Revolutions In International Law

The 1917 October Revolution and the revolutionary Mexican Constitution shook the foundations of international law. This collection revisits their legacies.

This book explores the historical inter-relations between international law and revolution, with a focus on how international anti-capitalist struggle plays out through law. The book approaches the topic by analysing the meaning of revolution and what revolutionary activity might look like, before comparing this with legal activity, to assess the basic compatibility between the two. It then moves on to examine two prominent examples of revolutionary movements engaging with international law from the twentieth century; the early Soviet Union and the Third World movement in the nineteen sixties and seventies. The book proposes that the ‘form of law’, or its base logic, is rooted in capitalist social relations of private property and contract, and that therefore the law is a particularly inhospitable place to advance revolutionary breaks with established distributions of power or wealth. This does not mean that the law is irrelevant to revolutionaries, but that turning to legal means comes with tendencies towards conservative outcomes. In the light of this, the book considers the possibility of how, or whether, international law might contribute to the pursuit of a more egalitarian future. International Law and Revolution fills a significant gap in the field of international legal theory by offering a deep theoretical reflection on the meaning of the concept of revolution for the twenty-first century, and its link to the international legal system. It develops the commodity form theory of law as applied to international law, and explores the limits of law for progressive social struggle, informed by historical analysis. It will therefore appeal to students and scholars of public international law, legal history, human rights, international politics and political history.

This book argues that the introduction of popular sovereignty as the basis for government in France facilitated a dramatic transformation in international law in the eighteenth century.

This book presents an analysis of global legal history in Modern times, questioning the effect of political revolutions since the 17th century on the legal field. Readers will discover a non-linear approach to legal history as this work investigates the ways in which law is created. These chapters look at factors in legal revolution such as the role of agents, the policy of applying and publicising legal norms, codification and the orientations of legal writing, and there is a focus on the publicization of law. The author uses Herbert Hart’s schemes to conceive law as a human artefact or convention, being the union between primary rules of obligations and secondary rules conferring powers. Here we learn about those secondary rules and the legal construction of the Modern state and we question the extent to which codification and law reporting were likely to revolutionize the legal field. These chapters examine the hypothesis of a legal revolution that could have concerned many countries in modern times. To begin with, the book considers the legal aspect of the construction of Modern States in the 17th and 18th centuries. It goes on to examine the consequences of the codification movement as a legal revolution before looking at the so-called “constitutional” revolution, linked with the extension of judicial review in many countries after World War II. Finally, the book enquires into the construction of an EU legal order and international law. In each of these chapters, the author measures the scope of the change, how the secondary rules are concerned, the role of the professional lawyers and what are the characters of the new configuration of the legal field. This book provokes new debates in legal philosophy about the rule of change and will be of particular interest to researchers in the fields of law, theories of law, legal history, philosophy of law and historians more broadly.

The first contemporary historiography of international law and an essential methodological guide for researching international legal history.

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

"In the 20th and 21st century revolutions have become more urban, often less violent, but also more frequent and more transformative of the international order. Whether it is the revolutions against Communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR; the "color revolutions" across Asia, Europe and North Africa; or the religious revolutions in Iran, Afghanistan, and Syria; today's revolutions are quite different from those of the past. Modern theories of revolution have therefore replaced the older class-based theories with more varied, dynamic, and contingent models of social and political change. This new edition updates the history of revolutions, from Classical Greece and Rome to the Revolution of Dignity in the Ukraine, with attention to the changing types and outcomes of revolutionary struggles. It also presents the latest advances in the theory of revolutions, including the issues of revolutionary waves, revolutionary leadership, international influences, and the likelihood of revolutions to come. This volume provides a brief but comprehensive introduction to the nature of revolutions and their role in global history"--

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.