ADVANCE ARTICLE: Richard BOURKE, 'European Empire and International Law from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century" (The Historical Journal) (OPEN ACCESS)

(image source: CUP)

Abstract:

In the 1821 Preface to his Elements of the philosophy of right, Hegel famously claimed that ‘philosophy…is its own time comprehended in thoughts’. It is tempting to view history in equivalent terms. After all, historical research usually engages the past under the influence of contemporary concerns. Topics acquire pertinence on account of prevailing values and interests. And yet there is a clear difference between being roused to investigate a subject as a result of its ongoing resonance and interpreting its meaning in terms of current attitudes. This distinction, however, is often blurred, and with it appropriate relations between historical analysis and moral judgement. It may well be that, at the level of political philosophy, each of these activities can be reconciled; but first their respective provinces should be carefully delimited.

Read the article for free here.

BOOK: Jeffrey Alan ERBIG, Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met. Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020). ISBN 978-1-4696-5504-8, USD 24.95

(Source: The University of North Carolina Press)

The University of North Carolina Press is publishing a new book on border making in 18^th century South America.

ABOUT THE BOOK

During the late eighteenth century, Portugal and Spain sent joint mapping expeditions to draw a nearly 10,000-mile border between Brazil and Spanish South America. These boundary commissions were the largest ever sent to the Americas and coincided with broader imperial reforms enacted throughout the hemisphere. Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met considers what these efforts meant to Indigenous peoples whose lands the border crossed. Moving beyond common frameworks that assess mapped borders strictly via colonial law or Native sovereignty, it examines the interplay between imperial and Indigenous spatial imaginaries. What results is an intricate spatial history of border making in southeastern South America (present-day Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay) with global implications.

Drawing upon manuscripts from over two dozen archives in seven countries, Jeffrey Erbig traces on-the-ground interactions between Ibero-American colonists, Jesuit and Guaraní mission-dwellers, and autonomous Indigenous peoples as they responded to ever-changing notions of territorial possession. It reveals that Native agents shaped when and where the border was drawn, and fused it to their own territorial claims. While mapmakers' assertions of Indigenous disappearance or subjugation shaped historiographical imaginations thereafter, Erbig reveals that the formation of a border was contingent upon Native engagement and authority.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr. is assistant professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

More info here

(source: ESCLH Blog)

BOOK: Luigi NUZZO, Lawyers, Space and Subjects: Historical Perspectives Historical Perspectives on the Western Legal Tradition (Lecce: Pensa Multimedia, 2020). ISBN: 9788867607129, pp. 283, 28,00€

(Source: Pensa Multimedia)

ABOUT THE  BOOK

How it is possible to appropriate the European legal legacy for writing a decolonized history of international law? Is this task possible also for a European legal historian ? Or is he is stucked in his past with his ‘dead white heroes’? Assuming an historical perspective, the book intends to answer these questions and tells the history of the paradoxical beginnings of a Western law. It was a new law that was considered the measuring unit of the civilized world and the instrument to reassemble the distinctions between ‘Us and the Others’ that it did not cease to produce.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Luigi Nuzzo is full professor of Legal History and History of International Law at the Law Faculty of the University of Salento (Lecce). He has been research fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main) and at the Freie Universität Berlin; Senior Robbins Research Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley; Hauser Global Research Fellow at the New York University and Fernand Braudel Fellow at European University Institute. He published extensively in Italian, English, German and Spanish about the history of international law, the Spanish Indies and the German and Italian legal culture between the XIXth and XXth centuries.

More information with the publisher.

(source: ESCLH Blog)

CALL FOR PAPERS: Guerra a pace tra pubblico e privato (Italian Review of Legal History); DEADLINE 30 SEP 2020

(image source: IRLH)

Description:

Il Comitato di Direzione dell’Italian Review of Legal History invita tutti gli studiosi interessati a partecipare, con un contributo in prospettiva storica o con riguardo all’attualità, al dibattito sul tema proposto. La guerra, la forma più organizzata e strutturata di violenza, rappresenta infatti una plurisecolare sfida per il Diritto, che non ha rinunciato allo sforzo di attribuirle una dimensione giuridica, costituita da principii, istituzioni, istituti, prassi, esplicitamente o implicitamente tendenti al passaggio dal "silent leges inter arma" al "cedant arma togae". Molteplici sono le prospettive attraverso le quali fissare lo sguardo sul tema: oltre, naturalmente, alla storia militare e a quella della diplomazia e delle relazioni internazionali, pressochè tutti gli indirizzi della storiografia impattano sulla (purtroppo) indefettibile presenza del conflitto e sui meccanismi elaborati per evitarlo o ricomporlo. La tensione tra guerra e pace riguarda non solo “soggetti” pubblici ma anche privati (basti pensare ai conflitti familiari e interpersonali o alle guerre e alle paci private dell'età comunale e della prima età moderna), lungo l’arco cronologico dall’età medievale alla contemporanea, e interroga tuttora storici e giuristi, con riferimento sia al contesto europeo che a quello extraeuropeo. In effetti se, da un lato, l'ampiezza della tematica ha stimolato consolidati filoni di indagine, essa richiede tuttora nuove prospettive di ricerca e ulteriori contributi scientifici.

Practical:

Il termine per l’invio del contributo è fissato al 30 settembre 2020. I contributi saranno pubblicati, a scelta dell’autore, in italiano (o nella lingua madre) e in inglese oppure soltanto in lingua italiana (o nella lingua madre), con un abstract in inglese di quattromila caratteri. Per ogni ulteriore informazione, anche relativa a come redigere i contributi, vi invitiamo a visitare il sito della Rivista https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/irlh Si prega di compilare entro il 30 giugno 2020 il seguente modulo (file pdf compilabile con Acrobat Reader) e di inviarlo a segreteria.irlh@unimi.it e a claudia.storti@unimi.it

Read more on the journal's website.

DATABASE: Les écrits de l’abbé Castel de Saint-Pierre (Université de Caen)

(image source: université de Caen)

Database presentation:
L’abbé Charles-Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre (1658-1743), l’auteur du célèbre Projet de paix perpétuelle, a composé un nombre important de mémoires sur des sujets divers (fiscalité, éducation, économie, gouvernement, institutions culturelles…) et il occupe une place à reconsidérer dans l’histoire de la pensée politique, juridique et économique française de l’Ancien Régime. Ses écrits présentent un intérêt tout particulier pour l’étude des tentatives de réponse à la crise traversée par la monarchie française à partir de la fin du règne de Louis XIV. Mais la plupart ne nous sont connus que par des éditions du XVIIIe siècle, alors que l’auteur a laissé dans ses manuscrits de nombreuses additions et corrections et a envisagé une seconde édition de l’ensemble de ses ouvrages. Cette édition scientifique électronique propose un ensemble des principaux écrits de l’abbé de Saint-Pierre, classés par grandes thématiques et présentés par des spécialistes des domaines considérés. Divers instruments de travail et outils d’exploration du corpus en favorisent l’étude (documents biographiques, bibliographie, inventaires des manuscrits et des imprimés…). Les textes édités le sont selon les modalités de l’édition critique (choix d’un texte de base, présentation de variantes, introduction et annotation) ; le format utilisé est le XML avec un balisage selon les directives TEI.

Read more here.

BLOGGING BREAK: No posts until 27 July

(image source: The Telegraph)

Due to holidays, there will be no further messages until Monday 27 July, 12:30 CET.

CALL FOR PAPERS: 'Britain, the League of Nations and the New International Order' (Online Conference 20-21 November 2020, University of Edinburgh) (DEADLINE: 20 August 2020)

(Source: University of Edinburgh)

The University of Edinburgh School of History, Classics & Archaeology has a Call for Papers for a conference on the League of Nations. Here the call:

November 2020 marks the centenary of the first meeting of the Assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva. The League was established by the Peace Conference at the end of the First World War to ‘promote international cooperation and to achieve international peace and security.’ The range of its activities was considerable and in recent years there has been renewed scholarly interest in the important work it undertook, which retains a relevance for modern policy makers.

Keynote speakers include:

Professor Glenda Sluga (University of Sydney)

Professor Peter Jackson (University of Glasgow)

Dr Madeleine Dungy (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)

Due to the continuing uncertainties presented by COVID-19, the conference will be held entirely online, through Microsoft Teams. There is no registration fee, but all attendees must register their interest via this web form. We would welcome 20-minute papers on any of the following aspects of the work of the League, and its role in the shaping of the post-First World War international system:

The work of the League – mandates, minority protection, refugees, economics and finance, disarmament and peace-making

The British Foreign Office and Geneva – the League Council and Assembly, British priorities

The League and its operation – the international civil service, the League and international law

The social work of the League – health, trafficking, women’s rights and gender equality

The cultural impact and legacy of the League – the LNU, peace movements, the League and popular culture, global governance in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

ECRs and PhD students are particularly encouraged to submit papers for panels consisting of three 20-minute papers. Those wishing to present papers are invited to submit a 250-word abstract and one-page CV to Dr David Kaufman, (D.Kaufman@ed.ac.uk) by 20 August, 2020.

More info here

(source: ESCLH Blog)

JOURNAL: Special Issue "Le concept de civilisation en droit colonial belge" (Revue interdisciplinaire d'études juridiques LXXXIII (2019), no. 2

(image source: CAIRN)

De l’épistémologie de la théorie du droit (Pierre Moor)

Abstract:

We cannot approach legal theory without first answering two questions : First, what do we mean by « law ». And second, what, in light of this understanding, are the appropriate theoretical instruments for its analysis ? As regards the first question, the legal phenomenon should be understood as it operates in reality : that is to say, as a system constituted by a set of texts, the most important being normative, which are produced by a set of actors – those being lawyers and people who work with them. It is the functioning of this complex system that legal theory must explain. The answer to the second question - the appropriate theoretical instruments-derives from this analysis. The instruments will be drawn, on the one hand, from semiology, insofar as the law is unthinkable without considering its textual and therefore linguistic dimension : defining the semiotic status of the signs that form the normative texts is therefore necessary to understand the relationship between the norms and their object. On the other hand, the contemporary theory of systems allows us to grasp the texture of internal relations between the legal actors, a differentiated texture that gives law its autoreferential character, while also bringing to light the modalities of its relation with its social environment. In sum, the point of view could be said to be external, since it does not use legal concepts, but, to the contrary, treats such concepts as the object of analysis ; and legal theory, not being a legal discipline, is an element of the sociology of law.

 Introduction. Nations civilisées, mission civilisatrice, droit de civilisation (Pierre-Olivier de Broux)
First paragraph:

Le concept de civilisation est au cœur du présent dossier, consacré au concept de civilisation en droit colonial belge. Ce concept est à la fois particulièrement ancien mais aussi très déprécié aujourd’hui, précisément à cause des usages qui en ont été faits aux XIXe et XXe siècles. Sa présence dans le droit colonial belge ne doit rien au hasard : la mission civilisatrice dont s’est prévalu Léopold II s’inscrit dans un contexte historique et juridique qui balise pour une bonne part la référence au concept de civilisation. C’est ce contexte – surtout issu de la sphère internationale – qui est brièvement brossé dans la présente introduction, synthétisant la littérature critique abondante récemment parue à ce sujet.

 « Le Congo était fondé dans l’intérêt de la civilisation et de la Belgique ». La notion de civilisation dans la Charte coloniale (Pierre-Olivier de Broux & Bérengère Piret)
Abstract:

Belgium’s “civilizing mission” in its African colonial territories is at the heart of colonial rhetoric. The leitmotif of overseas action since the foundation of the Congo Free State in 1885 and a prelude to most European colonization efforts in Africa in the 19th century. The Belgian colonial vocabulary did not hesitate to use it. However, its legal and administrative translation still seems to be poorly studied. The main ambition of this contribution is therefore to question this “civilizing mission” on the basis of the colonial charter. More precisely, this article aims to identify the meaning of the notion of civilization as used by the colonial authorities when the Congo was taken over by Belgium and to identify the legal instruments by which the “civilizing mission” must be implemented there.

 Civiliser les « indigènes » par le droit. Antoine Sohier et les revues juridiques coloniales (1925-1960) (Romain Landmeters & Nathalie Tousignant)
Abstract:

The idea of civilizing the population of Congo is concomitant with the Belgian colonial enterprise from the very beginning. This conception has been inherent in the imperial imagination since the end of the 19th century. With the takeover of Congo by Belgium in 1908, the civilization effort of the Congo Free State (CFS) became the common denominator of the Belgian government, of the world of industry and commerce as well as missionaries. At the crossroads of these three pillars of Belgian-style colonialism, the colonial judiciary also contributes to the civilizing mission. Through the analysis of textual data of three colonial legal journals, this contribution explores the uses of the terms civilize/civilization/civilized by contributors, including the main one, magistrate Antoine Sohier. This analysis highlights the construction of a consensus around a single Civilization, an objective to be achieved by the Congolese populations adhering to the values promoted by the civilizing mission/action claimed by the Belgian colonial project.

 La notion de civilisation en droit colonial belge postérieur à la Seconde Guerre mondiale et en droit congolais postérieur à l’indépendance (Wenceslas Busane Ruhana Mirindi)
Abstract:

Belgian colonial law has organised institutions and forged rules for the implementation of the civilizing mission, the main objective of the colonial enterprise. This contribution focuses on the evolution of the notion of civilization in the post-World War II period, during which the end of colonization took place. During this period, colonial law was characterised by a conception of civilization that was clearly European-centred and inherited from the 19th century. Nevertheless, there is a decrease in the intensity of the affirmation of the civilizing mission. Congolese post-independence law, on the other hand, shows the quest for an authentic civilization. It reflects a tension between the instrumentalization of autocratic power and the opening towards the values of universal civilization.

Lancement du nouveau thème du SIEJ (Jérémie Van Meerbeeck)

L’homme augmenté : quelle dignité humaine pour encadrer les progrès de la génétique ? (Jean-Aymeric Marot)
Abstract:

The notion of « human dignity » is ambivalent, susceptible to be brought up both to uphold the highest principles of protection of our species as a whole or to support the growing affirmation of the power of individuals’ self-determination over their own bodies. Today, at a time when the mysteries of the human genome are slowly unveiled, the use of human enhancement technologies comes in the wake of this autonomist trend but raises new fears as to the preservation of genetic heritage, the determination of the best interests of the child or the right to privacy. In these respects, involvement of public authorities will be required to ensure the safeguarding of the most fundamental values on which our society is built.

Book reviews:

• J. Gaakeer, Judging from experience. Law, praxis, humanities, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, 307 p. (François Ost)
• A. Somek, The Legal Relation : Legal Theory after Legal Positivism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017, 220 p. (Aristel Skrbic)
• Th. Berns et J. Lafosse (dir.), Guerre juste et droit des gens moderne, Bruxelles, Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2017, 208 p. (Louis Triaille)
• F. Ost, Si le droit m’était conté…, Paris, Dalloz, 2019, 214 p. (Xavier Dijon)
• A. Flückiger, (Re)faire la loi. Traité de légistique à l’ère du droit souple, Berne, Stämpfli, 2019, 761 p. (Norman Vander Putten)

Read more on Cairn.

(source: ESCLH Blog)

JOURNAL: Journal of the History of International Law/Revue d'histoire du droit international XXII (2019), Issue 1 (Oct)

(image source: Brill)

The Heidelberg Circle of Jurists and Its Struggle against Allied Jurisdiction: Amnesty-Lobbyism and Impunity-Demands for National Socialist War Criminals (1949–1955) (Philip Glahé)
Abstract:

After the Second World War, the Allies began a program of legal prosecution of war criminals who were to be sentenced in fair and public processes. However, these processes soon evoked vivid criticism, and by no means simply from former National Socialists. The Heidelberg Circle of Jurists (‘Heidelberger Juristenkreis’) is an example of a heterogeneous lobby group including victims of National Socialism as well as supporters of this ideology demanding amnesty for German war criminals between 1949 and 1955. Numbering forty high-ranking judges, lawyers, politicians, professors and church representatives, the Circle had access to a vast network and had a considerable impact on Allied and German war-crimes policy. On the basis of new source material, this article examines the Circle’s evolution, its apparently contradictory composition, its argumentation and its aims, by focusing on three of its members, the former minister of justice of the Weimar Republic and legal philosopher Gustav Radbruch, the internationalist Erich Kaufmann and the Nuremberg lawyer Hellmut Becker.

Training, Ideas and Practices. The Law of Nations in the Long Eighteenth Century: An Introduction to the Focus Section (Raphaël Cahen, Frederik Dhondt and Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina) (open access)

Language and Power: The Dragoman as a Link in the Chain Between the Law of Nations and the Ottoman Empire (Zülâl Muslu)
Abstract:

The paper attempts to take a different look into the Law of Nations through the role of dragomans (official translators) in the making of modern International law. Addressing the power of language above its mere linguistic meaning, also considering the way it is taught, socially shaped, productive and lasting, this paper intends to illustrate the general epistemic framework governing dragomans as an original social and professional body in order to better understand their unforeseen impact on the Ottoman understanding of and integration into modern international law. The paper argues that legal transformations are also the result of legal translations, which intrinsically imply the cultural and social backgrounds of the translators. It discusses how the progressive formation of the cosmopolitan professional body of dragomans led to both develop a bolted technicality and contribute to the uniformization of legal thought and language by the nineteenth century.

La conception des devoirs du négociateur en Nouvelle-France: Héritage métropolitain ou cas particulier? (Alice Bairoch de Sainte-Marie)
Abstract:

Le dix-septième siècle voit l’émergence de nouveaux modes de négociation ainsi que la naissance de théories sur la diplomatie. On assiste à la parution de plusieurs ouvrages sur le sujet tels que L’ambassadeur de Jean Hotman et De la manière de négocier avec les souverains de François de Callières. C’est également l’époque où la France débute la fondation de colonies dans le Nouveau Monde et, en particulier, en Amérique du Nord. Dans cette région aussi, de nouvelles formes de négociations apparaissent lors des contacts entre les envoyés du roi de France et les tribus amérindiennes, axées sur l’échange et le dialogue, la découverte de l’autre et de sa culture. Dans cet article, nous allons chercher à savoir si les autorités coloniales s’inspirent des principes de diplomatie européenne lors de la négociation de traités avec les Amérindiens. Pour ce faire, nous nous pencherons sur les deux ouvrages susmentionnés, sur la correspondance entre le ministre de la marine et les colonies françaises ainsi que sur les écrits d’auteurs, voyageurs et explorateurs des dix-septième et dix-huitième siècles.

 The Mutual Guarantee of the Peace of Westphalia in the Law of Nations and Its Impact on European Diplomacy
Abstract:

This paper seeks to investigate how the mutual guarantee clauses of the treaties of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War in 1648, affected European diplomacy until the late eighteenth century. It will first analyse the reception and impact of the guarantee of the Peace of Westphalia in the European Law of Nations and in subsequent treaty law. Secondly, it will assess the practical impact of this feature of the Law of Nations on European diplomacy, and how this influence changed over time. This will also include an analysis of how diplomacy and shifting power-political currents altered the content of the guarantee in the Law of Nations. In analysing the guarantee’s influence on diplomacy, the paper places a particular emphasis on Franco-Imperial and Swedish-Imperial relations, as well as the perception of the guarantee among diplomats and other political actors during political, constitutional and confessional conflicts within the Holy Roman Empire.

Transforming the Law of Nations: The Case of the Eighteenth Century Italian Peninsula (Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina)
Abstract:

This article aims to demonstrate and investigate how natural law and law of nations theories were used and adapted within the context of the Italian peninsula of the late eighteenth century. It proposes to retrace the ways in which the texts of the so called Ecole romande du droit naturel and particularly the Droit des gens ou principes de la loi naturelle, appliqués à la conduite et aux affaires des Nations et des Souverains by Emer de Vattel (1758) were used in and adapted to the Italian environment, which was extremely different from the one in which these texts were written and published, in order to contribute to the legal transformation process of the Italian states during the eighteenth century

La dignité impériale des rois de France en Orient: Titulatures et traductions dans la diplomatie franco-ottomane (Victor Simon)
Abstract:

Depuis la première moitié du seizième siècle, les rois de France semblent être présentés sous une titulature impériale dans la traduction française des capitulations. La notion d’empire apparaît pourtant étrangère à la conception turque de l’État. Le titre d’imparatorluk n’apparaît d’ailleurs nulle part dans le texte original des capitulations. La titulature impériale attribuée au roi de France découle en effet d’une traduction hasardeuse du terme de padishah par les drogmans attachés au service de l’ambassade. D’origine perse, ce titre sans réel équivalent en Europe signifie littéralement «grand dirigeant» ou «dirigeant des dirigeants». En reconnaissant cette qualité au roi de France, le sultan turc met ainsi en avant une prééminence du roi de France sur les autres princes européens. Cette rhétorique s’inscrit alors dans la construction de relations internationales franco-turques ouvertement tournées contre l’empire Habsbourg.

Droit et histoire dans la formation diplomatique d’après les écrits sur l’ambassadeur et l’art de négocier (XVIIe-début XVIIIe siècle) (Dante Fedele)
Abstract:

La formation diplomatique est une des questions majeures abordées dans les écrits sur l’ambassadeur et l’art de négocier de l’époque moderne. Dès la fin du XVIe siècle, le modèle du « parfait ambassadeur », qui plongeait ses racines dans la culture humaniste, est soumis à une critique serrée visant une redéfinition du statut politique et culturel de l’ambassadeur. Au fil du XVIIe siècle et du début du XVIIIe, on assiste à la formulation de programmes de formation plus spécifiques, centrés sur la connaissance de la documentation diplomatique et de l’histoire moderne, conçue comme une source du ius gentium. Cette réflexion, menée parfois en polémique ouverte avec la mauvaise formation des ambassadeurs, va jouer un rôle important à l’égard de la ‘professionnalisation’ de l’ambassadeur à l’époque moderne.

Book reviews:

• Stalin’s Soviet Justice. ‘Show’ Trials, War Crimes Trials, and Nuremberg, edited by David M. Crowe (Lauri Mälksoo)
• The Process of International Legal Reproduction: Inequality, Historiography, Resistance, written by Rose Parfitt (Jessie Hohmann)
• Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, written by Leonard V. Smith (Marcus M. Payk)

Read more on Brill's website.

(source: ESCLH Blog)

SSRN PAPER: Ryan MITCHELL, International Law as Project or System?

(image: library; source: Wikimedia Commons)

Abstract:

Classical authors on international law tended to understand it as an immanent system of norms, emerging from natural reason, self-interest, and/or customary state behavior. This view largely kept hold well into the Vienna System era of multilateral diplomacy, indeed becoming more conceptually clear even as the language of natural law grew increasingly marginal. By the early twentieth century, however, international law had turned into a domain for intentional legislative projects on a global scale. Ultimately, this new legislative function of international law was endowed to permanent organizations focused on norm-development in specialized areas. With this transformation, international law’s forms of legislation and, later, also of interpretation and adjudication transitioned from assuming “unwilled” to “willed,” intentional norms. This Article traces the conceptual history of this shift in the self-understanding of legal actors. It also argues that the now-prevalent epistemic model of international law as a collective project necessarily raises questions, including those rooted in Third World critique, as to whose project it is in practice. Finally, it suggests that further attention to international law’s “problem of authorship” can aid in understanding the way that legal discourses—such as those concerned with norms of freedom of navigation, trade, or international human rights—produce specific forms of knowledge and political possibilities.

Read more on SSRN.

BOOK: William BAIN, Political Theology of International Order (Oxford: OUP, 2020), 272 p. ISBN 9780198859901, 65 GBP

(image source: OUP)

Abstract:

Is contemporary international order truly a secular arrangement? Theorists of international relations typically adhere to a narrative that portrays the modern states system as the product of a gradual process of secularization that transcended the religiosity of medieval Christendom. William Bain challenges this narrative by arguing that modern theories of international order reflect ideas that originate in medieval theology. They are, in other words, worldly applications of a theological pattern. This ground-breaking book makes two key contributions to scholarship on international order. First, it provides a thorough intellectual history of medieval and early modern traditions of thought and the way in which they shape modern thinking about international order. It explores the ideas of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, Martin Luther, and other theologians to rise above the sharp differentiation of medieval and modern that underpins most international thought. Uncovering this theological inheritance invites a fundamental reassessment of canonical figures, such as Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, and their contribution to theorizing international order. Second, this book shows how theological ideas continue to shape modern theories of international order by structuring the questions theorists ask as well as the answer they provide. It argues that the dominant vocabulary of international order, system and society, anarchy, balance of power, and constitutionalism, is mediated by the intellectual commitments of nominalist theology. It concludes by exploring the implications of thinking in terms of this theological inheritance, albeit in a world where God is only one of several possibilities that can called upon to secure the regularity of order.

(read more with OUP)

ARTICLE: William MULLIGAN, " Decisions for Empire: Revisiting the 1882 Occupation of Egypt" (English Historical Review CXXXV (2020), nr. 572 (Feb), 94-126)

(image source: Oxford Journals)

Abstract:

The decision of Gladstone’s government to invade and occupy Egypt in 1882 remains one of the most contentious in late nineteenth-century British political and imperial history. This article examines the decision-making process in June and July 1882, revisiting Robinson and Gallagher’s influential study in the light of more recent historiographical research and previously unused sources. It looks at who made the critical decisions, what their preoccupations were, and how they were able to get Cabinet approval. Hartington and Northbrook were the two key figures, who co-operated to overturn Gladstone’s and Granville’s policy in June 1882. Yet their co-operation was momentary and they found themselves on different sides of the argument over the participation of Indian forces and international support. Although they shared a sense of Egypt’s importance to British imperial security, they each had a distinctive approach, so that the decision to occupy cannot be reduced to a conflict between Whig pragmatists and Radical idealists. The article also shows how the Alexandria riot on 11 June altered the context of decision-making by shifting the mood in the parliamentary Liberal party towards intervention. Parliament, not the press, was the crucial site of ‘public opinion’ in the Egyptian crisis in June and July 1882.

Read more with Oxford Journals.

ADVANCE ARTICLE: Alonso Gurmendi DUNKELBERG, "A legal history of consent and intervention in civil wars in Latin America" (Journal on the Use of Force and International Law)

(image source: Routledge)

Abstract:

Recently, international law has seen renewed interest in the topic of intervention by invitation. Despite this, Latin American views have remained absent from the conversation. This article rediscovers the history of intervention by invitation in Latin American civil wars, focusing specifically on the issue of consent and the role it played in two key events of the region’s early legal history: the War of the Confederation and the Gorostiza Pamphlet affair. It finds that, in those cases, the right of a state to consent to intervention in a civil war was not questioned, but rather, expressly affirmed. In this vein, and despite a lack of more recent practice, while Latin America’s experience with European interventionism indicates a strong tradition of non-interventionism, its experience with civil war seems to point towards a preference for government consent over strict-abstentionism as a guiding principle.

Read more with Taylor&Francis.