SSRN PAPER: Matthias GOLDMANN, The Entanglement of Sovereignty and Property in International Law: From German Southwest Africa to the Great Land Grab?

(image source: SSRN)

Abstract:

This article argues that an intricate entanglement existed between sovereignty and property in German Southwest Africa. Germany’s control over Southwest Africa depended considerably on European settlements, which received logistical, financial, and military support by Germany. The result was a symbiotic relationship between the government and private economic actors, a form of state capitalism under which private settlements contributed to the establishment of territorial control, a prerequisite of sovereign power. Contractual relationships suggesting formally equal relationships, and during and after the genocide, a mix of arguments drawing on tort law and an idea of formal legality, provided crucial justification for the assumption of territorial control. This description contradicts standard accounts of sovereignty, which tend to turn a blind eye on private property. The article discusses the implications of these findings for today’s international law, including for state responsibility for transnational corporations and the so-called Great Land Grab, the acquisition of vast lands in Africa by foreign public and private agents.

Read the paper here.

Source: International Law Reporter.

AJIL SYMPOSIUM: Anthony CARTY replies to B.S. CHIMNI, "Customary International Law: A Third World Perspective" (AJIL CXII (2018), 319-323)

(image source: Cambridge Core)

Extract:

B.S. Chimni's study of customary international law (CIL) is a review of its role both as a supporter of the existing global capitalist order and as a potential instrument to challenge that order in favor of a postmodern deliberative reasoning as the shaper of a new CIL. It has been my view, since the The Decay of International Law? in 1986, that general customary international law is not an intelligible concept and not actually used in practice to demonstrate empirically the existence of any rule of law. I follow Hans Morgenthau, who wrote in 1940 in the American Journal of International Law that the manner in which the International Court of Justice (ICJ) uses this concept is to decide what it likes and call it customary law. I reiterated this view in my review of the ICJ in the first edition of my Philosophy of International Law in 2007. While Chimni quotes my writings on general custom frequently and very positively in his article, this is always to support a progressive customary law and never to do what I would propose, which is to make a complete break with CIL in favor of an independent approach to the problems it is supposed to answer.

Read the whole response for free on Cambridge Core.

CALL FOR PAPERS: White Slavery in Transnational and International Context, 21 June 2019 (University of Warwick, Deadline: 31 January 2019)

(Source: University of Warwick)

Via Legal History Blog, we learned of a CFP on “White Slavery in Transnational and International Context”.

White Slavery in Transnational and International Context, 1880-1950.  June 21, 2019, University of Warwick (UK).  Keynote: Brian Donovan ((University of Kansas)

This is a call for abstracts for paper, poster and creative presentations for a one day interdisciplinary conference on white slavery, as trafficking in women was historically called. The conference seeks to question how white slavery manifested in transnational and international contexts but welcomes papers on any localities.

We welcome papers exploring different aspects of white slavery from nationalism to visual representations, and their impact on anti-white slavery legislation. The conference seeks to investigate white slavery and its legacies from conceptual, legal, popular culture perspectives. It also seeks to place it in relation to wider themes of nationalism, race, gender, and labour, and question how white slavery relates to critiques of modernity.

We invite paper and poster presentations from range of disciplines that explore how white slavery manifested in these different contexts, in different localities, during the years 1880- 1950. The conference is particularly interested in exploring white slavery through the following themes:

* Race, nationality and nationalism
* Regulation / criminalisation of white slavery in domestic and international sphere
* Rhetoric of slavery and neo-abolitionism
* Age, innocence and purity
* Agency, autonomy and free will
* Gender; trafficking in boys / men
* Migration and gendered labour
* Critique of modernity
* White slavery in popular culture / media

We also welcome creative responses to the subject, and in particular poster presentations that engage the audience and foster debate on the conference themes. PG students at any stage of their studies are particularly encouraged to submit proposals for posters or other visual presentations. Poster presentations must be printed in advance of the conference and be size A1, either portrait or landscape (H: 84.1cm x W: 59.4cm); and you have to present in person. Poster session participants populate boards with pictures, data, graphs, diagrams, narrative text, and more - and will informally discuss their presentations with conference attendees during an assigned session.

Please send 300-word abstract for papers and 200-word abstracts for posters with a short bio to the organisers. Deadline is 31 January 2019. PG bursaries may be available.

Dr Catherine Armstrong (Loughborough University) C.M.Armstrong@lboro.ac.uk  and Dr Laura Lammasniemi (University of Warwick) laura.lammasniemi@warwick.ac.uk

(source: ESCLH Blog)

YOUTUBE Discussions and lectures on Oona HATHAWAY & Scott SHAPIRO, The Internationalists (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017) (LSE, 12 OCT 2017 and New America, 12 SEP 2017)

Thanks to the expanding practice of livestreaming and videocasting, many lectures or panel debates on the history of international law can be revived from anywhere in the world. Above, the example of Scott Shapiro and Oona Hathaway's acclaimed The Internationalists, dating back to the fall of 2017 (see earlier on this blog).

CALL FOR PAPERS: British International History Group 31st Annual Conference, 5-7 SEP 2019 (DEADLINE 1 MAR 2019)

British International History Group 31st Annual Conference
Call for Papers

5-7 September 2019, Lancaster University
Keynote Speaker: Professor Kathleen Burk, University College London

The BIHG Committee invites you to contribute a paper to the conference. As in previous conferences we are pleased to receive offers to present papers on a wide range of subjects in International History, for any period. These include:

• Inter-State Diplomatic Relations
• Domestic Issues in Foreign Policy
• History of International Relations
• Military History (including strategic issues, POWs etc)
• Intelligence and/or Propaganda
• International Organisations and Institutions
• Inter-Imperial Relations
• International Economic Relations
• Cultural and/or Transnational Processes

The committee accepts both individual papers (20 minutes) and complete panel submissions consisting of three 20 minute papers. We also welcome the submission of multiple panels on a related theme; papers from such panels will be considered for publication in a theme issue of the International History Review.

If you wish to offer a paper, please submit your details and 250 word abstract online at https://www.bihg.ac.uk/

The deadline for submissions is 1 March 2019.

(source: H-Diplo)

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Legal History Fellowship – Harvard Law School (DEADLINE: 15 February 2019)

(Source: Harvard University)

Via H-Law, we learned of the call for the 2019-2020 Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Fellowship:

Harvard Law School invites applications for the Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Legal History Fellowship for the academic year 2019-2020.  Eligible applicants include those who have a first law degree, who have completed the required coursework for a doctorate, or who have recently been awarded a doctoral degree. A J.D. is preferred, but not required.  The purpose of the fellowship is to enable the fellow to complete a major piece of writing in the field of legal history, broadly defined. There are no limitations as to geographical area or time period.

Fellows are expected to spend the majority of their time on their own research. They also help coordinate the Harvard Law School Legal History Colloquium, which meets four or five times each semester. Fellows are invited to present their own work at the colloquium. Fellows will be required to be in residence at the law school during the academic year (September through May).

Applicants for the fellowship for 2019-2020 should submit their applications and supporting materials electronically to Professor Bruce H. Mann (mann@law.harvard.edu).

Applications should outline briefly the fellow’s proposed project (no more than five typewritten pages) and include a writing sample and a curriculum vitae that gives the applicant’s educational background, publications, works in progress, and other relevant experience, accompanied by official transcripts of all academic work done at the graduate level. The applicant should arrange for two academic references to be submitted electronically. The transcripts may be sent by regular mail to Professor Mann at Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.

The deadline for applications is February 15, 2019, and announcement of the award will be made by March 15, 2019.

The fellow selected will be awarded a stipend of $38,000.

(Source: ESCLH Blog)

JOURNAL: Journal of Modern Intellectual History, Forum "Law, Empire and Global Intellectual History" (July 2018)

(image source: Cambridge Core)

Introduction (Mililnda Banerjee & Kersten Von Lingen, "Law, Empire and Global Intellectual History: An Introduction"):

In recent years, there has been a deepening convergence between scholarship on global intellectual history and on legal history. To take just one example, a recent book on international law, by Arnulf Becker Lorca (2014), carries “global intellectual history” in its subtitle—a stance related to the author's emphasis on the constitutive role in the field of non-European legal actors.1 A sustained reflection on the convergence between legal studies and global intellectual history, however, still remains a desideratum, at least in the sense that we do not yet have even a basic platform where scholars with different space/time and (trans-) cultural specialization come together to reflect on how studying legal concepts gains from global intellectual history. This forum, which results from a conference organized at Heidelberg University in 2016, attempts a preliminary intervention here. The introductory remarks are not meant to be conclusive; they invite responses.

"Property and Political Norms: Hanafi Juristic Discourse in Agrarian Bengal" (Andrew Sartori)

This article explores the reception of discourses about land and property in Islamic jurisprudence in colonial Bengal. I argue that Hanafi fiqh provided a sophisticated conceptual repertoire for framing claims to property that agrarian political actors in Muslim Bengal drew upon. Yet the dominant framework for understanding property claims in postclassical jurisprudence was ill-fitted to claims of the kind that agrarian movements in colonial Bengal were articulating. As a result, twentieth-century agrarian movements in the region spoke the language of fiqh, but nonetheless inhabited the ideological landscape of a much broader twentieth-century world of political aspirations and norms.

"Sovereignty as a Motor of Global Conceptual Travel: Sanskritic Equivalents of “Law” in Bengali Discursive Production" (Milinda Banerjee)

How may one imagine the global travel of legal concepts, thinking through models of diffusion and translation, as well as through obstruction, negation, and dialectical transfiguration? This article offers some reflections by interrogating discourses (intertextually woven with Sanskritic invocations) produced by three celebrated Bengalis: the nationalist littérateur Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838–94), the Rajavamshi “lower-caste” peasant leader Panchanan Barma (1866–1935), and the international jurist Radhabinod Pal (1886–1967). These actors evidently took part in projects of vernacularizing (and thereby globalizing through linguistic–conceptual translation) legal–political frameworks of state sovereignty. They produced ideas of nexus between sovereignty, law, and “divine” lawgiving activity, which resemble as well as diverge from notions of political theology associated with the German jurist Carl Schmitt. Simultaneously, these actors critiqued coercive impositions of state-backed positive law and sovereign violence, often in the name of globally oriented concepts of “ethical”/natural law, theology, and capacious forms of solidarity, including categories like “all beings,” “self/soul,” “humanity,” and “world.” I argue that “sovereignty,” as a metonym for concrete practices of power as well as a polyvalent conceptual signifier, thus dialectically provoked the globalization of modern legal intellection, including in the extra-European world.

"Legal Flows: Contributions of Exiled Lawyers Toward the Concept of ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ During the Second World War" (Kerstin Von Lingen)

This article addresses the normative framework of the concept of “crimes against humanity” from the perspective of intellectual history, by scrutinizing legal debates of marginalized (and exiled) academic–juridical actors within the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC). Decisive for its successful implementation were two factors: the growing scale of mass violence against civilians during the Second World War, and the strong support and advocacy of “peripheral actors,” jurists forced into exile in London by the war. These jurists included representatives of smaller Allied countries from around the world, who used the commission's work to push for a codification of international law, which finally materialized during the London Conference of August 1945. This article studies the process of mediation and the emergence of legal concepts. It thereby introduces the concept of “legal flows” to highlight the different strands and older traditions of humanitarian law involved in coining new law. The experience of exile is shown to have had a significant constitutive function in the globalization of a concept (that of “crimes against humanity”).

"Liberalism, Cultural Particularism, and the Rule of Law in Modern East Asia: The Anti-Confucian Essentialisms of Chen Duxiu and Fukuzawa Yukichi Compared" (Kiri Paramore)

How and why are universalist modes of political thought transformed into culturally essentialist and exclusionary practices of governance and law? This article considers this question by analyzing the interaction between Confucianism and liberalism in East Asia. It argues that liberalism, particularly as it was used in attacking Confucianism, was instrumental in embedding ideas of cultural particularism and cultural essentialism in the emergence of modern political thought and law in both China and Japan. Both Confucianism and liberalism are self-imagined as universalist traditions, theoretically applicable to all global societies. Yet in practice both have regularly been defined in culturally determined, culturally exclusivist terms: Confucianism as “Chinese,” liberalism as “British” or “Western.” The meeting of Confucian and liberal visions of universalism and globalism in nineteenth-century East Asia provides an intriguing case study for considering the interaction between universalism and cultural exclusivism. This article focuses on the role of nineteenth-century global liberalism in attacks upon the previous Confucian order in East Asia, demonstrating the complicity of liberalism in new, culturally essentialist and particularist constructions of governance and law in both China and Japan.

"Autonomy and Decentralization in the Global Imperial Crisis: The Russian Empire and Soviet Union in 1905–1924" (Ivan Sablin & Alexander Semyonov)

This article brings the case of imperial transformation of the Russian Empire/Soviet Union into global discussions about empire, nationalism, and postimperial governance, and highlights the political and legal imaginaries that shaped this transformation, including their global and entangled character. This article argues that the legal and political discourses of decentralization, autonomism, and federalism that circulated at the time of the imperial crisis between the Revolution of 1905 and the adoption of the Soviet Constitution in 1924 contributed to the formation of an ethno-national federation in place of the Russian Empire, despite both the efforts of the Bolsheviks to create a unitary state, and the expectations of a different future among contemporary observers. At the same time, the postimperial institutional framework became a product of political conjunctures rather than the legal discourse. Its weakness before the consolidating party dictatorship made the Soviet Union a showcase of sham federalism and autonomism.

"Jewish Modern Law and Legalism in a Global Age: The Case of Rabbi Joseph Karo" (Roni Weinstein)

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Rabbi Joseph Karo composed two major Jewish codes of law: the Beit Yosef, and its abridged version, Sulchan ‘Aruch. Though several centuries of legal discussion and scholarship have passed since their publication, these double codes of law were never superseded. This codification project defined the axial place of law in Jewish tradition. I argue that it responded to changes in legal processes and the enforcement of law that simultaneously transformed early modern Europe and the Ottoman world. Transcontinentally connected changes in political institutions—the formation of a centralized Islamic empire in the Ottoman case, and the formation of centralized states in Europe—dramatically redefined the role of law and legal codification in the forging of state power and community identities. The resultant belief among Sephardi rabbis, including Karo, that changes in Jewish legal tradition were now needed, prompted a redefinition of Jewish legal culture, whereby law (a gradually centralized conception of it) began to be seen as the foundation of Jewish religious heritage and ethnic identity. Despite the absence of state backing, early modern transformations in Jewish law were thus part of comparable changes taking place in the European and Islamic legal worlds.

Find the full issue on Cambridge Core.