22 March 2021

BOOK: Ingo VENZKE and Kevin Jon HELLER (Eds.), Contingency in International Law - On the Possibility of Different Legal Histories (Oxford: OUP, 2021). ISBN 9780192898036, 95.00 GBP

 

(Source: OUP)

OUP is publishing a new book on contingency in international law.

ABOUT THE BOOK

This book poses a question that is deceptive in its simplicity: could international law have been otherwise? Today, there is hardly a serious account left that would consider the path of international law to be necessary, and that would refute the possibility of a different law altogether. But behind every possibility of the past stands a reason why the law developed as it did. Only with a keen sense of why things turned out the way they did is it possible to argue about how the law could plausibly have turned out differently.

The search for contingency in international law is often motivated, as it is in this volume, by a refusal to resign to the present state of affairs. By recovering past possibilities, this volume aims to inform projects of transformative legal change for the future. The book situates that search for contingency theoretically and carries it into practice across many fields, with chapters discussing human rights and armed conflict, migrants and refugees, the sea and natural resources, foreign investments and trade. In doing so, it shows how politically charged questions about contingency have always been.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

ngo Venzke is Professor of International Law and Social Justice at the University of Amsterdam, and Director of the Amsterdam Centre for International Law. He has held visiting positions at various universities including the National University of Singapore and Jindal Global Law School. He was a Hauser Research Scholar at New York University as well as a visiting scholar at the Cegla Center for the Interdisciplinary Research of the Law (Tel Aviv University) and the Center for the Study of Law and Society (UC Berkeley). He received his PhD in Law from the Goethe University in Frankfurt while working as research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for International Law in Heidelberg. Since 2015, Ingo has been the Editor-in-Chief of the Leiden Journal of International Law (together with Eric de Brabandere).

 

Kevin Jon Heller is Professor of International Law and Security at the University of Copenhagen and Professor of Law at the Australian National University. He has previously held positions at the University of Amsterdam, SOAS, the University of Melbourne, the University of Auckland, and the University of Georgia. He received his PhD in Law from Leiden University and holds a JD with distinction from Stanford University. He is the author of The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law, and the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law and the Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials, all published by Oxford University Press.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION

1:Contingency Situated, Ingo Venzke

II. THEORISING AND NARRATING CONTIGENCY

A. Enacted Structures and Structured Actors

2:On Dead Circuits and Non-Events, Fleur Johns

3:Contingency in International Legal History: Why Now?, Genevieve Painter

4:The Necessity of Contingency: Method and Marxism in International Law, Umut Özsu

5:The Realist and the Visionary: Property, Sovereignty, and the Problem of Social Change, Justin Desautels-Stein

6:An Enlarged Sense of Possibility for International Law: Seeking Change by Doing History, Janne Nijman

B. Situated Perspectives and Possibilities

7:Contingencies in International Legal Histories: Origins and Observers, Filipe dos Reis

8:Historical Base and Legal Superstructure: Reading Contingency and Necessity in the Tadic Challenge, Michele Tedeschini

9:Subverting Eurocentric Epistemology: The Value of Nonsense When Designing Counterfactuals, Mohsen al Attar

10:The Time of Contingency in International Law, Geoff Gordon

III. LOCATING AND RESISTING CONTINGENCY

A. Migrants and Refugees

11:The Contingency of International Migration Law, Frédéric Mégret

12:Contingent Movements? Differential Decolonisations of International Refugee and Migration Law and Governance, Christopher Szabla

B. Sea and Resources

13:What if the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea had Entered into Force Unamended: Business as Usual or Dystopia?, Alex Oude Elferink

14:What if Arvid Pardo had not made his famous speech? (False) Contingency in the Making of the Law of the Sea, Surabhi Ranganathan

15:Contingent Economic Ordering: Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources and International Commodity Agreements, Lucas Lixinski and Mats Ingulstad

C. Human Rights

16:Rights for Daydreaming: International Human Rights Law Thought Otherwise, Kathryn McNeilly

17:Who Turned Multinational Corporations into Bearers of Human Rights? On the Creation of Corporate 'Human' Rights in International Law, Silvia Steininger and Jochen von Bernstorff

18:Austerity: Why Human Rights Came Late and Helped Little, Matthias Goldmann

D. Armed Conflict

19:Contingencies of Context: Contested Legacies of the Algerian Revolution in the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, Emma Stone Mackinnon

20:Unveiling Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions: Contingency, Necessity and Possibility in International Humanitarian Law, Bianca Maganza

21:The Narrative Contingency of International Humanitarian Law: Crimes against Humanity in Cixin Liu's Post-Humanist Universe, Amanda Alexander

22:Why Did Starvation Not Become the Paradigmatic War Crime in International Law?, Nicholas Mulder and Boyd van Dijk

E. Foreign Investments

23:The Law of State Responsibility and the Persistence of Investment Protection, Kathryn Greenman

24:Barcelona Traction Re-Imagined: The ICJ as a World Court for Foreign Investment Cases?, Saïda El Boudouhi

25:From a Fortuitous Transplant to a Fundamental Principle of Law? The Doctrine of Legitimate Expectations and the Possibilities of a Different Law, Josef Ostranský

F. The New International Economic Order

26:Bandung's Fate, Kevin Crow

27:'Poisonous Flowers on the Dust-heap of a Dying Capitalism': The United Nations Code of Conduct on Transnational Corporations, Contingency and Failure in International Law, Michelle Staggs Kelsall

G. Eruptions

28:Contravention and Creation of Law during the French Revolution, Edward Kolla

29:Contingencies in The Rise of European and Latin American Private International Law, 1850 to 1950, Ana Delic

IV. OUTLOOK

30:From Situated Freedom to Plausible Worlds, Samuel Moyn

 

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