Erasing the Marks of Domination: Economic Sovereignty, Decolonization, and International Lawmaking in the 1950s and 1960s

Author(s):  
Christopher Dietrich

Abstract This article tells a legal and intellectual history of oil and decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s through the projects of international institutions including the UN Permanent Sovereignty Commission and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and the work of anti-colonial lawyers Hasan Zakariya and Nicolas Sarkis. It examines the ideas and infrastructure of decolonization as they related to the question of how international law could be used to win economic sovereignty.

Author(s):  
Lesaffer Randall

This chapter describes the role of Roman law—whose influence has been largely underestimated in recent scholarship—in the intellectual history and development of international law. To that end, the chapter offers a general survey of the historical interactions between Roman law and international law, drawing from general insights into the intellectual history of law in Europe that have remained remarkably absent in the grand narrative of the history of international law. The focus is on the periods in which these interactions were most pronounced. Next to Roman Antiquity, these are the Late Middle Ages (eleventh to fifteenth centuries) and the Early Modern Age (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries).


Author(s):  
José Antonio García Sáez

Resumen: Guerra y paz pueden ser pensadas como dos momentos que están destinados a sucederse alternativamente dentro la historia de las relaciones internacionales. Pero también cabe la esperanza de que a través del desarrollo de un orden internacional fuerte pueda conseguirse una paz perpetua o, cuanto menos, duradera. A ese fin han destinado sus esfuerzos numerosos juristas cuyas obras pueden ser enmarcadas dentro del pacifismo jurídico. En este texto se tratará de ordenar los rasgos característicos de esta posición, tomando como división central aquella que separa los autores que han apostado por la prohibición de la guerra de aquellos que han apostado por su progresiva superación. Ambas posiciones compartirán su preferencia por el fortalecimiento de las instituciones internacionales, además de una cierta vocación cosmopolita. Palabras clave: Pacifismo jurídico, guerra, paz, filosofía del derecho internacional. Abstract: War and peace could be thought as two moments bound to succeed each other within the history of international relations. But there is also room for the hope in a perpetual or, at least, sustainable peace thorough the development of a strong international order. Several legal scholars, whose works can be labelled inside the legal pacifism, have devoted their efforts to that end. This paper tries to put some order about the main features of legal pacifism. It takes as a central division their position towards war: some legal pacifists have defended the total outlawry of war, while others have considered preferable a progressive overcoming of war. Both positions will share the preference for strength the international institutions, together with a certain degree of cosmopolitan commitment. Keywords: legal pacifism, war, peace, philosophy of international law.


2020 ◽  
pp. 23-61
Author(s):  
Durba Mitra

This chapter offers a conceptual history of the modern study of ancient Indian sex. It traces the intellectual history of how the philology of Sanskrit erotics, particularly through concepts of deviant female sexuality, shaped the modern study of social life. In doing so, the chapter reveals a history of how modern philological inquiry produced deviant female sexuality, as found in premodern Sanskrit text, as an originary object for the study of modern Indian society. What was lost in these new fixed structures of knowledge was the multiplicity of interpretations of different texts on premodern social life. Thus, this chapter examines the transregional rise of the field of Indological erotics in the period between the 1880s and the 1950s and beyond.


2021 ◽  
pp. 92-108
Author(s):  
Janne E Nijman

This chapter explores the so-called ‘Turn to History’ in international legal scholarship. Interest in the intellectual history or ‘history of ideas’ of international law has surged around the last turn of the century. Nijman contextualises this development and stages three possible approaches of why and how to study ideas and theories of the past. A central proposition is that the field of ‘History and Theory of international Law’ ultimately aims to establish a dialogue between international legal thought then and now. In this way (and by employment of, eg, the Cambridge School method) a critical distance emerges with respect to our own international legal thinking and its underlying political and moral ideas. The meaning of international law ideas changes through time and use—in the study thereof lies the critical potential and value for our own thinking. As such, ‘doing history’ comes with what Quentin Skinner calls ‘an enlarged sense of possibility’. The chapter argues for a ‘doing history’ that liberates us from the hegemonic constraints that past thought and beliefs may place on our imagination. It builds on Roberto Mangabiera Unger’s image of ‘frozen politics’ and ‘false necessity’ to argue that change of our institutions is possible. In short, the chapter argues that doing history produces awareness of the contingency of received beliefs, values, and institutions, and as such produces a sense of possibility—and arguably—responsibility. It suggests/recognises a capacity to reimagine and act. It is transformative and empowers to establish (institutional) change and get our (global) act together. An empowerment we desperately need. The chapter ends by alluding at the change sought: Unger and Ricoeur are brought together in a brief argument for the reimagination of just institutions.


2017 ◽  
Vol 87 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Clark

Abstract This article examines the development of the concept of recognition in the writings of British jurists. It first outlines methodologies of conceptual history as applied to international legal concepts, before examining four strands of development of the concept of recognition from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. It shows how the concept of recognition moved from examining intra-European diplomatic disagreements, to a focus on Christianity, civilisation and progress that barred non-European communities, to a late colonial-era emphasis on technicalities of government and territory, and eventually a state-centric account that normalised inferiority into difference, before emerging in the interwar period as a ‘basic concept’ of international law: intensely debated and closely tied to a range of political projects. The article concludes with reflections on why British thinking turns away from recognition in the 1950s, as the decolonising world turns to a new international law and self-determination.


Author(s):  
Daniel Ricardo Quiroga-Villamarín

Abstract While the history of international law has been mainly dominated by intellectual history, the neighboring humanities and social sciences have witnessed a ‘material turn.’ Influenced by the new materialisms, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have highlighted the role of objects and nonhuman infrastructures in the making of the social. Law, however, has been conspicuously absent from these discussions. Only until recently, things began to be studied as instruments of – global – regulation. In this article, I trace an intellectual history of the intellectual history of international law, contextualizing it since its inception in the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ to its spread into the legal field via the Critical Legal Studies movement and its final import into international law in the last two decades. I conclude arguing that international legal historians can depart from the ‘well-worn paths’ of intellectual and conceptual history to engage with the materiality (past, present, and future) of global governance.


Author(s):  
Roxana Banu

This book seeks to demonstrate that contrary to conventional histories of the discipline, various nineteenth-century writings on Private International Law (PrIL), which focused on the individual, rather than the state, adopted an account of the individual as social and relationally constituted. The book dispels two common assumptions about the nineteenth-century intellectual history of the field: first all individual- and private-law-centered perspectives were overly liberal and individualistic; and second, the association between public and private international law enabled the latter to focus on global public goods and global justice generally. By contrast, the book shows that while many nineteenth-century theories focused on the relationship between public and private international law injected much of the formalism and alleged neutrality of today’s private international law, several individual-centered perspectives adopted a relational, rather than individualistic image of the individual. By recovering academic debates in private international law between the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the book traces how this “relational internationalist” perspective was misunderstood and eventually disappeared from the memory of the field. Through a detailed analysis of the writings of the three main protagonists of the “relational internationalist” perspective, namely Joseph Story, Carl von Savigny, and Josephus Jitta, the book recovers the analytical foundation of this theoretical perspective with respect to rights, legitimate authority, and the cosmopolitan dimensions of private international law.


2006 ◽  
Vol 7 (12) ◽  
pp. 982-992 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Kennedy

Martti Koskenniemi's From Apology to Utopia is the most significant late 20th century English language monograph in the field of international law, and it is terrific to see it re-issued. The book offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of the doctrinal materials and intellectual history of the discipline. It became an instant classic in the analysis of law's rhetorical structures, and it could well turn out to have been the last great original treatise in the international law field. It both synthesized the materials and demonstrated the impossibility of their being synthesized in a stable and intellectually coherent fashion. The treat in this re-issued edition is Martti's new epilogue. In it, he reflects on what he was seeking to achieve in ways that will open the text to new readings while remaining, I think, true to the spirit of the initial project.


Author(s):  
Jacob Katz Cogan

Abstract Histories of international law have typically focused on the origins of legal rules and doctrines, the decisions of courts and other formal tribunals, the views of professors and legal theorists and diplomats, and the evolution of the legal profession. That is, international legal histories have centered on the concerns of lawyers and states and have reflected a positivist vision of international lawmaking. We need a history of international law that focuses more on international law in action – the invocation, elaboration, and contestation of rules in and through their everyday application, not just by states, high-level state actors, legal theorists, and state-organized domestic and international institutions, but also by individuals, low-level officials, private groups, and nongovernmental actors and in places outside of the usual fora where ‘international law’ is said to be found. We need a history of international law in the vernacular.


2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-30

Over the past 20 years, numerous scholars have called upon social scientists to consider the colonial contexts within which sociology, anthropology and ethnology were institutionalised in Europe and beyond. We explain how historical sociologists and historians of international law, sociology and anthropology can develop a global intellectual history of what we call the ‘sciences of the international’ by paying attention to the political ideas of the Durkheimian school of sociology. We situate the political ideas of the central figures explored in this special issue—Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Bronisław Malinowski and Alfred Métraux—in their broader context, analysing their convergence and differences. We also reinterpret the calls made by historians of ideas to ‘provincialise Europe’ or move to a ‘global history’, by studying how epistemologies and political imaginaries continued by sociologists and ethnologists after the colonial era related to imperialist ways of thinking.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document