BOOK: David KENNEDY & Martti KOSKENNIEMI, "Of Law and the World: Critical Conversations on Power, History, and Political Economy" (HUP, 2023)

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Description:

A searching dialogue between two leading legal scholars exploring the place of law in global affairs.

The modern world is legalized: legal language, institutions, and professionals are everywhere. But what is law’s power in global life? What does all this legality have to do with hegemony, with hierarchy and inequality, and with the diversity of human experience? What is its history and how does that history matter in world affairs? Above all, what does it mean to think “critically” about law and global affairs? In this poignant and iconoclastic book, two leading scholars take us to the heart of the matter, examining law’s relationship with history, power, and political economy.

David Kennedy and Martti Koskenniemi have often inspired each other and are both considered “critical” voices in international law, but they have never explored their similarities and differences as deeply as they do here. Of Law and the World takes the form of a conversation, as the authors reflect on the study of international law, the motivations underlying their research, and the payoffs and limitations of their investigations into law’s role in global affairs. They revisit and renew debates about the past and future of the many legalities that shape our world.

Erudite, open-minded, and informed by decades of experience and observation, Of Law and the World is an unflinchingly honest confrontation with humanity’s struggle to live together.

Preface

Conversation 1: What Is Critique?

Conversation 2: What Is International Law?

Conversation 3: International Law and Power

Conversation 4: Many International Legalities: Hegemony and Differentiation

Conversation 5: International Legal History as Critique

Conversation 6: Law in the Political Economy of the World

Conversation 7: Concluding Thoughts, Open Questions

Authors’ Works Cited

See HUP website for more information.

BOOK: Lauren BENTON, "They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence" (Princeton University Press, 2024)

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Description:

Imperial conquest and colonization depended on pervasive raiding, slaving, and plunder. European empires amassed global power by asserting a right to use unilateral force at their discretion. They Called It Peace is a panoramic history of how these routines of violence remapped the contours of empire and reordered the world from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries.

In an account spanning from Asia to the Americas, Lauren Benton shows how imperial violence redefined the very nature of war and peace. Instead of preparing lasting peace, fragile truces insured the easy return to war. Serial conflicts and armed interventions projected a de facto state of perpetual war across the globe. Benton describes how seemingly limited war sparked atrocities, from sudden massacres to long campaigns of dispossession and extermination. She brings vividly to life a world in which warmongers portrayed themselves as peacemakers and Europeans imagined “small” violence as essential to imperial rule and global order.

Holding vital lessons for us today, They Called It Peace reveals how imperial violence of the past has made perpetual war and the threat of atrocity endemic features of the international order.

About the author: 

Lauren Benton is the Barton M. Biggs Professor of History at Yale University and recipient of the Toynbee Prize for significant contributions to global history. Her books include A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 and (with Lisa Ford) Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850.

More information with Princeton University Press.

BOOK: Mlada BUKANOVSKY, Edward KEENE, Christian REUS-SMIT & Maja SPANU, "The Oxford Handbook of History and International Relations" (OUP, 2023)

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 Description:

Historical approaches to the study of world politics have always been a major part of the academic discipline of International Relations, and there has recently been a resurgence of scholarly interest in this area. This Oxford Handbook examines the past and present of the intersection between history and IR, and looks to the future by laying out new questions and directions for research.

Seeking to transcend well-worn disciplinary debates between historians and IR scholars, the Handbook asks authors from both fields to engage with the central themes of 'modernity' and 'granularity'. Modernity is one of the basic organising categories of speculation about continuity and discontinuity in the history of world politics, but one that is increasingly questioned for privileging one kind of experience and marginalizing others. The theme of granularity highlights the importance of how decisions about the scale and scope of historical research in IR shape what can be seen, and how one sees it. Together, these themes provide points of affinity across the wide range of topics and approaches presented here.

The Handbook is organized into four parts. The first, 'Readings', gives a state-of-the-art analysis of numerous aspects of the disciplinary encounter between historians and IR theorists. Thereafter, sections on 'Practices', 'Locales', and 'Moments' offer a wide variety of perspectives, from the longue durée to the ephemeral individual moment, and challenge many conventional ways of defining the contexts of historical enquiry about international relations. Contributors come from a range of academic backgrounds, and present a diverse array of methodological and philosophical ideas, as well as their various historical interests.

The Oxford Handbooks of International Relations is a twelve-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and innovative engagements with the principal sub-fields of International Relations.

The series as a whole is under the General Editorship of Christian Reus-Smit of the University of Queensland and Duncan Snidal of the University of Oxford, with each volume edited by specialists in the field. The series both surveys the broad terrain of International Relations scholarship and reshapes it, pushing each sub-field in challenging new directions. Following the example of Reus-Smit and Snidal's original Oxford Handbook of International Relations, each volume is organized around a strong central thematic by scholars drawn from different perspectives, reading its sub-field in an entirely new way, and pushing scholarship in challenging new directions.

Table of Contents:

Part I. Introduction
1:Modernity and Granularity in History and International Relations, Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene
Part II. Readings
2:Origins, Histories, and the Modern International, R. B. J. Walker
3:Historical Realism, Michael C. Williams
4:Liberal Progressivism and International History, Lucian M. Ashworth
5:Historical Sociology in International Relations, Maïa Pal
6:Global History and International Relations, George Lawson and Jeppe Mulich
7:International Relations and Intellectual History, Duncan Bell
8:Gender, History, and International Relations, Laura Sjoberg
9:Postcolonial Histories of International Relations, Zeynep Gulsah Capan
10:International Relations Theory and the Practice of International History, Peter Jackson and Talbot Imlay
11:Global Sources of International Thought, Chen Yudan
Part III. Practices
12:State, Territoriality, and Sovereignty, Jordan Branch and Jan Stockbruegger
13:Diplomacy, Linda S. Frey and Marsha L. Frey
14:Empire, Martin J. Bayly
15:Barbarism and Civilization, Yongjin Zhang
16:Race and Racism, Nivi Manchanda
17:Religion, History, and International Relations, Cecelia Lynch
18:Rights, Andrea Paras
19:The Diplomacy of Genocide, A. Dirk Moses
20:War and History in World Politics, Tarak Barkawi
21:Nationalism, James Mayall
22:Interpolity Law, Lauren Benton
23:Regulating Commerce, Eric Helleiner
24:Development, Corinna R. Unger
25:Governing Finance, Kevin L. Young and Signe Predmore
26:Revolution, Eric Selbin
Part IV. Locales (Spatial, Temporal, Cultural)
27:The 'Premodern' World, Julia Costa Lopez
28:Modernity and Modernities in International Relations, Ayse Zarakol
29:The 'West' in International Relations, Jacinta O'Hagan
30:The Eighteenth Century, Daniel Gordon
31:The Long Nineteenth Century, Quentin Bruneau
32:The Pre-Colonial African State System, John Anthony Pella, Jr.
33:The 'Americas' in the History of International Relations, Michael Gobat
34:'Asia' in the History of International Relations, David C. Kang
35:The 'International' and the 'Global' in International History, Or Rosenboim
Part V. Moment
36:The Fall of Constantinople, Jonathan Harris
37:The Peace of Westphalia, Andrew Phillips
38:The Seven Years War, Karl W. Schweizer
39:The Haitian Revolution, Musab Younis
40:The Congress of Vienna, Jennifer Mitzen and Jeff Rogg
41:The Revolutions of 1848, Daniel M. Green
42:The Indian 'Mutiny', Alexander E. Davis
43:The Berlin and Hague Conferences, Claire Vergerio
44:World War One and Versailles, Duncan Kelly
45:Sykes-Picot, Megan Donaldson
46:World War Two and San Francisco, Daniel Gorman
47:The Bandung Conference, Christopher J. Lee
48:Facing Nuclear War: Luck, Learning, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Richard Ned Lebow and Benoît Pelopidas
Part V. Conclusion
49:History and the International: Time, Space, Agency, and Language, Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-Smit