a legal framework for the theory of occupation by proxy which is then applied to the CPA and US.

The United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the 1964 Fisheries Convention and from the European Union has raised questions concerning the potential existence of third states’ fishing rights in the UK’s maritime zones post-Brexit. Historic fishing rights are a complex and controversial issue in the law of the sea. Uncertainty remains regarding their nature, the process for their formation and ascertainment, as well as their contemporary relevance in the light of the Law of the Sea Convention (LOSC) and other fisheries agreements. This article explores the concept of historic fishing rights in the law of the sea. First, it examines the nature and scope of historic fishing rights as discussed in the jurisprudence of international courts and tribunals and their relationship with other akin terms such as ‘customary’ and ‘traditional’ fishing rights. Issues related to the formation and establishment of these rights are also explored. The article also examines whether these rights have been superseded by the LOSC in the territorial sea and exclusive economic zone (EEZ), or whether they are still relevant in the post-LOSC era and maritime zones. It finally explores the relationship between historic fishing rights and treaty-based fishing access rights, and addresses the question posed by Brexit whether withdrawal from a fishing access treaty can unilaterally eliminate any related pre-existing historic rights. This discussion will provide an answer to the question whether it is possible for other states to have historic fishing rights in the UK’s territorial sea and EEZ following its withdrawal from the London Fisheries Convention and the European Union.