BOOK: Matthew CRAVEN, Sundhya PAHUJA, and Gerry SIMPSON (eds.) International Law and the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). ISBN 9781108499187, £ 120.00

(Source: CUP)

Cambridge University Press is publishing a new book on international law and the cold war.

ABOUT THE BOOK

International Law and the Cold War is the first book dedicated to examining the relationship between the Cold War and International Law. The authors adopt a variety of creative approaches - in relation to events and fields such as nuclear war, environmental protection, the Suez crisis and the Lumumba assassination - in order to demonstrate the many ways in which international law acted upon the Cold War and in turn show how contemporary international law is an inheritance of the Cold War. Their innovative research traces the connections between the Cold War and contemporary legal constructions of the nation-state, the environment, the third world, and the refugee; and between law, technology, science, history, literature, art, and politics.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Matthew Craven, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Matthew Craven is a Professor of International Law at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and Chair of the Centre for the Study of Colonialism, Empire and International Law. He is also a Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School and a member of the Advisory Council for the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School. He is author of The Decolonization of International Law: State Succession and the Law of Treaties (2007) and The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1995).

Sundhya Pahuja, University of Melbourne

Sundhya Pahuja is a Professor of International Law and Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at the University of Melbourne. She is a leading scholar of postcolonial international law, and author of Decolonising International Law (Cambridge, 2011).

Gerry Simpson, London School of Economics and Political Science

Gerry Simpson is a Professor of International Law at London School of Economics and Political Science. He held the Sir Kenneth Bailey Chair of Law at the University of Melbourne Law. He is the author of Great Powers and Outlaw States (Cambridge, 2004) and Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law (2007).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication

About the editors

About the authors

List of figures

Acknowledgements

1. Reading and unreading a historiography of hiatus Matthew Craven, Sundhya Pahuja and Gerry Simpson

Part I. The Anti-Linear Cold War:

2. International law and the Cold War: reflections on the concept of history Richard Joyce

3. The elusive peace of Panmunjom Dino Kritsiotis

Part II. The Generative/Productive Cold War:

4. Accounting for the ENMOD convention: Cold War influences on the origins and development of the 1976 Convention on Environmental Modification techniques Emily Crawford

5. Nuclear weapons law and the Cold War and post-Cold War worlds: a story of co-production Anna Hood

6. Parallel worlds: Cold War division space Scott Newton

7. Shadowboxing: the data shadows of Cold War international law Fleur Johns

8. Contesting the right to leave in international law: The Berlin Wall, the third world brain drain and the politics of emigration in the 1960s Sara Dehm

9. Bridging ideologies: Julian Huxley, Détente, and the emergence of international environmental law Aaron Wu

10. More than a 'parlour game': international law in Australian public debate, 1965–1966 Madelaine Chiam

11. Environmental justice, the Cold War and US human rights exceptionalism Carmen G. Gonzalez

12. The Cold War and its impact on Soviet legal doctrine Anna Isaeva

13. Forced labour Anne-Charlotte Martineau

14. Rupture and continuity: North–South struggles over debt and economic co-operation at the end of the Cold War Julia Dehm

15. The Cold War history of the landmines convention Treasa Dunworth

Part III. The Parochial/Plural Cold War:

16. The Cold War in Soviet international legal discourse Boris N. Mamlyuk

17. The Dao of Mao: Sinocentric socialism and the politics of international legal theory Teemu Ruskola

18. 'The dust of Empire': the dialectic of self-determination and re-colonisation in the first phase of the Cold War Upendra Baxi

19. The 'Bihar Famine' and the authorisation of the green revolution in India: developmental futures and disaster imaginaries Adil Hasan Khan

20. Pakistan's Cold War(s) and international law Vanja Hamzić

21. International law, Cold War juridical theatre, and the making of the Suez Crisis Charlie Peevers

22. To seek with beauty to set the world right: Cold War international law and the radical 'imaginative geography' of Pan-Africanism Christopher Gevers

23. John Le Carré, international law and the Cold War Tony Carty

24. Postcolonial hauntings and Cold War continuities: Congolese sovereignty and the murder of Patrice Lumumba Sara Kendall

25. End times in the Antipodes: propaganda and critique in On the Beach Ruth Buchanan.

More information here
(source: ESCLH Blog)

JOURNAL: Journal of the History of International Law XXI (2019), No. 2 [Special Issue: Revisiting State Socialist Approaches to International Criminal and Humanitarian Law, ed. by Raluca GROSESCU & Ned RICHARDSON-LITTLE]

(image source: Brill)

Revisiting State Socialist Approaches to International Criminal and Humanitarian Law: An Introduction (Raluca Grosescu & Ned Richardson-Little)
Abstract:

This introductory essay provides an overview of the scholarship on state socialist engagements with international criminal and humanitarian law, arguing for a closer scrutiny of the socialist world’s role in shaping these fields of law. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the historiography on post-1945 international law-making has been generally dominated by a post-1989 sense of Western triumphalism over socialism, where the Soviet Union and its allies have been presented as obstructionists of liberal progress. A wave of neo-Marxist scholarship has more recently sought to recover socialist legal contributions to international law, without however fully addressing them in the context of Cold War political conflict and of gross human rights violations committed within the Socialist Bloc. In contrast, this collection provides a balanced understanding of the socialist engagements with international criminal and humanitarian law, looking at the realpolitik agendas of state socialist countries while acknowledging their progressive contributions to the post-war international legal order.

The Protagonism of the USSR and Socialist States in the Revision of International Humanitarian Law (Giovanni Mantilla)
Abstract:

The USSR and Socialist states played a crucial and still largely underappreciated role in the re-negotiation of international humanitarian law (IHL) in 1949 and 1977. Drawing on new multi-archival research, I demonstrate that the support of the Soviet Union and Socialist Bloc states was essential to the negotiation of key legal achievements with regard to non-traditional conflict forms and actors, including rules on internal conflicts, national liberation war, and irregular fighters. They exerted influence chiefly through concerted action to create or side with majority coalitions alongside neutral Western or Third World countries, forcing their principal Western foes to accept rules they found undesirable. Yet Soviet-Western interactions in the re-making of IHL were not simply confrontational. In the 1970s, as Cold War hostilities cooled, East and West engaged in partial backdoor cooperativeness, leading to critical features of the Additional Protocols I and II, including rules for the protection of civilians and IHL oversight.

Socialist Internationalism and Decolonizing Moralities in the UN Anti-Trafficking Regime, 1947–1954 (Sonja Dolinsek & Philippa Hetherington)
Abstract:

In the late 1940s, state socialist governments proclaimed that commercial sex did not exist under socialism. At the same time, they were enthusiastic participants in the drafting of a new UN Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others. This article explores state socialist involvement in the global moral reform drive accompanying the 1949 Convention. It traces the ideological coherence between Socialist Bloc and ‘Western’ delegations on the desirability of prostitution’s abolition. Conversely, it highlights splits on issues of jurisdiction, manifesting in the Soviet call for the eradication of the draft Convention’s ‘colonial clause’, which allowed states to adhere to or withdraw from international instruments on behalf of ‘non-self-governing territories’. We argue that critiques of the colonial clause discursively stitched together global moral reform and opposition to imperialism, according socialist and newly decolonized delegations an ideological win in the early Cold War.

State Socialist Endeavours for the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to International Crimes: Historical Roots and Current Implications (Raluca Grosescu)
Abstract:

This article analyses the role of Eastern European socialist governments and legal experts in encoding the non-applicability of statutory limitations to international crimes. It argues that socialist elites put this topic on the agenda of the international community in the 1960s through two interrelated processes. On the one hand, legal scholars cooperated with Western European lawyers in order to enforce the idea that the international crimes codified by the Nuremberg Charter should not be subject to prescription. On the other hand, Eastern European governments proposed and enabled – through their cooperation with African and Asian states – the adoption of the 1968 UN Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, this instrument became an important tool for advancing prosecutions of international crimes committed under dictatorships and violent conflicts, particularly in Central Eastern Europe and Latin America.

The Drug War in a Land Without Drugs: East Germany and the Socialist Embrace of International Narcotics Law (Ned Richardson-Little)
Abstract:

This article examines how the German Democratic Republic (GDR) engaged with the problem of international anti-narcotics law and how it came to embrace the global drug war. The international anti-narcotics system provided a means of signalling the GDR’s normalcy to the international community and allowed East Germany to highlight its absence of drug abuse at home as a demonstration of socialism’s superiority in comparison with the narcotics abuse crisis of the capitalist world. By the 1980s, however, the GDR’s support for the international prohibition of drug trafficking shifted from one of competition with the West to that of collaboration. Through cooperation between international experts from both East and West, GDR elites abandoned earlier concerns about state sovereignty to endorse the global harmonization of drug laws as part of the 1988 Vienna Narcotics Convention.

Crimes against the People – a Sui Generis Socialist International Crime? (Tamal Hoffmann)
Abstract:

Crimes against humanity is one of the core crimes in international criminal law, whose existence is treated as a natural reaction to mass atrocities. This idea of linear progress is challenged by this article, which demonstrates that in post-Second World War Hungary an alternative approach was developed to prosecute human rights violation committed against civilian populations. Even though this concept was eventually used as a political weapon by the Communist Party, it had long-lasting effects on the prosecution of international crimes in Hungary.

Book reviews:

• System, Order, and International Law: The Early History of International Legal Thought from Machiavelli to Hegel, edited by Kadelbach, Stefan, Thomas Kleinlein, and David Roth-Isigkeit (Claire Vergerio)
• Restricted Access Opfer – Die Wahrnehmung von Krieg und Gewalt in der Moderne, written by Svenja Goltermann (Milos Vec)

(source: Brill)

BOOK: Petra GOEDDE, The Politics of Peace. A Global Cold War History (Oxford: OUP, 2019), 312 p. ISBN 9780195370836, 22,99 GBP

(image source: OUP)

Abstract:

During a television broadcast in 1959, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower remarked that "people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days our governments had better get out of the way and let them have it." At that very moment international peace organizations were bypassing national governments to create alternative institutions for the promotion of world peace and mounting the first serious challenge to the state-centered conduct of international relations. This study explores the emerging politics of peace, both as an ideal and as a pragmatic aspect of international relations, during the early cold war. It traces the myriad ways in which a broad spectrum of people involved in and affected by the cold war used, altered, and fought over a seemingly universal concept. These dynamic interactions involved three sets of global actors: cold war states, peace advocacy groups, and anti-colonial liberationists. These transnational networks challenged and eventually undermined the cold war order. They did so not just with reference to the United States, the Soviet Union, and Western Europe, but also by addressing the violence of national liberation movements in the Third World. As Petra Goedde shows in this work, deterritorializing the cold war reveals the fractures that emerged within each cold war camp, as activists both challenged their own governments over the right path toward global peace and challenged each other over the best strategy to achieve it. The Politics of Peace demonstrates that the scientists, journalists, publishers, feminists, and religious leaders who drove the international discourse on peace after World War II laid the groundwork for the eventual political transformation of the Cold War.

On the author:

Petra Goedde is Associate Professor of History at Temple University. She is the author of GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945-1949 and the co-editor of The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (OUP, 2012), and The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (OUP, 2013)

More information with OUP.