Stained Glass Windows, the Great Hall of Justice of the Peace Palace

This chapter critically examines The Evolution of the Peace Ideal (1914), a series of four monumental stained glass windows inside the largest courtroom at the Peace Palace in The Hague that now houses the International Court of Justice. It uses the stained glass windows to explain three structuring beliefs held by international lawyers about international adjudication. First, the ethereal effect of the stained glass and its vivid iconography signals international adjudication as essential to the achievement of peace and thus a matter of professional faith. Second, a highly structured evolutionary narrative across the four windows depicts the idea of international adjudication as progress which serves to distinguish ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ states. Third, the windows’ historicism links international adjudication to an immemorial past, an invented tradition that obfuscates significant changes to its practice and meaning over the last century.

Peace Sign: La Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó

The Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó (Peace Community) is a group of peasant farmer settlements in Northern Colombia who have used signage to unilaterally declare neutrality in the Colombian armed conflict. This chapter looks at the signs displayed by the Community as objects of international law and discusses the implications for the development and localization of international law. The chapter explores how the Community has adopted concepts of international law to carve out a space to resist the violence that surrounds them. The chapter also describes how the signs detail informal internal law, with adorned handwritten internal Community rules, and looks at the aspirations and principles conveyed by the signs’ design.

Mosul Four and Iran Six

This chapter explores the practical entanglement of questions of public and private international law through an examination of the history of ten commercial aircraft belonging to Kuwait Airways Corporation. The aircraft were seized by Iraq after the unlawful 1990 invasion of Kuwait, flown to Baghdad, and handed over to Iraqi Airways. Proceedings seeking return of the aircraft and damages were commenced by Kuwait Airways against Iraqi Airways in the English courts, a further saga which led to more than thirty reported cases, including a remarkable five decisions of the House of Lords. The dispute raised a range of issues, including questions of jurisdiction, state immunity, and perhaps most significantly the potential for public international law to be given effect through domestic private law proceedings, in this case as a source of public policy denying effect to acts of Iraqi law which were contrary to UN Security Council resolutions.

‘Good Urban Citizen’

This chapter assesses how the global sphere is connected to the local level through a reflection on a poster on the streets of Atlanta. This poster indicates what it means to be a ‘good urban citizen’. The contribution argues that this poster with its call to behave reasonably and sustainably is an example of how global norms of good urban governance filter through to the local level. The poster is thus an artefact of the implications of international law on the ground. At the same time, it is connected with the growing importance of cities as global actors. Through networks such as the ‘C40 – Climate Leadership Group’ cities aspire to shape the global norms which are determining what global urban governance means today.

Gavel

The gavel is one of the most widely recognized objects of law around the world today. Images of it are everywhere. Gavels feature in some of the most prominent institutions of international law as well as in many courts and legislatures internationally. Even in jurisdictions where the gavel doesn’t appear in conventional legal settings it can still be found at auctions, conferences, and meetings, and will be doing important juridical work. It is not, however, well understood. Drawing on contemporary work in sound studies and jurisprudence, and via a close reading of a film by Italian artist Diego Tonus, this chapter provides a critical evaluation of the gavel’s material, symbolic, and sonic lives. It suggests that the gavel is right at the centre of the global juridical imaginary, and that this serves as a reminder that sound matters in law in ways that are not yet adequately explored.

Barcelona Traction Share

This chapter discusses a share certificate issued by the defunct Barcelona Traction company, and explores the layers of its meaning and significance. First, to the general public it tells the story of a Canadian company, with Spanish subsidiaries, whose shares were mainly owned by Belgian citizens. Second, it reminds lawyers of the dispute between Belgium and Spain before the International Court of Justice, in the matter of the corporate hijacking of the company at the hands of Francisco Franco’s cronies. Third, it evokes to international jurists controversial technicalities like the nationality of transnational corporations and the nature of state obligations owed erga omnes, that is, to the international community. The chapter illustrates how a piece of paper has—within a certain epistemic circle—quasi-mystical connotations, speaking to the promises and the unfulfilled potential of international law.

AIDS

This chapter asks: Is AIDS an object of international law? It accepts that the question is problematic but argues that answering it might allow international law to be seen differently. Drawing on public health responses to HIV/AIDS, the chapter explores this argument across three related dimensions: crisis, human rights, and law itself. Each of these is central to how we frame international law, which means that reframing them is likely to interrupt international law ‘as usual’—put differently, it is likely to interrupt the ‘order of things’.

Trees

This chapter uses the example of the tree as a ‘natural object’ to reflect on how the categories of object and subject of international law are ill-suited to protect living entities. The image of authority that the tree projects in peoples’ imaginations has not translated into an international regulatory regime protecting the tree from over-exploitation, or, in other words, from becoming a lifeless object. Fragmented and disconnected international regimes regulate certain aspects of the tree but fail to capture the tree’s complexity in full. International environmental law often loses sight of the tree per se and focuses on derivative objects which represent a smaller part of the tree (such as timber) or a bigger ensemble (such as a forest). Overall, the chapter reveals how the natural object, by falling between the categories of object and subject, challenges the core constructs of international law, and in particular its theory of subjects.

Somali Pirate Skiff

This chapter discusses the role of small uncovered boats powered by outboard engines in the Somali piracy crisis of 2003–2013. It examines the tactics and economics of Somali piracy in some detail. It then considers the three-pronged international response involving naval patrols, law-enforcement piracy trials, and measures of industry self-protection. The chapter notes the curious possibility that the response to Somali piracy involves probably the first widespread assertion of universal jurisdiction over pirates in practice. It concludes by considering the extent to which Somali piracy and counter-piracy may be emblematic of some of international law’s current preoccupations: embodying both the potency of the asymmetrical non-state actor in challenging the established international order and also the ‘new normal’ of relatively informal, transnational coordination of state responses to transnational crime and non-traditional threats.

Ships’ Ballast

This chapter discusses how an ostensibly mundane material item, ships’ ballast, an object or set of objects used to counterweight a ship while it is afloat, was at the foundation of the transatlantic slave trade and the international law norms that first sustained and later dismantled African captive transport. Ships’ ballast took on a particular legal evidentiary use in the context of transatlantic slavery. This was because cargoes of human beings, being mobile and of variable weights and shapes, required countervailing weight in order to keep a ship carrying them righted. Hence, the presence, as well as the amount and type of ballast found on European ships in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was often a marker of slavery. In numerous legal and historical accounts regarding the interdiction of the slave trade via public international law, the presence and use of ballast is central.