JOURNAL: Journal of the History of International Law/Revue d'histoire du droit international XXV (2024), No 4 (Apr)

 

(image source: Brill)

The Blood Brotherhood and Colonial Treaties and Alliances: Between Myth and Reality (Inge Van Hulle)
DOI 10.1163/15718050-bja10097
Abstract:

This article examines the representation and use of the blood exchange between European expeditionary leaders, that worked in the service of king Leopold II, and African rulers in Central and East Africa during the late nineteenth century. While the blood brotherhood played a role in the appeasement of African rulers and the conclusion of treaties, the details and origins of the procedure are often unclear. Europeans believed that the blood brotherhood was an African legal custom, even though recent anthropological studies suggest it differed from the inter-African version of the blood brotherhood. Europeans styled the blood brotherhood as the African counterpart to the European treaty, which served to support the legality of the much-contested treaties that Leopold II’s representatives had concluded, often under dubious circumstances. While the blood brotherhood therefore functioned as a practical tool to establish European influence and sovereignty over African rulers, it was also as a means of glorifying the white European explorer as a pseudo-scientist and well-meaning broker of peace. This article complicates the traditional narrative of how treaties were concluded during the Scramble for Africa and highlights the need for a critical re-examination of the legal practices and representations of colonialism.

Focus Section: Bogotá at 75

Bogotá at 75: Palaces, Streets, and Classrooms (Justina Uriburu & Francisco-José Quintana)
10.1163/15718050-12340224

Indigeneity at the 1948 Bogotá Conference (Lucas Lixinski) [OPEN ACCESS]
DOI 10.1163/15718050-bja10093
Abstract:

The article examines the history and legacy of the Bogotá diplomatic conference of 1948 in relation to Indigenous peoples. Indigenous voices were entirely absent from the Bogotá conference itself, and delegates relied instead on certain assumptions and narratives largely drawn from the Indigenismo movement in the Americas at the time. In considering Indigenous peoples as part of a broader social agenda, delegates confronted the legacies of colonialism and the ongoing exploitation and resistance of Indigenous peoples, invoking threads that we today might label a racial capitalism critique of international law. Their efforts, however salutary, culminated in an instrument, the Inter-American Charter of Social Guarantees, that was never ultimately adopted. Nevertheless, the debates at Bogotá are illuminating of the subsequent trajectory of Indigenous peoples’ rights in international law, and the alternative possibilities that can still be recovered to live up to the Bogotá conference delegates’ aspirations of Indigenous emancipation.

Locating the 1948 Economic Agreement of Bogotá: The Rise and Fall of Latin America’s International Economic Law Project (Nicolás M. Perrone)
DOI 10.1163/15718050-bja10099
Abstract:

This article claims that Latin America developed a competing International Economic Law project in the 1940s. These ideas and practices served the region to imagine its economic development process. Through the work of economists and lawyers – especially international lawyers – Latin America envisioned a future of industrialization and designed a strategy to make it happen. In the 1940s, many Latin Americans were enthusiastic about the prospects of industrialization; however, the consensus was that this objective required regional cooperation to reshape international trade and foreign investment laws among themselves and, especially, vis-à-vis the United States. This article explores this regional momentum focusing on the 1948 Economic Agreement of Bogotá, one of the most important international economic law-making efforts in the Western Hemisphere. In Bogotá, many Latin American governments insisted that states, not markets or foreign investors, should plan the region’s economic future. The United States and the US business elite disagreed.

The (Latin) American Dream? Human Rights and the Construction of Inter-American Regional Organisation (1945–1948) (Francisco-José Quintana)
DOI 10.1163/15718050-bja10100

Abstract:

The American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man is often cited as evidence of the longstanding centrality of human rights in Latin American approaches to international law. However, when the Declaration is brought into the history of inter-American regionalism, a more complex picture emerges. This article places the early codification efforts of regional human rights within the post-war construction of inter-American regional organisation. It argues that for Latin American and US elites, the priorities lay on institutional, collective security, and economic aspects. In this context, they instrumentally embraced the flexible language of human rights to advance broader regionalist visions. As a result, human rights gained ground, albeit as a contested idea. The article reveals that the post-war institutional settlement ultimately comprised a collective security apparatus, crucial for the United States, supplemented by the principle of non-intervention, vital to Latin American states, in which human rights were not central.

Organizing Peace in the Americas: Collective Security versus International Adjudication (Justina Uriburu)
DOI 15718050-bja10101
Abstract:

American states concluded two treaties to organize peace in the postwar world: the Rio Treaty (1947) and the Pact of Bogotá (1948). At first sight, they appear to reflect a division of tasks: the Rio Treaty would address threats to the peace and security of the Americas, and the Pact of Bogotá would help solve the disputes between American states. However, the Rio Treaty’s dominance during the Cold War calls this division into question. This paper first argues that American states pursued two projects of peace. The Rio Treaty was a defence pact with an autonomous enforcement mechanism, to which the United States was strongly committed. The Pact of Bogotá reflected Latin American states’ thinking that a comprehensive framework for solving disputes would mitigate regional power symmetries. Second, it claims that the Rio Treaty’s vague provisions and the US support it enjoyed facilitated its dominance during the Cold War. 

Regional Imaginations of Peace: The Work of the Rio Committee and the Antecedents of the Pact of Bogota (1942–1947) (Fabia Fernandes Carvalho)
DOI  10.1163/15718050-bja10103
Abstract:

This contribution re-describes the work of the Rio Committee in international law concerning dispute settlement in the Americas between 1942 and 1947. The work of the Rio Committee constitutes a crucial doctrinal and institutional experience that underpins the fundamental transformations experienced in Pan-Americanism considering the meeting of the Ninth International Conference of American States in Bogota, Colombia, in 1948, which led to the creation of the Organization of the American States. As an antecedent to the adoption of the Pact of Bogota in 1948, the doctrinal work of the Rio Committee and its draft treaties allow for a substantive interrogation of the complex relationship between regionalism and universalism in international law. More specifically, this article assesses the ways in which mechanisms of peaceful settlement of disputes in the Americas were accommodated under the universal legal framework of the United Nations, opening space for regional cooperation to continue evolving in the continent.

Epilogue: Bogotá, Law, Time, and Politics (George Rodrigo Bandeira Galindo)
DOI 10.1163/15718050-bja10102
Abstract:

This special issue offers contemporary international lawyers a unique opportunity to be self-conscious about how those involved in the 1948 Bogotá Conference politicized time and how historical narratives about that Conference do the same. They treat the American region as an object of study in itself in international law, and avoid falling into the habit of many international lawyers in facing universalism as an a priori of legal thinking. In this vein, the 1948 Bogotá Conference is better seen as an array of possibilities.

Book reviews

• War, States, and International Order. Alberico Gentili and the Foundational Myth of the Laws of War , written by Claire Vergerio (Luigi Lacchè)
• The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty, written by Natasha Wheatley (Carl Landauer)

Read the full issue here.