ARTICLE: Jullia GAFFIELD, "The Racialization of International Law after the Haitian Revolution: The Holy See and National Sovereignty" (American Historical Review CXXV (2020), No. 3, 841-868)

(image: Toussaint Louverture; source: Wikimedia Commons)

Abstract:

The Haitian state shaped international definitions of sovereignty and national legitimacy after the Declaration of Independence in 1804. Haiti’s nineteenth century was not a period of isolation and decline; its first six decades were globally connected because the country’s leaders challenged their postcolonial inequality with diplomacy and state formation. This strategy aimed to establish Haiti’s membership in the “family of nations,” a central metaphor in European and American diplomatic, legal, and religious decision-making. In doing so, the Haitian state forced the Atlantic powers to redefine the boundaries of international relations. Haiti’s decades-long negotiations with the Catholic Church were tied to the racialization of the global hierarchy. After its Declaration of Independence, the Haitian state began clearing a theoretical path toward recognized sovereignty based on the dominant narrative that a society must be considered “civilized” on the world stage. But, as it cultivated internal policies and practices that rejected the dominant racist assumptions, these discriminatory ideologies became increasingly more explicit in international law. 

(read more with OUP Journals: DOI 10.1093/ahr/rhz1226)

WEBINAR: Janne NIJMAN (Asser Institute/UvA), "Locating Gender and Race in the History of International Law" (Geneva: IHEID, 10 MAR 2021)

 

(image source: IHEID Law/Twitter)

The IHEID's Law Faculty announced a webinar with Prof. Janne Nijman (Asser/UvA) entitled "Locating Gender and Race in the History of International Law".

The link for the seminar is here. See earlier on this blog for the EJIL article.

ARTICLES: Henri DE WAELE & Janne NIJMAN on international legal history (EJIL XXXI (2020), Issue 3)

(image source: OUP)

A New League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? The Professionalization of International Law Scholarship in the Netherlands, 1919–1940 (Henri de Waele) (open access)

Abstract:

Despite the historical turn in the study of public international law and the advance of comparative approaches, still too little attention is paid nowadays to specific national traditions. This holds, inter alia, for the scholarly views and practices in the Netherlands during the first half of the 20th century. This article seeks to shed light on the experiences here at the advent of the League of Nations and its tentative ‘new world order’. Offering a meso-level analysis, it portrays the leading protagonists during the 1920s and 1930s, aiming to provide a snapshot of how their discipline and activities underwent an unexpectedly swift professionalization. This process is perceived to have run along three distinct vectors – academic, societal and diplomatic/bureaucratic – which are each examined in turn. Novel opportunities stemming from the rise of the international judiciary, especially the two Permanent Courts established on Dutch soil, are looked at separately. The research delivers a greater insight into the inter-war era and the challenges faced by (academics from) smaller nations, enabling us to situate underexplored local experiences within a global frame, and offering useful lessons for (the writing of) international law history more generally.

Marked Absences: Locating Gender and Race in International Legal History (Janne Nijman) (open access)

Abstract: 

This article was sparked by a critical reading of Henri de Waele’s article ‘A New League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? The Professionalization of International Law Scholarship in the Netherlands, 1919–1940’, and aims to offer an alternative perspective on this period in the history of Dutch international legal scholarship. While it appreciates the author’s examination of Dutch international law scholarship during the interwar period and concurs with the idea that this scholarship needs to be examined more closely, it argues that doing history today requires us first to raise ‘the woman question’, especially in the context of the so-called ‘professionalization’ of international law in the 1920s and 1930s, and second to include Dutch colonialism as an important backdrop to the work of the interwar international law scholars. I will give some pointers and illustrations to support this argument. The specific Dutch material brought to bear aims to show more generally the importance of questioning rather than reproducing traditional historiography, within which ‘the woman question’ and ‘the colonial question’ were left unmentioned. As such this article also deals with the issue of expanding and remaking international legal history as an issue of present and future purport