BOOK: Hendrik SIMON, "A Century of Anarchy? War, Normativity, and the Birth of Modern International Order" (OUP, The History and Theory of International Law, 2024)

Source: OUP

The nineteenth century has been understood as an age in which states could wage war against each other if they deemed it politically necessary. According to this narrative, it was not until the establishment of the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the UN Charter that the 'free right to go to war' (liberum ius ad bellum) was gradually outlawed. Better times dawned as this anarchy of waging war ended, resulting in radical transformations of international law and politics.

However, as a 'free right to go to war' has never been empirically proven, this story of progress is puzzling. In A Century of Anarchy?: War, Normativity, and the Birth of Modern International Order, Hendrik Simon challenges this narrative by outlining a genealogy of modern war justifications and drawing on scientific, political, and public discourses. He argues that liberum ius ad bellum is an invention created by realist legal scholars in Imperial Germany who argued against the mainstream of European liberalism and, paradoxically, that the now forgotten Sonderweg reading was universalized in international historiographies after the World Wars.

A Century of Anarchy? is a compelling read for historians, jurists, political theorists, international relations scholars, and anyone interested in understanding the emergence of the modern international order. In this groundbreaking work, Simon not only artfully deconstructs the myth of liberum ius ad bellum but also traces the political and theoretical roots of the modern prohibition of war to the long nineteenth century (1789-1918).

Setting the Scene

1:Introduction: A Century of Anarchy, a Right to War?

2:Thesis and Antithesis: Why States Justify War

Part I. Justifying War in the Nineteenth Century: A European Discourse

3:On the Threshold of Modernity: From Revolutionizing to Reordering War

4:Birth of an International Order

5:Between Might and Right: Justified Wars and Multiple Normativities

6:The Promise of 'Peace through Law' in the Shadow of War

Part II. Emergence of a Myth: A German Sonderweg?

7:Recht zum Krieg: A Clausewitzian Tradition

8:A Hegemonic Discourse? On Mainstream(s) and Myth(s)

9:Antinomianism: The Kaiserreich's Politics of Justifying War

10:Old Order, New Order: Historiography between Anarchy and Progress

Conclusion

11:War, Normativity, and the Birth of Modern International Order

Hendrik Simon, Researcher, Peace Research Institute Frankfurt

Hendrik Simon is a postdoctoral researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) and Lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt. He was Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Advanced International Theory/University of Sussex (2017), at the University of Vienna (2018, 2016), at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History Frankfurt (2015-16) and at the Cluster of Excellence 'Normative Orders' (2011-12). Publications include The Justification of War and International Order. From Past to Present (OUP 2021; co-edited with Lothar Brock); and 'The Myth of Liberum Ius ad Bellum. Justifying War in 19th-Century International Legal Theory and Political Practice', 29 European Journal of International Law (2018).

More inof with OUP.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Legal Histories of Empire IV: Empires in Touch (University of Toronto, 10-12 July 2025, DEADLINE: 31 August 2024)

Source: LHBE

Call For Papers 

Legal Histories of Empire IV 

Empires in Touch 

St Michael’s College, University of Toronto 

July 10-12, 2025 

Law in Empire. Law among Empires. We invite papers that consider how law has worked within empires at different times and places, how it has worked at the contact points between empires, and how imperial subjects have attempted to work law to their advantage. Law has facilitated, constituted, and enabled connections. People and societies have both suffered and benefitted from the uncertainties produced as empires have spread, imposed themselves on local populations, and competed with each other. Legal ideas have moved with people who had legal training and people without it. Institutions have formed and reformed, succeeded, failed, and produced intended and unintended consequences. In this fourth Legal Histories of Empire conference, we seek to explore these movements and connections, including the construction of illegality and non-legality. We hope to bring together historians working in different legal traditions and with a range of different sources to reveal the threads that have bound, ordered, and separated different empires, places, laws and legal traditions across the globe. 

Please send abstracts to LHE2025conference@uts.edu.au by 31 August 2024. Acceptances will be sent by the middle of October 2024. We are pursuing avenues to allow us to provide funding for travel, especially for graduate students and scholars from the Global South. Those interested in seeking funding should sign up for updates from our website, lhbe.org. 

Format: Chiefly in-person. We may have some limited capacity for online participation. Please indicate on your abstract whether your participation is contingent on the availability of online participation.

Personal information: For each participant (presenter, chair, or commentator), please submit: 1) Biographical details of no more than 150 words; 2) Where, and in what timezone, you will be in July 2025 if you are not physically in Toronto. 

Individual papers: If you are submitting an individual paper, please submit an abstract of no more than 200 words. Panels (of no more than 4 speakers: a chair and/or commentator can be included): If you are submitting a panel, please include: 1) A panel abstract of no more than 150 words; and 2) Individual paper abstracts of no more than 200 words. 

Streams: We anticipate having streams in the program on the following themes, coordinated by the scholars listed below. If your proposal is to a particular stream please indicate that clearly in your abstract. 

Illegality in Empire: Dr David Chan Smith 

The American Empire: Dr Sam Erman 

Empire in Oceania: Dr Mary Mitchell 

Law in Africa: Dr Yolanda Osondu 

Legal Transfer in the Common Law World: Prof Stefan Vogenauer and Dr Donal Coffey 

Comparing Empires: Judicial Institutions and Legal Actors: Prof Heikki Pihlajamäki

Consult the CfP or the website of the Legal Histories of Empire.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Journal for Digital Legal History invites submissions (DEADLINE: 30 September 2024)

We have learnt of several calls for papers with relevance to the history of international law, insofar empirical or digital methods are used.

Description:

The Journal for Digital Legal History (DLH) is a diamond Open-Access, peer-reviewed international journal hosted by the Open UGent platform. For our second issue, which will be published in November 2024, we are pleased to invite contributions from researchers working on legal history with digital, empirical and computational approaches. The journal welcomes all research questions and outputs at the intersection of legal history, digital humanities and empirical legal studies, broadly defined.

 

In the field of legal history, digital methods are hardly ever the centrepiece of a publication itself, if not downplayed. In 1997, Richard Evans claimed that: 'How we know about the past, what historical causation is, how we define a historical fact, whether there is such a thing as historical truth or objectivity - these are questions that most historians have happily left to one side as unnecessary distractions from their essential work in the archives' (R. Evans, In Defence of History, 1997, p. 9). Nevertheless, in the 21st century, the work of a historian or legal scholar does not stop in the archives. Often, digital or computational techniques are applied in seemingly pedestrian ways, such as "searching" full texts, or they are applied in more elaborate methods to transform the historical facts embedded in our precious archival material or legal documents to answer novel research questions or to explore well-trodden paths from an innovative perspective. 

 

The application of digital techniques to legal history research is often overlooked or omitted from discussions on methodology. We encourage you to highlight the technical tools or methods that proved effective in your research projects without neglecting all the trials and errors that helped structure your final choice of any particular technique. You are welcome to illustrate your work with all forms of outputs, from notebooks to graphs, networks, maps, diagrams, etc.. If you have developed software, a database or a dataset that others could reuse, feel welcome to publish it with us. 

1. 2024 Call for Contributions: continuous call for submissions

 

Submissions that address legal sources from any historical period and any part of the world are welcome. We actively encourage collaborative and multi-authored pieces by authors from different countries working across disciplines. 

We accept publications in English; we can also support German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, but do contact the editorial board in advance. If you wish to publish in another language than mentioned here, please consult us beforehand.

Beyond the following suggestions, feel free to contact us through the DLH website if you have any original ideas that you want to discuss.

 

Topic suggestions 

• Original research articles (up to 10,000 words). 

• Reproduction pieces: Can the results of classic studies be replicated through DLH techniques?

• A dedicated section for your Digital Legal History events: If you are organising a panel, conference, or webinar series that prominently features Digital Humanities performed on legal sources, contact us for a dedicated focus section that will allow you to publish the papers or conclusions of your meeting.

• Shorter focus pieces or provocations (around 5,000 words with fewer footnotes).

• Conference and seminar reports.

• Spotlight articles: inspiration from other social sciences fields on the promising benefits of specific Digital Humanities techniques that could be successfully applied to Digital Legal History.

• Presentations or Reviews of software, databases, datasets, websites, and platforms.

• Tutorials: general presentation, application through a specific study angle (legal linguistics, marginalia analysis).

• Trials & errors: reflections on the productive role of wandering and errors in abandoned, rejected or substantially modified past projects that could help improve the current methodology (inspired by the Journal of Trial & Error). 

Formats

We are open to submissions in traditional and non-traditional formats: from traditional articles to blog posts, from plain text to linked data or hyperlinked texts, from posters to Notebooks, etc.. Illustrations could be included in the form of notebooks, graphs, diagrams, maps, networks, and images.

 

Timeline

Upon receiving your contribution, we aim to publish it within 2-4 months, depending on a positive peer-review. Please send us a short abstract of 150 words, including a provisional title, suggested format and up to five keywords. You can find the detailed guidelines for authors on the journal's website. Please include a short biographical statement for the proposed contributor(s), including the area of expertise, interests, affiliation (if applicable), and any other relevant information. We will respond to all abstract submissions within 14 days (in July and August, this may take a bit longer).

More info: https://openjournals.ugent.be/dlh/

2. Call for Contributions: The Trial and Errors of Grant Applications in Digital Legal History

We are pleased to announce a special call for papers for an upcoming thematic section in the Journal for Digital Legal History. As part of our ongoing commitment to fostering innovation and interdisciplinary dialogue in the field of digital legal history, we invite scholars to submit their successful or failed grant applications that utilize novel methodologies.

In recent years, the intersection of digital humanities, empirical legal studies, network science, and other social sciences has given rise to many innovative research approaches within legal history. However, securing funding for such projects often presents its own set of challenges and opportunities. Through this thematic section, we aim to highlight the grant application process as a crucial aspect of scholarly endeavour in the digital age.

We welcome submissions that explore the following themes:

Methodological Innovation: Successful or failed grant applications that employ novel methodologies in digital legal history research, including but not limited to network analysis, text mining, computational modeling, and data visualization.

Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Projects that demonstrate interdisciplinary collaboration between legal historians, digital humanists, computer scientists, sociologists, and other relevant disciplines, as reflected in the grant application process.

Ethical Considerations: Grant applications that address ethical considerations and challenges associated with conducting research in digital legal history, such as data privacy, algorithmic bias, and the responsible use of digital tools.

Impact and Outreach: Projects that emphasise the potential impact and broader societal relevance of digital legal history research, as articulated in the grant application's outreach and dissemination strategies.

Submission Guidelines:

Manuscripts can be up to 10.000 words. The methodological section of a grant application will be accepted, as long as an introduction is provided, placing the methodology within the wider context of the research project.

All submissions must adhere to the journal's formatting guidelines, which can be found on our website.

Authors should include a cover letter specifying whether the grant application was successful or unsuccessful and any relevant contextual information.

• Submission of your full contribution (of any kind) before September 30th, 2024.

• Peer-review reports before November 4th, 2024.

• Submission of the final version between November 18th - 25th, 2024.

• Appearance on the website – pending positive peer review – two to three weeks after final submission.

3. Call for Contributions: Dedicated "Focus-section: Early Career Digital Legal Historians: Legal History Upside-Down: Novel Methodologies for the History of Law". 

 

We are pleased to invite proposals from researchers and others working with digital legal history in the early stages of their careers for a special section of the Journal for Digital Legal History, which will be published in November 2024. The theme of this section is "Legal History Upside-Down: Novel Methodologies for the History of Law." 

Digital techniques are often not explicitly discussed, and we would encourage you to show us which techniques worked for your research - but we are also open to explaining which techniques failed. You are welcome to illustrate your work with e.g. Jupyter notebooks, R scripts, and excel files,. If you have developed software, databases or -sets that others could reuse: feel welcome to publish with us. 

• Length: Pieces in this section should be 2,500-5,000 words (up to 10,000 words max.). Do also consider alternative formats, such as fully explained Notebooks, posters with additional explanations, linked videos, tutorials, or course outlines.

• We accept publications in English; we can also support German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese but do contact the editorial board in advance. If you wish to publish in another language than mentioned here, please consult us beforehand.

• More info: https://openjournals.ugent.be/dlh/

• Timeline:

• Please send an email before July 1st, 2024, with a short proposal (150 words), including a provisional title and suggested format (and length) for your contribution. Please also include a short biographical statement for the proposed contributor(s), including the area of expertise, interests, affiliation (if applicable), and any other relevant information. We will respond to all submissions within 14 days. Mention in the subject line of the contact form to which CfC you are submitting.

• Submission of your full contribution (of any kind) before September 30th, 2024.

• Peer-review reports before November 4th, 2024.

• Submission of the final version between November 18th - 25th, 2024.

• Appearance on the website – pending positive peer review – two to three weeks after final submission

Consult the Journal for Digital Legal History News section for more info.