International Law Rights And Politics

Teaches how and why states make, break, and uphold international law using accessible explanations and contemporary international issues.

Today international law is everywhere. Wars are fought and opposed in its name. It is invoked to claim rights and to challenge them, to indict or support political leaders, to distribute resources and to expand or limit the powers of domestic and international institutions. International law is part of the way political (and economic) power is used, critiqued, and sometimes limited. Despite its claim for neutrality and impartiality, it is implicit in what is just, as well as what is unjust in the world. To understand its operation requires shedding its ideological spell and examining it with a cold eye. Who are its winners, and who are its losers? How - if at all - can it be used to make a better or a less unjust world? In this collection of essays Professor Martti Koskenniemi, a well-known practitioner and a leading theorist and historian of international law, examines the recent debates on humanitarian intervention, collective security, protection of human rights and the 'fight against impunity' and reflects on the use of the professional techniques of international law to intervene politically. The essays both illustrate and expand his influential theory of the role of international law in international politics. The book is prefaced with an introduction by Professor Emmanuelle Jouannet (Sorbonne Law School), which locates the texts in the overall thought and work of Martti Koskenniemi.

Beth Simmons demonstrates through a combination of statistical analysis and case studies that the ratification of treaties generally leads to better human rights practices. She argues that international human rights law should get more practical and rhetorical support from the international community as a supplement to broader efforts to address conflict, development, and democratization.

Politics and law appear deeply entwined in contemporary international relations. Yet existing perspectives struggle to understand the complex interplay between these aspects of international life. In this path-breaking volume, a group of leading international relations scholars and legal theorists advance a new constructivist perspective on the politics of international law. They reconceive politics as a field of human action that stands at the intersection of issues of identity, purpose, ethics, and strategy, and define law as an historically contingent institutional expression of such politics. They explain how liberal politics has conditioned modern international law and how law â€~feeds back' to constitute international relations and world politics. This new perspective on the politics of international law is illustrated through detailed case-studies of the use of force, climate change, landmines, migrant rights, the International Criminal Court, the Kosovo bombing campaign, international financial institutions, and global governance.

Explores the ideological, political, and economic stakes of struggles over international law's history and its relation to empire and capitalism.

World Politics, Human Rights, and International Law examines the functional dynamics between these concepts based upon the author's professional experiences dealing with real world situations, problems, and crises: from the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations; Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Israel, and Syria; Bosnia and Herzegovina; successfully litigating genocide at the World Court; indicting Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia; prosecuting American torture and enforced disappearances at the International Criminal Court; opposing nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons; citizen civil resistance against state crimes; protecting Indigenous Peoples, etc. The reader can see how the author defined these predicaments from the perspective of international law and human rights, and then proceeded to grapple with them and to rectify them. This book demonstrates the power of international law and human rights to make a positive difference for international peace and justice as well as for the good of humanity in the real world of international power politics. By reading this book the citizen will be empowered and inspired to do the same.

This book brings together 18 contributions by authors from different legal systems and backgrounds. They address the political implications of the writing of the history of legal issues ranging from slavery over the use of force and extraterritorial jurisdiction to Eurocentrism.

This volume derives from a series of lectures delivered as the `general course' at the Hague Academy of International law in July 1989. Like those lectures, this volume does not pretend to provide a complete treatise covering all international law. Rather, it offers a particular perspective on the principal subjects of traditional international law, elaborates new developments, and dares reexamine assumptions and premises. The book is built on three themes. The first addresses law as politics, and international law as the law of a political system, now comprised of more than 180 separate, independent states. The essential autonomy of states accounts for the political (as well as economic and cultural) heterogeneity in a pluralist and fragmented system, and international law as its common denominator of normative expression. A second theme explores change in international law as reflecting change in the values and purposes of the international political system. It traces the pursuit through law of the traditional ideal of the state system to secure every state's right to realize its own agenda through its own institutions, and the superimposed contemporary purpose to promote individual human rights and welfare in every society. The third theme perceives a movement in the law from `conceptualism' to `functionalism', from logical deduction out of abstract principles to pragmatic attention to practical needs and solutions to new and old human problems. Each of these themes dominates in several chapters but the other themes are not absent from any of them. Each will add a fresh perspective and contribute to understanding the nature and operation of international law in the international political system at the turn of a new century.