BOOK: Davide RODOGNO, Night on Earth A History of International Humanitarianism in the Near East, 1918–1930 (Cambridge: CUP, 2021), ISBN 9781108689892

 

(image source: CUP)

Book presentation:

Night on Earth is a broad-ranging account of international humanitarian programs in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Near East from 1918 to 1930. Davide Rodogno shows that international 'relief' and 'development' were intertwined long before the birth of the United Nations with humanitarians operating in a region devastated by war and famine and in which state sovereignty was deficient. Influenced by colonial motivations and ideologies these humanitarians attempted to reshape entire communities and nations through reconstruction and rehabilitation programmes. The book draws on the activities of a wide range of secular and religious organisations and philanthropic foundations in the US and Europe including the American Relief Administration, the American Red Cross, the Quakers, Save the Children, the Near East Relief, the American Women's Hospitals, the League of Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

(source: CUP) 

BOOK: Marcel BERNI & Tamara CUBITO (Eds.), Captivity in War during the Twentieth Century - The Forgotten Diplomatic Role of Transnational Actors (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). ISBN 978-3-030-65094-0, 127.19 EUR

  

(Source: Palgrave)

Palgrave Macmillan is publishing a book on the role of IOs, neutral nations and other transnational actors in supporting civilian and military captives in the 20^th century.  

ABOUT THE BOOK

This book offers new international perspectives on captivity in wartime during the twentieth century. It explores how global institutions and practices with regard to captives mattered, how they evolved and most importantly, how they influenced the treatment of captives. From the beginning of the twentieth century, international organisations, neutral nations and other actors with no direct involvement in the respective wars often had to fill in to support civilian as well as military captives and to supervise their treatment. This edited volume puts these actors, rather than the captives themselves, at the centre in order to assess comparatively their contributions to wartime captivity. Taking a global approach, it shows that transnational bodies - whether non-governmental organisations, neutral states or individuals - played an essential role in dealing with captives in wartime. Chapters cover both the largest wars, such as the two World Wars, but also lesser-known conflicts, to highlight how captives were placed at the centre of transnational negotiations.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marcel Berni is a Research and Teaching Fellow at the Swiss Military Academy at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He specialises in the history of the Cold War. His dissertation on the treatment of communist captives during Vietnam's American War has won the André Corvisier Prize.

Tamara Cubito is a Research and Teaching Fellow at the Swiss Military Academy at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. She recently completed her PhD on the treatment of enemy aliens in the British colonies during the First World War.

 

More info here

(source: ESCLH Blog)

BOOK: Philippe RYGIEL, L’ordre des circulations ? L’Institut de Droit international et la régulation des migrations (1870-1920) [Coll. « Histoire contemporaine »] (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2021), ISBN 9791035106348

 

(image source: CNRS Histoire Sociale)

Description:

Le contrôle des migrations affectant le territoire d’un État est souvent conçu comme relevant de la seule compétence de celui-ci : tout passage de frontière, tout séjour d’un étranger, pourtant, mettent en contact plusieurs souverainetés et instaurent entre elles des échanges, des négociations, ou suscitent des conflits. Les fondateurs du droit international moderne, réunis à la fin du XIXe siècle par l’Institut de droit international, en étaient bien conscients. Fins observateurs du monde de leur temps, qu’ils entendaient ordonner selon le droit, ils consacrent alors aux implications des mobilités humaines des milliers de pages, et au meilleur moyen de les régler de nombreux débats, soucieux qu’ils étaient d’instaurer un ordre des circulations libéral, condition à leurs yeux de la prospérité de chacun et de la paix entre les nations occidentales. Ils entreprennent ainsi, non sans connaître de véritables succès, d’assurer un statut juridique aux étrangers résidant en Occident, de protéger les réfugiés de la vindicte des États, de dénoncer enfin les entraves trop manifestes à la liberté de circulation. Les guerres brutales que connut l’Europe, sa division en aires d’influence rivales, l’affaissement de la civilisation européenne consécutif à la Première Guerre mondiale ont fait tomber dans l’oubli ces travaux fondateurs autant que leurs réalisations effectives, dont beaucoup ne survécurent toutefois pas à l’effondrement du monde qui les avait vu naître. Ce livre retrace leur histoire et leurs combats, en un temps que marque à nouveau autant la nécessité d’un ordre mondial des mobilités humaines que l’apparente impossibilité de le faire advenir.

(read more here) 

SSRN PAPER: Alexandra KEMMERER, "Exile and Access: Lilly Melchior Roberts and the Infrastructures of International Law" (forthcoming in: Immi TALLGREN (ed.), Portraits of Women in International Law)

 

(image source: Wikimedia Commons)

Abstract:

In her two consecutive and yet closely interwoven legal careers, as a corporate lawyer in Berlin’s premier transnational law firm in the years of the decline of the Weimar Republic and as a law librarian and bibliographer in one of the world’s leading law libraries at the height of the Cold War, Lilly Melchior Roberts (1903 – 1966) was part of an intellectual project that encompassed the disciplinary fields of international law, comparative law, and the emerging field of European legal integration, inspired by conceptual frameworks and perspectives of transnational law. In this chapter, on a biographical journey from Hamburg and Berlin to Ann Arbor, challenging well-worn distinctions between content and infrastructures, scholarship and practice, faculty and library, the German-Jewish émigré lawyer Lilly Melchior Roberts will be portrayed as a transformative actor in the emerging field of transnational (and, in particular: European) legal studies as well as in the disciplines of comparative and international law.

Read the paper on SSRN. 

ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRY: Alain COLLIGNON, "Henri Rolin" (Belgium WWII)

(image source: BelgiumWWII)

First paragraph:

Beaucoup d’éléments rapprochent Henri Rolin et Paul-Henri Spaak : même milieu sociologique et culturel (la bourgeoisie francophone avec des racines flamandes), même profil politico-philosophique au départ et même itinéraire politique, du libéralisme progressiste au socialisme belge. Pourtant, le cheminement des deux hommes s’est révélé bien différent : d’une part l’idéalisme de Rolin, trouvant sa raison d’être dans le Droit international, d’autre part le pragmatisme de Spaak, détenant très longtemps le portefeuille des Affaires étrangères.

(source: BelgiumWWII) 

CALL FOR PAPERS: Jewish International Lawyers and New World Orders (1917-1951) (Jerusalem/Leipzig 24-25 MAY 2021); DEADLINE 15 NOV 2020

The International Law Forum of the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem together with the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow, at Leipzig and the Jacob Robinson Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem are inviting proposals for papers to be presented at an international conference to be held mostly or partly online on 24-25 May 2021 (depending on the prevailing public health conditions). The conference will include invited speakers and other participants.

Theme

 The first half of the 20th century featured two dramatic attempts to construct New World Orders following the two World Wars. These attempts included the establishment of ambitious international governance frameworks in the form of the League of Nations, the Permanent Court of International Justice and the International Labor Organization after the First World War and the United Nations Organization, the International Court of Justice and the Bretton Woods System after the Second World War. In parallel with these developments, landmark agreements were reached resulting in a radical transformation of the Westphalian state system, and, in particular, with regard to the relationship between states, individuals and groups. These agreements included other major instruments such as the post-World War One minority treaties, the Slavery Convention (1926), the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), the Geneva Conventions of 1929 and 1949, the London Charter (1945), the Genocide Convention (1948), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the Refugees Convention (1951). It can be argued that the norms and institutions established in this dramatic period revolutionized international law in diverse fields, ranging from international human rights law, through international criminal law and international humanitarian law, to international economic law. Recent years have seen a sharp increase in historical research describing the unique contribution of prominent Jewish international lawyers to the development of modern international law. Among the prominent publications belonging to this genre one can mention Philippe Sands’ East West Street, focusing on the life and work of Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht (2017), Gilad Ben-Nun’s book on the Fourth Geneva Convention which highlights the contribution of Georg Cohn, Georges Cahen-Salvador and Nissim Mevorah (2020), James Leoffler and Moria Paz’s edited volume on the Law of Strangers (2019), James Loeffler’s Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (2018),  Nathan Kurz’s, Jewish Internationalism and Human Rights after the Holocaust (2020) and Rotem Giladi’s publications on Israel and the Refugees and Genocide Convention (2015).[1]  A number of earlier works also touched upon multiple dimensions of the topic[2],  including the contributions of prominent Jewish international lawyers, such as Hans Kelsen and Jacob Robinson[3],  and on the relationship between the experience of being uprooted and interest in international law. 4] The conference seeks to invite lawyers, historian and academics from other relevant disciplines to take stock of this growing literature, that analyzes the contribution of Jewish international lawyers to the major developments in international law noted above, and to address the following questions: Can one truly speak of a “Jewish school” in international law? Or can one allude to a number of “Jewish schools” speaking in different voices? Can the contributions of Jewish international lawyers be distinguished from other contemporary trends shaped by migration and/or attachment to cosmopolitan ideals? If so, what are the main contours of this Jewish school(s)? How is it related to Jewish thought and experience generally or to the collective interests of the Jewish people in the relevant period? Does anything remain of this tradition in the 21st century? Has this tradition affected the approach to international law of Israel and international Jewish institutions? To what extent does the categorization of certain authors as “Jewish” do injustice to their own self-identification as individuals or as nationals of specific countries? To what extent has the Jewish stance(s) toward international law changed since the creation of the State of Israel (and to what extent is there a Jewish-Israeli School (or schools) that are distinct from the Jewish school(s)(? In particular, how may these questions be related to what some have seen as Israel’s skeptical stance towards many of the universal or cosmopolitan values articulated in the post-World War eras. Finally, can any contemporary lessons be drawn from this phenomenon and, if so, what are they? Understanding the historic experience represented by the contribution of Jewish international lawyers in the period in question may also help researchers better understand contemporary attitudes towards international law as well as the feasibility of changing them.

The call

Researchers interested in addressing issues related to the themes of the conference are invited to respond to this call for papers with a 1-2-page proposal for an article and presentation, along with a brief CV. Proposals should be submitted by email to Mr. Tal Mimran, the coordinator of the International Law Forum (tal.mimran@mail.huji.ac.il) no later than 15 November 2020. Applicants should be notified of the committee's decision by 15 December 2020. Written contributions (of approx. 10-25 pages) based on the selected proposals should be submitted by 1 May 2021. The Israel Law Review (a Cambridge University Press publication) has expressed interest in publishing selected full length papers based on conference presentations, subject to its standard review and editing procedures.

 Conference Academic Committee  

Eyal Benvenisti, Cambridge University/Hebrew University of Jerusalem Tomer Broude, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Dan Diner, Jabob Robinson Institute, Hebrew University Elisabeth Gallas, Dubnow Institute Rotem Giladi, Dubnow Institute Philipp Graf, Dubnow Institute Guy Harpaz, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Moshe Hirsch, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Yaël Ronen, Israel Law Review, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Yuval Shany, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Malcolm Shaw, Essex Court Chambers/Hebrew University of Jerusalem Yfaat Weiss, Dubnow Institute

(source: H-Diplo) 

BOOK: Jean-Marie PALAYRET, Isabelle RICHEFORT, and Dieter SCHLENKER, eds., Histoire de La Construction Européenne (1957-2015) Sources et Itinéraires de Recherche Croisés (Paris: Editions du Comité des Travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2019). ISBN 978-2-7355-0908-9, 24.00 EUR

(Source: CTHS)

Editions du Comité des Travaux historiques et scientifiques has published a new book on the history of the European Union.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Initiée par Robert Schuman et Jean Monnet, la Communauté européenne du charbon et de l’acier (CECA) précurseur de la construction européenne – a comme premier objectif de « créer une solidarité de fait » (Déclaration Schuman, 9 mai 1950) entre les Européens pour éviter une nouvelle guerre. Le plan Schuman marque le point de départ de la construction européenne.

La présente conférence, qui s’est tenue au centre des Archives diplomatiques les 30 juin et 1er juillet 2016, se propose de faire un état des lieux de la recherche historique sur la construction européenne et des dernières tendances de l’historiographie, de présenter divers fonds d’archives (publiques et privées) récemment ouverts au public en la matière et de découvrir quelques-uns des réseaux associatifs ou professionnels qui la sous-tendent.

En collaboration avec la direction des Archives du ministère français des Affaires étrangères, la Conférence « Sources et itinéraires de recherche croisés de l’histoire de la construction européenne – 1957-2015 » a été organisée par l’Association des « Amis des Archives historiques de l’Union européenne ». Celle-ci est une association qui regroupe tous ceux qui souhaitent apporter leur concours à l’enrichissement et à la connaissance des Archives historiques de l’Union européenne.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Remarques introductives
Jean-Marie Palayret


Historiographie du processus de construction européenne

The History of the European construction: development and current trends
Antonio Varsory

Alan S. Milward’s legacy: deconstructing the history of the construction of Europe
Frances MB Lynch

European Integration and the Cold War
Maria Eleonora Guasconi

Les états membres


« Les négociations d’adhésion de l’Espagne à la CEE et les relations hispano-communautaires : sources, parcours et perspectives de recherche »
Mathieu Trouvé

La poursuite et la demande d’adhésion de la Grèce aux Communautés européennes à travers les Archives grecques
Giorgios Polydorakis

Les archives du ministère des Affaires étrangères sur la Construction européenne : état des fonds et présentation de documents
Isabelle Nathan

La construction européenne vue à travers les archives hongroises
Gergely Fejérdy

A History of European Law: The ‘Constitutional Practice’ and the ‘Veto Politics’
Philip Bajon

Le Cedefop, 40 ans au service de la formation professionnelle en Europe : collecte et exploitation des archives d’une agence européenne
Marc Willem


L’apport des archives privées à l’historiographie de la construction européenne

Les archives de la présidence de Jacques Delors à la Commission européenne
Catherine Allaire-Previti

Sources et historiographie de l’Agence spatiale européenne
Nathalie Tinjod

Les sources privées dans la reconstruction biographique des responsables communautaires, années 1950-1970
Mauve Carbonell


Le rôle des fondations

Le Groupe de Liaison des Professeurs d’histoire auprès de la Commission européenne
Wilfried Loth

Le projet d’histoire de la Commission européenne
Éric Bussière

Towards an European Research infrastructure on Integration Policy?
Marc Dierikx

La Maison de l’histoire européenne au défi d’un récit sur l’unité de l’Europe : une histoire de papier(s) ?
Étienne Deschamps


L’Europe a-t-elle tenu toutes ses promesses ?
Jean-Marie Palayret

More info here

(source: ESCLH Blog)

BOOK REVIEW: Thomas GIDNEY reviews Kim A. WAGNER, Amritsar 1919, An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (New Haven: Yale UP, 2019) (LSE Review of Books)

(image source: LSE Review of Books)

Review summary:

13 April 2019 marks 100 years since the Amritsar (or Jallianwala Bagh) massacre, which remains one of the most controversial acts of colonial violence in the history of the British Empire. In his new book Amritsar 1919: An Empire or Fear and the Making of a Massacre, Kim A. Wagner offers a meticulously researched account of the events leading up to the massacre as well as its aftermath. The book vividly and emotively captures post-war Amritsar, the horrors of the massacre and the violent humiliation inflicted through British colonial retribution, writes Thomas Gidney.

Read more with the LSE Review of Books.

BOOK: Immi TALLGREN & Thomas SKOUTERIS (eds.), The New Histories of International Criminal Law [The History and Theory of International Law] (Oxford: OUP, 2019), 288 p. ISBN 9780198829638, 70 GBP

(image source: OUP)

Book abstract:

The language of international criminal law has considerable traction in global politics, and much of its legitimacy is embedded in apparently 'axiomatic' historical truths. This innovative edited collection brings together some of the world's leading international lawyers with a very clear mandate in mind: to re-evaluate ('retry') the dominant historiographical tradition in the field of international criminal law. Carefully curated, and with contributions by leading scholars, The New Histories of International Criminal Law pursues three research objectives: to bring to the fore the structure and function of contemporary histories of international criminal law, to take issue with the consequences of these histories, and to call for their demystification. The essays discern several registers on which the received historiographical tradition must be retried: tropology; inclusions/exclusions; gender; race; representations of the victim and the perpetrator; history and memory; ideology and master narratives; international criminal law and hegemonic theories; and more. This book intervenes critically in the fields of international criminal law and international legal history by bringing in new voices and fresh approaches. Taken as a whole, it provides a rich account of the dilemmas, conundrums, and possibilities entailed in writing histories

Contents:

 1: Editors' Introduction, Immi Tallgren & Thomas Skouteris 2: Foreword, Martti Koskenniemi 3: Unprecedents, Gerry Simpson 4: Founding Moments and Founding Fathers: Shaping Publics Through the Sentimentalization of History Narratives, Kamari Clarke 5: From the Sentimental Story of the State to the Verbrecherstaat; Or, the Rise of the Atrocity Paradigm, Lawrence Douglas 6: International Criminal Justice History Writing as Anachronism, Frederic Megret 7: Redeeming Rape: Berlin 1945 and the Making of Modern International Criminal Law, Heidi Matthews 8: 'Voglio una donna!': Of Contributing to History of International Criminal Law with the Help of Women Who Perpetrated International Crimes, Immi Tallgren 9: Writing More Inclusive Histories of International Criminal Law: Lessons From the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Emily Haslam 10: The 'Africa Blue Books' at Versailles: World War I, Narrative and Unthinkable Histories of International Criminal Law, Christopher Gevers 11: Crimes Against Humanity: Racialized Subjects and Deracialized Histories, Vasuki Nesiah 12: Nazi Atrocities, International Criminal Law, and War Crimes Trials. The Soviet Union and the Global Moment of Post-World War II Justice, Franziska Exeler 13: Theodor Meron and the Humanization of International Law, Aleksi Peltonen 14: Histories of the Jewish 'Collaborator': Exile, not Guilt, Mark Drumbl

(source: OUP)

ARTICLE: Terry NARDIN, "The international legal order 1919–2019", International Relations

(image source: Sage)

Abstract:

Despite repeated claims during the past century that the international legal order has been radically transformed, the contours of that order are in many ways the same in 2019 as they were in 1919. New laws govern international institutions, human rights, trade, and the environment and new institutions have emerged that affect how international law is interpreted and applied. War has lost legitimacy as a tool of foreign policy and individual responsibility for aggression and crimes against humanity has been affirmed. Yet these changes build on ideas and practices that may have been rudimentary but were not absent a century ago. Underlying them are persistent differences involving a shifting cast of old and new states as well as differences between local and universal ideals and between instrumental and noninstrumental conceptions of law. The traditional understanding of state sovereignty on which the international legal order rests has been qualified but not discarded, and its persistence confirms that the system it orders remains a system of states.

Read more with Sage journals.

 

CHAPTER: Ignacio DE LA RASILLA Y DEL MORAL, "Quintiliano Saldaña Garcia-Rubio (1878-1938)" in The Dawn of a Discipline – International Criminal Justice and Its Early Exponents, Frédéric MEGRET & Immi TALLGREN (eds.), forthcoming (SSRN)

(image source: KUL)

Abstract:

Quintiliano Saldaña Garcia-Rubio (1878-1938) was one of the leading proponents of ‘legal pragmatism’ in European criminal law circles in the interwar period and the author of the first course on international criminal justice delivered at The Hague Academy of International Law in 1925. This chapter examines the three main stages in Saldaña’s polyhedral intellectual life. The first part surveys Saldaña’s formative years and his early academic professional development, examining the influence of Franz von Liszt’s Marburg School of Criminal Law on his academic interests and professional career until the end of the First World War. The second part examines Saldaña’s seminal theory of ‘universal social defence’ and his 1925 Hague Academy course, La justice pénale internationale, which included one of the first projects for an international criminal code. It also reviews Saldaña's legislative contribution to the polemical 1928 Spanish Criminal Code project, which is widely considered an example of a proto-fascist criminal code. The third part follows Saldaña’s career during the Second Spanish Republic, surveying his criminal law and criminology work in the development of his theory of ‘legal pragmatism.’ It also revisits his engagement with the mid-1930s international legal debates on terrorism in the framework his contribution to the works of the International Bureau for the Unification of Criminal Law. The conclusion revisits the mysterious circumstances of Saldaña’s death during the Spanish Civil War and the dark legacy of his legal thought on the criminal law system of General Franco’s regime in Spain.

Read the full paper on SSRN.

(source: International Law Reporter)

BOOK: Patrick William KELLY, Sovereign Emergencies : Latin America and the Making of Global Human Rights Politics [Human Rights in History] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). ISBN 9781316730225, $ 24.00

(Source: Cambridge University Press)

Cambridge University Press has just published the eBook of a new book which deals with the role of Latin America in the making of global human rights politics during the 1970s. The paperback and hardback are to be released in August 2018.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The concern over rising state violence, above all in Latin America, triggered an unprecedented turn to a global politics of human rights in the 1970s. Patrick William Kelly argues that Latin America played the most pivotal role in these sweeping changes, for it was both the target of human rights advocacy and the site of a series of significant developments for regional and global human rights politics. Drawing on case studies of Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, Kelly examines the crystallization of new understandings of sovereignty and social activism based on individual human rights. Activists and politicians articulated a new practice of human rights that blurred the borders of the nation-state to endow an individual with a set of rights protected by international law. Yet the rights revolution came at a cost: the Marxist critique of US imperialism and global capitalism was slowly supplanted by the minimalist plea not to be tortured.

- Draws on archival research and oral interviews spanning ten countries in Latin America, Europe, the United States, and Australia

- Offers a highly interdisciplinary lens, drawing on political science, anthropology, law, and sociology to paint a broad historical canvas

- Historicizes the birth of global human rights politics with a minimalist focus on civil and politics rights in the 1970s

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick William Kelly, Northwestern University, Illinois

Patrick William Kelly is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern University. He is currently writing a global history of AIDS.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of figures

Introduction

1. Torture in Brazil

2. The emergency in Chile

3. Transnational solidarity

4. Redefining sovereignty

5. The origins of American human rights activism

6. The global specter of Argentina's disappeared

7. Argentina and the inter-American system

Epilogue: the promise and limits of the human rights cascade

Index.

More information with the publisher

(source: ESCLH Blog)

CALL FOR PAPERS: The League of Nations and International law, 1919-1945 (Copenhagen, 13-14 JUN 2019); DEADLINE 1 NOV 2018

(image source: study.eu)

The historiography of international law of the 19th and 20th centuries has grown rapidly in the last decades around the excellent work of the legal scholar Martti Koskenniemi and the new Journal of the History of International Law. However, this new wave of scholarship focuses primarily on intellectual history based on biographical studies of leading jurists. Generally, scholars of international legal history have not followed in the footsteps of recent historiographical developments in the fields of human rights or EU law, where historians have systematically used archival resources to go beyond intellectual history and explore the actual legal practice situated in different societal contexts. As a result, historiography of international law has to some extent neglected how the rise of international organisations, and in particular the foundation of the League of Nations (LoN) system, created new legal techniques and shaped the development of international law. Turning to the new historiography of international organisations a similar pattern emerges.
While historians in the last decade have fundamentally reassessed the history of the League of Nations, they have not explored its legal dimension. The same goes for recent studies of the technical international organisations that were established from the mid-19th century onwards and became part of the LoN system after 1919.

This conference wants to promote a new legal history that explores how the LoN system influenced the development of international law from 1919-1945 based on systematic research of international,
state and private archives and a contextual approach to the object of study.
This call is interested in archive based research papers that address:
- How the League of Nation system, including the ILO and the Permanent Court of International Justice, shaped the development of international law.
- The role of law, legal techniques and jurists in the institutional and administrative development of the League of Nation system.
- The role of law and legal techniques in the development of LoN policies and regulatory efforts.
- The professionalisation of academics and practitioners of international law
- Network or biographical approaches to exploring the key actors of the legal history of League of Nation system.
- Analyses of how League of Nation member states (as well as key non-member states such as the United States) incorporated international law and legal techniques in their foreign policy.

The conference is meant to be a first meeting between researchers sharing the agenda outlined above. The aim is that methodological challenges can be identified and the contextual approach to legal history can be further refined. There will be a follow-up conference by the end of 2020 aimed to prepare the papers for a final publication with a leading international publishing house.

The conference is part of a new collective research project running at the University of Copenhagen from 2018 to 2020 entitled: Laying the Foundations – The League of Nation and International Law, 1919-1945 - https://internationallaw.ku.dk.

We welcome abstracts (in English) of a maximum of 400 words by 1 November 2018. Abstracts should be sent to Associate Professor Morten Rasmussen (University of Copenhagen)  mortenra@hum.ku.dk.
The organization will cover expenses of 2-3 nights of hotel accommodation as well as travel expenses.

(source: ESCLH Blog)

BOOK: Tom RUYS, Olivier CORTEN & Alexandra HOFER (eds.), The Use of Force in International Law. A Case-Based Approach (Oxford: OUP, 2018), 960 p. ISBN 9780198784364, 49,99 GBP

(image source: OUP)

Book abstract:

The international law on the use of force is one of the oldest branches of international law. It is an area twinned with the emergence of international law as a concept in itself, and which sees law and politics collide. The number of armed conflicts is equal only to the number of methodological approaches used to describe them. Many violent encounters are well known. The Kosovo Crisis in 1999 and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 spring easily to the minds of most scholars and academics, and gain extensive coverage in this text. Other conflicts, including the Belgian operation in Stanleyville, and the Ethiopian Intervention in Somalia, are often overlooked to our peril. Ruys and Corten's expert-written text compares over sixty different instances of the use of cross border force since the adoption of the UN Charter in 1945, from all out warfare to hostile encounters between individual units, targeted killings, and hostage rescue operations, to ask a complex question. How much authority does the power of precedent really have in the law of the use of force?

Table of contents:

 1: Introduction, Tom Ruys, Olivier Corten, and Alexandra Hofer
2: The Caroline Incident - 1837, Michael Wood
1 - The Cold War Era (1945-1989)
3: The Korean War - 1950-1953, Nigel White
4: The Suez Canal Crisis - 1956, Alexandra Hofer
5: The Soviet Intervention in Hungary - 1956, Eliav Lieblich
6: The U-2 incident - 1960, Ki-Gab Park
7: The Belgian Intervention in The Congo - 1960 and 1964, Robert Kolb
8: The Indian Intervention in Goa - 1961, Tom Ruys
9: The Cuban Missile Crisis - 1962, Alexander Orakhelashvili
10: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident - 1964, Douglas Guilfoyle
11: The US Intervention in the Dominican Republic - 1965, Christian Walter
12: The Six Day War - 1967, John Quigley
13: The Intervention in Czechoslovakia - 1968, Gerhard Hafner
14: The USS Pueblo Incident - 1968, Wolff Heintschel von Heinegg
15: The Indian Intervention into (East) Pakistan - 1971, Dino Kristiotis
16: The Yom Kippur War - 1973, François Dubuisson and Vaios Koutroulis
17: Turkey's intervention in Cyprus - 1974, Oliver Dörr
18: The Mayaguez Incident - 1975, Natalino Ronzitti
19: The Entebbe Raid - 1976, Claus Kreß and Benjamin K. Nußberger
20: The Larnaca Incident - 1978, Constantine Antonopoulos
21: The Vietnamese Intervention in Cambodia - 1978, Gregory H. Fox
22: The Ugandan-Tanzanian War - 1978-1979, Kenneth Chan
23: Operation Litani - 1978, Myra Williamson
24: The Lebanon War - 1982, Myra Williamson
25: The Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan - 1979-1980, Georg Nolte and Janina Barkholdt
26: The US Hostage Rescue Operation in Iran - 1980, Mathias Forteau and Alison See Ying Xiu
27: The Iran-Iraq War - 1980-1988, Andrea de Guttry
28: Israel's Air Strike Against Iraq's Osiraq Nuclear Reactor - 1981, Tom Ruys
29: The US Intervention in Nicaragua - 1981-1988, Jörg Kammerhofer
30: The Falklands/Malvinas War - 1982, Etienne Henry
31: South African Incursions into Lesotho - 1982, Theresa Reinold
32: The US Intervention in Grenada - 1983, Nabil Hajjami
33: The Israeli Raid Against the PLO Headquarters in Tunis - 1985, Erin Pobjie, Fanny Declercq, and Raphaël Van Steenberghe
34: The Killing of Khalil al-Wazir by Israeli Commandos in Tunis - 1988, Erin Pobjie, Fanny Declercq, and Raphaël Van Steenberghe
35: The US Strikes Against Libya - 1986, Maurice Kamto
36: The US Intervention in Panama - 1989, Nicholas Tsagourias
2 - The Post-Cold War Era (1990-2000)
37: The ECOWAS Intervention in Liberia - 1990-1997, Ugo Villani
38: The Gulf War - 1990-1991, Erika de Wet
39: Intervention in Iraq's Kurdish region and the Creation of the No-Fly Zones in Northern and Southern Iraq - 1991-2003, Tarcisio Gazzini
40: The Intervention in Somalia, Terry D. Gill and Kinga Tibori-Szabó
41: The Intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina - 1992-1995, Pierre Klein
42: The US Air Strike Against the Iraqi Intelligence Headquarters - 1993, Paulina Starski
43: The ECOWAS Intervention in Sierra Leone - 1997-1999, Susan Breau
44: The US Strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan - 1998, Enzo Cannizzaro and Aurora Rasi
45: The Eritrean-Ethiopian War - 1998-2000, Sean D. Murphy
46: The Great African War and the Intervention by Uganda and Rwanda in the Democratic Republic of Congo - 1998-2003, James A. Green
47: The Kosovo crisis - 1999, Daniel Franchini and Antonios Tzanakopoulos
3 - The Post 9/11-Era (2001-)
48: The Intervention in Afghanistan - 2001-, Michael Byers
49: The Iraq War - 2003, Marc Weller
50: Israeli Air Strikes in Syria - 2003 and 2007, Lindsay Moir
51: The Israeli Intervention in Lebanon - 2006, Christian J. Tams and Wenke Brückner
52: The Turkish Intervention Against the PKK in Northern Iraq - 2007-2008, Kimberley N. Trapp
53: 'Operation Phoenix' - the Colombian Raid Against the FARC in Ecuador - 2008, Mónica Pinto and Marcos Kotlik
54: The Conflict in Georgia - 2008, Christine Gray
55: Israeli Military Operations Against Gaza: Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), Operation Pillar of Defense (2012) and Operation Protective Edge (2014), Christian Henderson
56: The NATO Intervention in Libya - 2011, Ashley Deeks
57: US Extra-Territorial Actions against Individuals: Bin Laden, Al Awlaki, and Abu Khattalah, David Kretzmer
58: The Intervention in Côte d'Ivoire - 2011, Dire Tladi
59: The Intervention of the Gulf Cooperation Council in Bahrain - 2011, Agatha Verdebout
60: The Ethiopian Military Intervention in Somalia - 2011, Jean-Christophe Martin
61: The Intervention of France and African Countries in Mali 2013, Karine Bannelier and Théodore Christakis
62: Threats of and Actual Military Strikes against Syria - 2013 and 2017, Anne Lagerwall
63: The Crisis in Ukraine - 2014, Mary Ellen O'Connell
64: The Military Operations against the 'Islamic State' (ISIL or Da'esh) - 2014, Olivier Corten
65: The Saudi-Led Military Intervention in Yemen's Civil War - 2015, Luca Ferro and Tom Ruys
66: The ECOWAS Intervention in the Gambia - 2016, Mohamed S. Helal

More information with OUP.

CALL FOR PAPERS: British Influences on International Law 1915-2015(DEADLINE 29 OCTOBER)

International Law Reporter signals a call for submissions from the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, concerning a collective book on "British Influences on International Law 1915-2015". The invitation is aimed at "established academics, early career researchers, doctoral researchers, those with experience in government and other practice, and anoyne else with relevant experience", whether based in Her Majesty's United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, or elsewhere.

A seminar,  linked to the book, will be held in the first half of 2015. Professor Robert McCorquodale will edit the book, with Jill Barrett, Dr. Andraz Zidar, Anna Riddell and Dr Jean-Pierre Gauci. The book is linked to another project, the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Grotius Society.

The deadline for this call is rather soon, 29 October. Fur further details, we refer to ILR or Dr. Jean-Pierre Gauci (j.gauci@biicl.org).