I think it is difficult to contest that the most important state player in world affairs over the last one hundred years – and consistently so over this period – has been the United States of America. World War I – into which, to borrow from Christopher Clark's justly celebrated book, we 'sleepwalked' – marks a useful starting point. It is not only the fairly important role America played in bringing WWI to an end that signals the beginning of this era, but also the no less important role it played in shaping the aftermath. Wilson's 14 points were considered at the time 'idealistic' by some of the yet-to-be 'Old Powers'. But by dismantling the Ottoman Empire through the principle of self-determination (not at that time a universal legally binding norm) it was an early swallow to the demise, a mere generation later, of all other colonial empires and the truly decisive reshaping of the balance of power in the post-WWII world. The US played an equally cardinal role in ideating and realizing the United Nations Organization and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – two lynchpins of our current world order.
The theory of functionalism dominates the law of international organizations, explaining why organizations have the powers they possess, why they can claim privileges and immunities, and often how they are designed as well. Yet, the theory of functionalism is rarely spelt out in any detail, and its origins have remained under-explored. The purpose of the present article is to outline how functionalism came about by focusing on the 'pre-history' of international institutional law. To that end, the article studies the work of a number of late 19th, early 20th century authors on the law of international organizations, paying particular attention to the writings of Paul Reinsch. It turns out that functionalism, as developed by Reinsch, was inspired by his familiarity with colonial administration: colonialism and international organization both manifested cooperation between states. While this is no reason to discard functionalism, it does provide an argument for viewing international organizations more critically than functionalism habitually does.
This study employs a select ethnography of Palestinian workers in the field of international law and human rights to explore how an epistemic community gives content and meaning to international law in its professional and personal life. Through a series of interviews conducted in the West Bank in the wake of the Palestinian attempt to gain full United Nations membership in September 2011, the article constructs a meta-narrative about the nature of international legal discourse as spoken on the Palestinian periphery. It shows how speakers of international law are required to restate or over-state the distinction between law and politics so as to sustain their hope and desire for Palestinian statehood in the face of despair about its protracted denial. The article then is an exploration about the politics of meaning making through international law and a call for methodological hybridity within the discipline of international law.
Topic:
Human Rights, International Law, Politics, and United Nations
This article argues that a gap that has always existed in the law of state responsibility is now becoming more apparent. That gap divides a state from its citizens, making it difficult to justify why state responsibility should be distributed to them. Purely legal approaches to the issue are not likely to resolve the problem, and although the literature of moral collective responsibility suggests some bases for having citizens share the costs of state responsibility, none are completely satisfying. Concepts from complexity theory show why this is so. If the theory is correct, the state is neither a legal abstraction nor reducible to the individuals who purportedly comprise it. Instead, it is an emergent phenomenon that arises from complex interactions among individuals, formal and informal subgroups, and the conceptual tools and structures that individuals and subgroups use to comprehend and respond to their physical and social environments. The theory is consistent with a basic premise of international law that the state as such is an appropriate bearer of responsibility. However, because in a complex system there is no linear connection between the emergent phenomenon and its underlying constituents, this suggests that the divide between a state and its citizens in the distribution of state responsibility may never be bridged.
Formal international law is stagnating in terms both of quantity and quality. It is increasingly superseded by 'informal international lawmaking' involving new actors, new processes, and new outputs, in fields ranging from finance and health to internet regulation and the environment. On many occasions, the traditional structures of formal lawmaking have become shackles. Drawing on a two-year research project involving over 40 scholars and 30 case studies, this article offers evidence in support of the stagnation hypothesis, evaluates the likely reasons for it in relation to a 'turn to informality', and weighs possible options in response. But informal structures can also become shackles and limit freedom. From practice, we deduce procedural meta-norms against which informal cooperation is increasingly checked ('thick stakeholder consensus'). Intriguingly, this benchmark may be normatively superior (rather than inferior) to the validation requirements of traditional international law ('thin state consent').
The article examines the substance and form of 20th century positivist international law; in particular the way in which each determines the other. The text describes the turn to interests in international law, which evolved slowly in scope and depth. By examining Lassa Oppenheim's focus on 'common interests' that united states and Hans Kelsen's focus on the 'struggle of interests' that constituted politics, the article studies two phenomena produced by the foundational role taken by interests during the 20th century. First, this role contributed to putting an end to the moral discussion about the treatment of native populations. Secondly, it curbed debate about a common political project for a global order, thus creating conformity characterized by abuse of power – all in the name of the neutrality of positivist law. This article suggests that the work of these two leading theoreticians in the field has contributed to the shaping of the legal theory of mainstream positivist international law, and seeks to foreground discussions about the different theories on the role of law in politics. In this manner it aims to help reconceptualize law in such a way as to bring about a situation in which discussions of a common political project for the international arena are more central.
In this response to Mónica García-Salmones Rovira's article 'The Politics of Interest in International Law', the argument is developed that an interpretation of Kelsen's legal theory as founded on 'interests' or 'conflicts of interests' is not adequately supported by the primary materials, if read in their context. 'Interests' do not play a major role in Kelsen's writings, and where they are discussed, they do not form part of his legal theory, i.e., the Pure Theory of Law. This response argues that this 'context insensibility' in reading Kelsen may have its roots in the unwitting adoption of one over-arching method of scholarly cognition. It thereby implicitly discards one of the crucial axioms of Kelsen's theory of scholarship: the avoidance of a syncretism of methods through a consistent separation of scholarly enterprises and methods. Not to adopt such a separation is a legitimate stance; to foist the non-separation on an author whose theory hinges upon it is not.
I am very grateful to Jörg Kammerhofer for his engagement with my text. Not only does he know Kelsen's main writings on legal theory very well, but he is himself a Kelsenian scholar. One is led, therefore, to speculate on the extent to which his reply comes close to what Kelsen himself would have written in respect of my article, and more generally in respect of the book on which it is based.
We deal in EJIL with the world we live in – often with its worst and most violent pathologies, often with its most promising signs of hope for a better world. But, inevitably, since our vehicle is scholarship, we reify this world. Roaming Charges is designed not just to offer a moment of aesthetic relief, but to remind us of the ultimate subject of our scholarly reflections: we alternate between photos of places – the world we live in – and photos of people – who we are, the human condition. We eschew the direct programmatic photograph: people shot up; the ravages of pollution and all other manner of photojournalism.