Histories of harbour development at Cochin have assumed that the Cochin Harbor Project was motivated by the colonial state’s economic interests and that it provides yet another illustration of the technological hubris associated with high modernism. Through a close analysis of the debates and discussions preceding the execution of the project however, this chapter shows that both of these assessments are inaccurate. Unlike what such accounts suggest, every stage of the Cochin Harbor Project was mired in doubt – with senior officials conceding that the project was likely to have an adverse impact on the port and its surroundings. Why then was this project executed despite such concerns? I argue that far from representing the colonial state’s confident mobilization of technology to meet its economic and strategic needs, as commonly assumed, the Cochin Harbor Project was in fact an uneasy compromise between the divergent and often competing political and economic interests of the colonial state and the princely states of Malabar. At a time of increasing environmental and political instability, a development project, this chapter shows, offered the best possibility of not only meeting the criterion of ‘productive works’ that was so central to colonial finance but also securing the cooperation of the princely states of Malabar that were becoming increasingly assertive.

The introduction offers a historical overview of terrorism through the ages and describes the development of international counterterrorism law. It discusses the interplay between terrorism and international crimes such as genocide and crimes against humanity. It also introduces some of the controversy surrounding terrorism as a term.

This chapter starts from the premise that secondary sanctions are invariably adopted to exert pressure upon foreign economic or financial actors operating in third states, with the intention to modify their conduct in alignment with the primary sanctions already imposed by the sanctioning state against the target state. As follows, due to their extraterritorial scope and their exceptional capacity to encroach upon the sovereignty of other countries, the legal status of secondary sanctions under international law is controversial. This contribution seeks to elucidate if secondary sanctions may amount to economic coercion and whether as a result these measures could constitute a breach to the principle of non-intervention. The chapter closes by exploring the potential avenues for regime interaction between the rules governing the exercise of jurisdiction by states and the principle of non-intervention in the context of secondary sanctions.

The growing range and changing nature of unilateral sanctions have seen the emergence of a new label of so-called ‘secondary’ sanctions, as opposed to the more traditional ‘primary’ sanctions. While there is no accepted legal definition of secondary sanctions, in essence, secondary sanctions restrict economic transactions between third countries which may be entirely lawful under the law of these countries. Their extraterritorial character gives secondary sanctions their distinctive and particularly controversial character. Secondary sanctions create inter-State tension and may possibly violate a number of public international law regimes. They may harm the politico-economic interests of third States and cause headaches for private economic operators, whose potential exposure to secondary sanctions complicates the already complex web of multi-jurisdictional norms governing their international business transactions.

Chapter 3 addresses the suggestion that for a special regime to exist, there must be a mutual engagement of community members. As the chapter argues, in the context of international law, a mutual engagement among a group of international law specialists can be inferred from their participation in a distinct legal discourse, and from their further specialization and distinct way of ascribing functions to legal agents. More specifically, it can be inferred from: the publication of specialized international law journals; the way of organization of conferences and workshops; the creation of inter-governmental organization; the work of NGOs; the specialized research profile of international scholars and description of chairs; their separation of tasks and division of labour; and the function that they ascribe to the judiciary and to the international legal scholar.

This chapter addresses the suggestion that for a special regime to exist, community members must be engaged in a joint enterprise. In the context of international law, to claim that a group of international law specialists is engaged in a joint enterprise is to assert that they do what they do based on the idea that some certain state of affairs is desirable. As Chapter 4 argues, in the context of international law, the existence of such a presupposition can be inferred from the actual pursuit of those specialists of a distinct state of affairs, and the way in which they perform assignments.

This chapter focuses on the recent (re)turn to history in scholarship of international relations (IR) on international law. We argue that two interrelated trends explain this development. The first is primarily internal to the field, where historically sensitive approaches have gained ground over the past thirty years. The second is external and the result of IR scholars’ productive engagement with debates in other fields, including global history, intellectual history and legal history. Although the new historical IR work on international law remains heavily indebted to histories produced outside the confines of the discipline, IR scholars at the vanguard of this movement are increasingly comfortable with writing histories themselves. New IR historical accounts have thus emerged, spanning broad subjects of international society, order and transformation, as well as specific areas of international law, including human rights, humanitarian law and international organisations. We review the history of the disciplinary divide between IR and legal history, outline how IR theoretical approaches have made use of history, highlight some of the thematic areas of the new IR historical work, and lay out possible future research directions.

This chapter explores the views of prominent Western thinkers between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries who addressed the relationship between political thought and the historiography of international law. The chapter’s early modern chronological scope puts into sharp relief the precursors and originalities of the so-called nineteenth-century turn in international law’s historiography. A survey of consequential understandings of the link between international legal historiography and political thought finds that early modern thinkers systematically connected politics and international law by examining their shared epistemological, ontological and genealogical foundations, drawing interweaving lines of reasoning on how these fields are understood, and how they arise and evolve. Thus the arc of texts from Francisco de Vitoria to Jean Barbeyrac that specifically focus on this topic suggests that considerable sophistication existed before the nineteenth-century master narrative of international law’s historiography, and has been partly lost.

In this chapter, the historiography of international law in East Asia is approached and critiqued as a tale of two centrisms, i.e. Sinocentrism and Eurocentrism. The historiography of international law in the region prior to the ‘encounter’ between East Asia and Europe has been largely Sinocentric. It is suggested that the traditional East Asian order be reinterpreted through the concept of ‘asymmetrical mutuality’ under which the regional actors of differentiated subjectivity were able to reconcile and manage their diverging interests through the crucial intermediary of diplomatic rituals. The historiography of the post-‘encounter’ period can be characterised as Eurocentric, being premised on the overwhelming positional superiority of Europe over East Asia. This traditional narrative is critically revisited (again) through the prism of ‘asymmetrical mutuality’. Despite Europe’s overwhelming dominance, East Asians articulated a wide variety of responses to the onset of a new normative discourse claiming universal validity, demonstrating their agency (if restricted). Critical engagement with Eurocentrism in the historiography of international law, one of the core questions of today’s historiography of international law, inevitably gives rise to the question of how to view universality. As a cautionary tale from this region, an attempt in interwar Japan to construct its own historiography of international law and relations by rejecting the universality articulated by the West (a ‘historiography of Sonderweg’) is investigated. By way of conclusion, it is suggested that the history of international law be reconceived as the fusing together of diverse normative voices through an intersubjective dialogue based on mutual recognition, rather than as the self-realisation of a certain universalistic normative discourse.

This chapter periodises the British historiography of international law in five parts. Its first period extends from Robert Ward’s Enquiry into the Foundation and History of the Law of Nations in Europe (1795) to Thomas Erskine Holland’s Oxford inaugural lecture on Alberico Gentili (1874), and traces the gradual professionalisation of the discipline and its historical strain. The second part examines the entanglement of empire and historicism in British international legal historiography from around 1870 to roughly 1920. The third part treats the symbolic coming of age of British international legal historiography, between the founding of the British Yearbook of International Law in 1920, and Hersch Lauterpacht’s pivotal enunciation of the so-called ‘Grotian’ tradition of international law after the Second World War. The fourth part explores the history of international law in the succeeding ‘age of Lauterpacht’ up to c. 1960, when historiographical advances came increasingly from the semi-periphery rather than the centre and from disciplines other than international law. The fifth part takes stock of the transdisciplinary ‘turn’ to the history of international law in the British world and the chapter concludes with reflections on the nascent field of comparative international legal history in the light of British developments over the longue durée.

Until about twenty-five years ago, economic historians (both those in economics departments and in history departments) had little to say about international law. There possible causes of this (beyond the possible insignificance of international law to the project of economic history) are likely the similar intellectual bases for economics and international law prior to the twentieth century, the lack of an accessible archival and intellectual base upon which to conduct the research, and the professional bias of academic historians against writing about events to close to the present. But as time as marched onward, the development of international economic law in the twentieth century has become of increasing interest to historians broadly interested in the history of international institutions and capitalism.

This chapter deals with the historiography of international law in tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, as well as other successor states of the Soviet Union. It examines how the understanding of international law has changed in this geographic space, depending on ideologies and needs of the time. Historical contributions and interpretations of outstanding international lawyers and diplomats such as Shafirov, Martens, Baron Taube, Hrabar (Grabar), Kozhevnikov and others are mapped and discussed. Moreover, the chapter also maps how Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet scholars have understood the role of their respective countries in the global history of international law, especially the complex and sometimes problematic role of the Soviet Union and Russia.

This chapter discusses the overlooked and often ignored historiography of the history of international law in Africa. It argues that this absence is a symptom of the myth of African ahistoricity before the coming of European imperialism and the idea that the advent of intellectual independence only came after decolonisation. In order to overcome this exclusion scholars should abandon the disciplinary tools and markers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western international law that are usually employed when establishing the canon of the history of international law. Instead, the chapter proposes that pan-Africanism can offer a lens through which to view African and Black authors’ historical engagement with histories of international law on the continent. Unlike their European contemporaries, most pan-African authors were not interested in analysing detailed state practice, but had a far more ambitious project: to construct a new world order based on racial equality and self-determination. In that sense, what they were interested in was forging anew the very foundations on which international law and international relations had been built.

Latin American international lawyers are prolific historians. However, while having profusely written histories of international law, Latin Americans have shied away from historiographic controversy. Latin Americans have not disagreed much about how to conceive and write history, but they have had sound disagreements about the international law that is constructed by history, they have disagreed over different ways of using history as law. This chapter offers a history of these disagreements. Some Latin-Americans have used universal histories, echoing the familiar Eurocentric history from the Latin-American periphery to the core, in order to gain doctrinal authority to speak and change international law. With a similar goal in mind, other Latin-Americans have used particularistic histories, foregrounding the region’s doctrinal divergences and contributions to universal international law. Universalist and particularistic histories were dominant between the first half of the nineteenth century and the second half of the twentieth century, between independence and the Cold War. Towards the end of the Cold War, these two types of history merged into one, presenting the region’s historical trajectory as in harmony with universal international law. This represents a break. If in the nineteenth century an international legal tradition emerged in Latin-America, during the twentieth century it radicalised, diverging from international law as conceived from the West. From the Cold War merger an endemic history emerged, which depoliticised and deradicalised the Latin American tradition. Exploring this history of history-writing in the region may help rearticulating a more ambitious Latin American international law.