It is a long-standing principle of international law that every breach of an international obligation that results in harm gives rise to a duty to make adequate reparation. Reparations can take different forms, from the ideal of full restitution to the provision of satisfaction, and the payment of compensation. Notwithstanding reparation's main aim––to ameliorate, if not eradicate, the detrimental consequences of an internationally wrongful act–– it also serves other purposes, such as reinforcing the authority of the norm breached, acknowledging the injury, and recognizing the bearer of harm (the victim). This essay adopts a queer approach to examine the role played by reparation–– in particular, compensation––in determining what (and whose) suffering matters to international law. With a focus on internationally wrongful acts that result in deprivation of life, this piece discusses who is seen as worthy of redress when a violation of the right to life has taken place, as this, in turn, speaks volumes about who is seen as legally entitled to suffer, to mourn and, ultimately, to love. This essay argues that reparation orders from international human rights courts offer a valuable opportunity for re-evaluating––and perhaps even overcoming––heteronormative understandings of kinship.

Queer theory's commitments are radical and disruptive. They have operated to interrogate the definition and reinforcement of sexuality and gender categories, and to expose and problematize normalized relations of power and privilege in the institutional structures and systems in which we live and operate. Queer's deconstructive and anti-normative (or non-conformist) tendencies, however, can be antithetical to international LGBTQIA+ law reform projects. In much of queer scholarship, human rights activism is framed as reinforcing heteronormative structures of knowledge and power and promoting fixed ideas of monogamy, social reproductivity, and gender identity. In this essay, I work with the tension between queer theory and the law to frame the continued pursuit of human rights by LGBTQIA+ people as queer jurisprudence. I do so by drawing on the methodological tools provided by Eve Sedgwick's technique of reparative reading and Michel Foucault's ethics of care of the self to focus on the lived experience of LGBTQIA+ people. What emerges through the stories of LGBTQIA+ commitments to human rights and legal activism are not themes of naivety, compliance, or assimilation, as often charged, but ongoing efforts toward disruption, creativity, and hope.

The pioneering 1990s movement in critical theory has generated path-breaking scholarship seeking to queer law. Efforts to queer international law have produced important research uncovering the role of international law as a performative discourse and as a transnational governance framework reproducing gendered and sexual hegemonies. However, these efforts have done very little to destabilize the structures and workings of the very site where international law is theorized and taught: the university. Queering international law has mostly entailed looking at how the state, international organizations, international lawyers, scholars, and civil society produce or resist the heteronormative matrix, “that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized.” But what about the role of the university and its everyday routines––themselves byproducts of the aforementioned matrix––in reproducing and/or resisting (gendered) hierarchies and exclusions? We have raised this question as young scholars involved in organizing a week-long event on queer methods in international legal scholarship. The present essay is a first attempt at grappling with what the queering of an academic conference in international law meant for us, and for the university itself. It echoes a recent trend in scholarship on queer pedagogies, which, however, remain mostly silent on practices of scientific exchange. By reflecting on our efforts to queer a workshop in the field of international law, we also hope to inspire others to pursue their own queer processes of knowledge production.

Queering international law involves dreaming. It requires stepping outside the framing presumptions of “normal” law to reveal and challenge the heteronormative underpinnings of the hierarchies of power and value that the law sustains. Reclaiming the nomenclature of queer from its history as a term of insult and dehumanization, queer theory interrogates the normative framework that naturalizes and privileges heterosexuality and its binary regime of gender. In its reclamation, “queer” gestures toward affirmative assemblages of new meanings and emancipatory imaginaries. In international law, queer theory has been used in many different ways. For some, queerly troubling the normative involves expanding the existing normal to be more inclusive of queer lives, as can often be seen in the field of international human rights law. As life-giving as inclusion is to those barely existing on the margins, without changing the terms of inclusion this approach risks leaving heteronormativity intact and may even buttress it, as with the legal recognition of same-sex marriage. For others, queering international law involves a more fundamental critique of its regimes of the normal that, together, regulate our relations with each other and the planet. The objects of queer theory's structural critique are the conceptual foundations of international law, which rely on heteronormativity as a fundamental organizing principle that helps to normalize inequality, poverty, exploitation, and violence. One example is the “civilizing mission” which justified colonialism and continues to animate present legal norms. As Teemu Ruskola argues in his seminal queer critique, international legal rhetoric attributed normative masculinity to (Western) sovereign states and cast the “deficient” sovereignty of non-Western states in terms of variously deviant masculinities which, together with their civilizational and racial attributes, justified their “penetration.” My “troubling” of international law's account of peace takes a queer structural approach and then outlines some alternative imaginaries suggested by queer theory and activism.

International instruments fail to specify the meaning of gender identity. Yet gender identity has been invoked as a prohibited ground of discrimination, particularly in cases concerning trans persons. Trans existences fall outside the expectation of a correspondence between sex and gender. “Trans” is an umbrella term referring to people who do not identify with the sex attributed to them at birth. This broad definition encompasses pre-operative and post-operative transsexuals, as well as persons who have not undergone any medical intervention and do not conform to the social norms of expression and self-identification imposing the binary. Regional conventions do not define the concept of gender identity either. Documents issued by the United Nations (UN) and regional human rights bodies frequently rely on the category, without any clear explanation of the notion, or of what makes gender identity different from gender as such. Relying on Lacanian psychoanalysis, this essay argues that gender is an identity per se and challenges international law's treatment of gender and gender identity as distinct categories. Underlying this essay is the view that questioning the shape that the law gives to “gender identity” is the preliminary step to evaluating what protections human rights law can or cannot offer to individuals.

When the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established in 1995, it was seen as representative of a new era in international law, which claimed to be more functional and cooperative than the Cold War years. Fast forward to 2022, most commentators proclaim that the WTO is in “crisis.” For over two decades, its membership has struggled to reach decisions and, in 2019, the WTO was “dejudicialized” by the United States blocking consensus on appointments to the Appellate Body. In seeking to understand what went wrong, some commentators have focused on the operation of the WTO's consensus procedure and, in particular, the way it can afford states a veto power. In this essay, I take a different approach by considering how the discursive effects of consensus decision making have played into some of the problems facing the WTO today. Inspired by Gibson-Graham's work on “queering the economy,” I do so by unmooring queer theory from its base of gender and sexuality and applying queer insights to a discourse analysis of statements made in relation to the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, which lasted from 1986 until 1993 and culminated in the agreement to establish the WTO. I show how the use of consensus decision making served to cultivate an intolerance of economic difference by giving rise to discourses of worldwide sameness and agreement. Finally, I consider what a queerer approach to trade-related decision making might look like.

In “Governing the Interface of U.S.-China Trade Relations,” Gregory Shaffer argues that legal rules and dispute processes can play a major role in managing conflict and competition between the United States and China. While trade is the central focus of Shaffer's article, he realizes that it cannot be severed from other dimensions of the great power rivalry, including human rights and security issues. Shaffer rejects the idea promoted by some scholars (e.g., Petros Mavroidis and André Sapir) that the World Trade Organization (WTO) should double down on neoliberalism in response to the impact on trade of China's industrial policies by crafting rules that would constrain distinctive features of China's political economy. Such an approach fails to explain why China, a rising power with a strong sense of its own sovereignty and entitlement to its own political and economic system, would ever agree to these constraints. Shaffer and I agree on the basic vision of a pluralist WTO that respects deep differences among states and that is deferential to domestic policies to further legitimate objectives, whether protecting the environment or promoting the observance of basic labor rights around the world. Yet I differ with Shaffer on where the WTO fits into an overall strategy for addressing the global economic governance issues raised by the U.S.-China conflict. While I see the WTO as a useful and necessary part of the picture, I have a lesser estimate than Shaffer of its amenability and centrality to addressing many of the governance challenges that are at play. The post-war General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade from which the WTO system originates still plays a crucial role in providing a structure for voluntary reduction in tariffs through negotiations based on reciprocity and a set of rules for the legal security of tariff concessions. This is reinforced by non-discrimination norms that apply to domestic policies that affect trade. But where non-discriminatory domestic policies are claimed to be trade restrictions, it is much less clear that they should be disciplined multilaterally through a trade-focused institution like the WTO that is not particularly sensitive to the demands of public policy in complex areas of regulation.

How to deal with China? This is the biggest question confronting U.S. trade policy—or even the United States’ entire foreign policy—today. Over the past few years, the debate on this important issue has benefited from the contributions of many trade law scholars, including those by Mark Wu, Jennifer Hillman, Petros Mavroidis, André Sapir, Rob Howse, Weihuan Zhou, and the present author. In “Governing the Interface of U.S.-China Trade Relations,” Gregory Shaffer offers refreshing insights. Building on the framework developed by the U.S.-China Trade Policy Working Group, of which he is a member, Shaffer further adjusts the group's “four-buckets” model and provides an updated framework. Calling his approach “Rebalancing Within a Multilateral Framework,” Shaffer argues that his framework avoids the pitfalls of both “Power-Based Bargaining” and “Rule-Based Neoliberalism” and is the most promising “middle path.” As a trade lawyer, I am naturally more inclined toward Shaffer's approach and its firmer grounding in trade law, in contrast to the heavily econ-centric approach in the Joint Statement by the Working Group, which does not reference law. Coming from the other side of the Pacific, however, I would approach the issue a bit differently by asking the questions that rarely gets asked: What are China's reactions to these proposals? Will China be willing to trail along, or, perhaps more likely, will it view them suspiciously as “traps,” as China's former World Trade Organization (WTO) Ambassador Zhang Xiangchen once put it?

Gregory Shaffer's article discussing the legal aspects of the multifaceted U.S.-China relationship is comprehensive, pragmatic, and timely at the twentieth anniversary of China's World Trade Organization (WTO) accession. Shaffer provides a surgical analysis of the “three central dimensions of this relationship: (i) the economic dimension; (ii) the geopolitical/national security dimension; and (iii) the normative/social policy dimension.” He also offers a targeted roadmap to reconceptualize a world where policies are increasingly securitized and to revitalize domestic safety valves embedded in the post-war economic system. Under Shaffer's proposed “Rebalancing Within a Multilateral Framework,” states enjoy more policy space and accommodation, subject to the proportionality principle and protection of third parties. Supplementing Shaffer's analysis, I offer three alternative dimensions, namely, the perceptions of businesses, states, and international organizations and how they complicate the successful delivery of Shaffer's proposal. I echo Shaffer's call for empathy between the United States and China regarding their respective domestic challenges and approaches to each other. Yet I contend that adequate trust and understanding of each other and the agreement over Shaffer's identification of interfaces/dimensions by decisionmakers of the two nations are susceptible to disruptions caused by the three alternatives I offer. Furthermore, I argue that a thorough and inclusive policy and legal analysis—designed in a coordinated way (“统筹” in Chinese)—should reduce negative externalities from the management of the U.S.-China relationship and minimize impacts for developing and least developed countries.

Growing U.S.-China rivalry undoubtedly poses a profound threat to the multilateral trading system. In “Governing the Interface of U.S.-China Trade Relations,” Gregory Shaffer provides a highly nuanced and balanced analysis of the nature of this threat and potential solutions to address it. Yet managing trade conflict between the United States and China is, I argue, only one of the twin challenges currently facing the multilateral trading system. The other is how to rein in growing economic coercion and the arbitrary abuse of power by dominant states in the system. The United States and China have each become highly disruptive forces in the liberal trading order—not simply because of their bilateral trade relations but also, and just as importantly, because of their behavior toward the rest of the world. Both of these countries have increasingly turned away from trade multilateralism and toward aggressive unilateralism and the raw use of coercive power in their dealings with other states. It is this flagrant disregard for the rule of law on the part of the system's two dominant powers that has thrown the World Trade Organization (WTO) into crisis and ultimately poses the greatest threat to the global trade regime.

The United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2006 to encourage the development of international and domestic legal protections for people with disabilities. Over the past sixteen years, 184 countries have ratified the CRPD, and more than one hundred countries have submitted their country reports to the CRPD Committee for review. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recently released a set of human rights indicators to measure states parties’ progress toward compliance with the CRPD. This essay discusses the potential benefits and limitations of the new CRPD Indicators. Despite their limitations, the CRPD Indicators may become an important catalyst for states parties’ compliance with the CRPD as well as a way to substantiate claims of violations of international, regional, and domestic law and crimes against humanity, such as those discussed in the lead article, Disability, Human Rights Violations, and Crimes Against Humanity.

Pons, Lord, and Stein's article entitled “Disability, Human Rights Violations, and Crimes Against Humanity,” offers a timely and comprehensive analysis of the necessity to legally frame and approach crimes against persons with disabilities across the globe as crimes against humanity (CAH). National public inquiries examining the systematic violations against persons with disabilities repeatedly demonstrate how, despite efforts to report such heinous crimes, these violations remain largely ignored and nearly always unprosecuted. In the Global South and East, violations may be accentuated as complex historical, economic, (geo)political, cultural, ideological, spiritual, and even religious beliefs come into play alongside shifting landscapes of civil unrest, war, and state militarization. Within such contexts, legal measures for the protection of persons with disabilities, particularly for minority communities, meet extraordinary barriers. In this essay, we identify a number of core issues that constrain the possibilities of investigation and prosecution of CAH committed against persons with disabilities living in the Global South and East. Even though such laws are largely grounded in practices and institutions of the Global North, this essay emphasizes the need to ensure that accountability efforts for CAH perpetrated against persons with disability are rigorous in their design, robust in their application, and recognize the heterogeneity of persons with disability on a global scale.

As international criminal lawyers and diplomats discuss the Draft Treaty on Crimes Against Humanity on the one hand, and the potential of adding a fifth crime, ecocide, to the Rome Statute on the other, Janet Lord, William Pons, and Michael Stein issue a well-timed and compelling call to demonstrate our understanding that people with disabilities (PWD) are a part of humanity. The authors map the many crimes and various situations in which PWD have been and continue to be specifically targeted, and persuasively argue that it is past time for the system of international criminal law to embrace prosecutions of crimes against PWD. In so doing, the authors make a series of important recommendations for international criminal law: for example, that international criminal processes must be made fully accessible to PWD. This essay offers three reflections on the authors’ call to use international criminal prosecutions, specifically at the International Criminal Court (ICC), to elevate the rights of PWD, centering around the following questions: (1) do the people of the world believe that disabled lives matter; (2) if they do not, might international criminal law help shape domestic laws and overcome ableism; and, relatedly, (3) can the ICC create the necessary change? Or put another way, how capacious can and should the category of “crimes against humanity” be since institutional credibility and longevity are concerns?

This essay examines how EU criminal law, which regulates certain aspects of criminal procedural law of the twenty-seven EU member states, addresses the situation of persons with disabilities who come into contact with the criminal justice system. EU law on victims and on suspects and accused persons (partially) addresses disability through the prism of “vulnerability.” This essay argues that associating persons with disabilities with “vulnerability” can be stigmatizing. Moreover, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which requires that persons with disabilities have effective access to justice and receive appropriate accommodations, does not link these rights to a prior recognition of “vulnerability.” Even though the EU is a party to the CRPD, the 2013 Recommendation from the European Commission on Procedural Safeguards for Vulnerable Persons Suspected or Accused in Criminal Proceedings, frames disability in terms of “vulnerability.” In contrast, parts of the EU Victims’ Rights Directive address the situation of individuals with disabilities without using the language of vulnerability.

The lives of peasants are strongly interconnected with their territories, economies, and local institutions. At the same time, they have been historically defined by international processes and decisions that are taken elsewhere and affect their autonomy and identity. This is clearly the case when smallholders (that is, farmers who work small plots of land, mostly less than two hectares) are part of transnational food chains, but it is also true when their market is the local community: even when peasants do not grow global food commodities, they can be affected by the dynamics and continuous expansion of the transnational food system. Given the local impacts of international processes and regulatory frameworks, peasant organizations have increasingly organized translocally to participate in the international policy spaces, and try to subvert the legal structures that are shaping their lives and territories. This essay discusses those attempts by peasants to organize beyond their local realities to increase their political power and promote their vision of international economic law as a central piece in their long term strategy for recognition, food sovereignty, and consolidation of territorial and agroecological food systems. The essay provides a diagnosis of farmers’ silencing and exclusion by international economic law, presents the movement La Vía Campesina as a platform for translocal solidarity and multi-scalar engagement, and elaborates on peasants’ “cosmopolitan insurgence” and their promotion of food sovereignty as an alternative project for international economic law.

The relationship between trade, investment, and environmental protection is complex, and environmental activists have engaged with international economic law in a wide variety of ways. Some environmental activists have sought to use trade systems as leverage to advance environmental protections aims, while others have been concerned about how international economic law constrains unilateral national environmental action. The dominant account of the harmonization of economic and environmental norms and the promotion of sustainable development through trade and investment is challenged by sobering statistics of ecological decline. In the face of intersecting ecological, economic, and social crises facing the global community, the often-marginalized critique developed by environmental justice activists of neoliberal globalization and the legal regimes that enable it is more urgent than ever. These perspectives and voices—which sometimes align with other environmental activists and sometimes directly oppose market-orientated environmental agendas—have been marginalized in the scholarship on international economic law, but offer an indispensable resource for imagining more equitable and ecologically just forms of global economic cooperation. This essay shows how environmental justice activists have enacted a powerful politics of refusal, resisting international economic law as well as articulating visions of how to achieve systemic change and sustainable societies based on environmental, social, economic, and gender justice and peoples’ sovereignty.