(image source: OUP)
Introduction:
André Mandelstam delivered four courses at the Hague Academy between its inaugural session in 1923 and 1934, making him one of the most frequent lecturers of the interwar period. Two studies in particular – on the rights of minorities (1923) and on human rights (1931) – made outsized contributions to the theoretical and practical understandings of human rights as group rights, which, until then, had only been addressed by a smattering of authors.1 Because of this, Mandelstam has sometimes been celebrated as a human rights lawyer avant la lettre, but more recent scholarship has rightly positioned him as a transitional figure mediating between imperial and liberal mindsets within the epistemic community of international lawyers.2 The tension between these two attitudes provides the backdrop for the following considerations. These explore the ‘Realpolitik’ underlying Mandelstam’s humanitarian thought and its uneasy coexistence with his solidarist view of international law, which was largely set aside by mainstream scholarship after World War II to make way for individualistic approaches to human rights.3
Read more here: DOI 10.1093/ejil/chaf020.
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