Political Theory and International Law

International Law and International Political Theory
Oxford Handbooks Online

Gerry Simpson
The Oxford Handbook of International Political Theory
Edited by Chris Brown and Robyn Eckersley
Print Publication Date: Mar 2018

Subject: Political Science, Political Theory, International Relations, Law, Law and Politics
Online Publication Date: Apr 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198746928.013.4
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter probes the way in which description, prescription, and critique form a
congeries of approaches that together, in turn, produce an intellectual field that might be
described as the political theory of international law (though it is hardly one thing, and
some of it refuses altogether the injunctions of traditional political theory). All of this will
lead to an examination of two particular problems of international diplomacy to which
political theories of international law appear to have responded: namely, intervention and
war crimes trials, and an engagement with two interdisciplinary turns (to History and to
International Relations) through which international law has enlivened its habits of
thought and theoretical inclinations.
Keywords: law, history, diplomacy, war crimes, intervention, critique
Why Is There International Thought?

PUPILS of international law inevitably encounter, early in their study, a field-defining split
between international law’s two most pervasive self-images: as a field of norms derived
from the scientific (Kelsen 1934) or empirical (Simmons 2010) study of the practice of
states, and as a project of reform or radical transformation grounded either in
aspirational humanitarianism (Weston, Falk, and D’Amato 1990) and normative theory
(McDougal, Lasswell, and Reisman 1968) or in assemblages of post-Enlightenment
critical thinking (Boyle 1985; Beckett 2012). In this chapter, I will consider historically
law’s receptiveness (and sometimes lack of receptiveness) to political theory (via Kant
and Hobbes and, later, Schmitt and Rawls) and consider too the way in which description,
prescription, and critique form a congeries of approaches that together, in turn, produce
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an intellectual field that might be described as the political theory of international law
(though it is hardly one thing, and some of it refuses altogether the injunctions of
traditional political theory).
All of this will lead to a consideration of two particular problems of international

diplomacy to which political theories of international law appear to have responded:
namely, intervention and war crimes trials, and then, finally, to an engagement with two
interdisciplinary turns through which international law has enlivened its habits of thought
and theoretical inclinations.
It is by now a commonplace that political theory has been largely associated with—indeed
has dedicated itself to—the study of state formation, authority, legitimacy, and resilience
as a matter of internal or domestic politics (Wight 1960).1 The question, from Aristotle
and Plato through to Hobbes and Bodin and then on to Rawls and Skinner, (p. 61) largely
concerned how a good (Plato) or tolerable (Hobbes) life is to be constructed within the
polis.
This attention to the construction of sovereign space can be understood, then, as a kind
of inattention to that other sphere in which political life is conducted—namely, the sphere
of the international or the space in which sovereigns and others engage with each other
beyond the boundaries of the provincial or local or sovereign. Indeed, that space itself,
and therefore what counts as local or global, has been partly defined by the sorts of
choices and intellectual commitments made by both the political and philosophical
classes (Eslava 2016). This is why the Scottish nineteenth-century international lawyer
James Lorimer felt free to assert the proposition that no man of first-class intellectual
abilities had ever devoted himself to the study of the law of nations (Lorimer 1883; Knop
2016), why Martin Wight was able to ask “Why is there no international theory?” (1960),
and why David Armitage, as recently as 2013 and in direct homage to Skinner’s earlier
Foundations of Political Thought, could devote a book to retrieving the foundations of
modern international thought (Armitage 2013: 1–13).
Two separate arguments are being made here about international political theory. One
arises from a sense that philosophers of the international were somehow mediocre or
scatter-brained or unsystematic or parasitic or engaged in what Kenneth Waltz described
mordantly as “the puerile task of telling men of affairs to stop behaving badly” (Waltz
1962: 331). The other is a converse belief that when the great philosophers studied the
world of sovereigns they tended to produce second-class or derivative work. Richness of
thought and revolutionary originality (political theory in the polis) is replaced by tired
formulas and shallow diagnosis (political theory among states). According to this view,
political theorists have turned to the international space either in a state of late-career
exhaustion or torpor (The Law of Peoples after A Theory of Justice) or before they have
produced more foundational work (Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars before Spheres of
Justice) or as a coda to brilliant lifelong interrogations of the constitutional life of the
state (Dworkin 2013). To interrogate the international is either to take a break from the
Page 2 of 17

central work of figuring out how a state is meant to manage its internal affairs or to
indulge a hobby or sideline.
This image of the field requires significant revision in light of several developments
including: the turn to international history in historical studies in general (Mazower
2012) and in intellectual history in particular (Moyn and Sartori 2013); the sense that
political theories—if they are to have any purchase—need to confront the conditions of
global life; and the (re)turn to theory in the work of international lawyers themselves. All
of this has produced important work but also opportunities for interdisciplinary cross-
fertilization. An important aspect of this work has been the reinterpretation of political
thought as international. Here, the likes of Hobbes, Hume, Arendt, and Foucault
(Dyzenhaus 2014; Gillroy 2007; Golder 2015; Whitehall 2016; Roele 2012) have been
revived or reconfigured as theorists of international politics and law. At the same time,
Suarez, Vitoria, and Grotius have been reread as political theorists engaged in internal
politics and polemic contestation (Hunter 2010). So perhaps, at least, we can say that
Wight’s goal to overcome “the unhappy partition that had divided (p. 62) philosophically
minded international lawyers and internationally minded political philosophers” (Lawson
2012: 31) has been achieved.
But why did this state of affairs arise in the first place? Interestingly, the problem of
political theory’s domesticity is mirrored by the obstacles international law has
encountered in having itself regarded as law “properly so-called” (Austin 1954; Bentham,
1789). If—and to return to Wight—the international space is indeed a realm of “repetition
and recurrence,” where a set of unchanging iron laws of history dictate what is possible
or, more pertinently, impossible (Wight 1960), it would make sense for political theorists
to devote attention to normative projects related to the internal workings of the state and
descriptive projects concerning the endlessly variable machinations of political agents
within the state. To put this aphoristically, national sovereign space becomes the sphere
of political theory, while the international is the sphere of (mere) history and necessity.
The political theory of international law suffers from the obvious problem that, from a
certain angle, the international order is incapable of being understood as either juridical
(laws between nations in an anarchical system?) or political (politics among nations in a
world of survival, insecurity, and war?).
In the rest of this chapter, I want to offer a tentative (and positive) response to these
concerns by arguing that there is a lively and substantial political theory of international
law constituted by what political philosophers have said about international law and by
what international lawyers have said about themselves (or their field), and that this
political theory has had two separate tendencies. In the first, the classical political theory
of international law is a set of reflections (often quite disparate) about the possibilities of
a life among sovereign states in a space we think of as international or anarchical. In the
second mode (let’s call it “the modern conception”), the international feels more like
some national political spaces: a polity in which there is a quite thick and lawful order.
The subjects (or “legal persons”) within this legal order are much more diverse and
diffuse than in the classical conception of international law (Krisch 2010). In this second
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mode, political theory either becomes a normative project that seeks (in its most
sophisticated version) to advance a framework of norms and institutions designed to
govern this world fairly or efficiently or democratically in the presence of the
interpenetration of local and international space and the profusion and multiplicity of
legal regimes, and law-bearing and receiving actors within this space (Young 2012), or
becomes a critical project that thinks of international law as a language or space or
terrain in which our political, cultural, and ethical lives are articulated and contested: a
law, not above the political realm taming or managing it, but imbricated within it
(Koskenniemi 1989; Cass 1996; Shklar 1964) and helping to constitute what counts as law
and non-law in the first and last place (Johns 2012).
Classical International Law: Anarchy and

Cooperation
The Hobbesian image of autonomous, sometimes nasty, alienated agents weighed heavily
on classical international lawyers, who developed various species of positivism (p. 63) to
accommodate or (partially) counteract it. International legal positivists were responding
to the assumptions of anarchy that provoked generations of international relations
realists, but their idealized sovereigns were not violent and insecure but instead capable
of engaging in limited cooperation defined by legal rules to which they themselves had
agreed. The eighteenth-century Swiss lawyer Emmerich Vattel brought this inter-
sovereign order into relief with his focus on agreement, self-help, self-defence, and auto-
interpretation, and this idea of an international order composed of self-constraining
sovereigns and horizontal legal agreement was very influential on nineteenth-century
international lawyers (Holland 1898; Westlake 1894) as well as late twentieth-century
international society thinkers. Legal positivism, for all its updatings (Weil 1983;
d’Aspremont 2011; and judicial re-elaborations (The Lotus Case)) has remained tied to
this idea of law as a kind of anti-normative (or, better, norm-generating) description of
what states do and what they believe and what they feel obliged to do in future.
Modern International Law I: Normativity and

Centralization
What, then, is the modern political theory of international law? From within the
discipline, two main approaches can be discerned: a progressive-humanitarian orthodoxy
that has tried to conceptualize international law as a combination of social contract
(Rawls 1996) and moral norm or communitarian value (Tasioulas 1996), and a more
disillusioned, heterodox tradition that either tends to read international law as
philosophically unstable (Koskenniemi 1989) or historically culpable (Craven 2007) or
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politically (Beckett 2012) and economically (Lang 2011; Pahuja 2011) complicit or
excessively progressivist (Skouteris 2010), or seeks to understand international law as a
way of thinking embedded in particular cultural formations (Berman 2011; Simpson
2015).
To begin with the first of these, international law has always possessed an explicitly
normative aspect. This political theory of international law is often traced back to the
early international lawyers who adopted forms of naturalism that gelled nicely with moral
prescription. In Vitoria, for example, a Christian ethic underpins both a commitment to
charity or equality but also various forms of violent evangelical empire. It was, of course,
Immanuel Kant who offered up the most famous and explicitly normative international
law in his Articles on Perpetual Peace. This work greatly absorbed international relations
theory after Michael Doyle’s revival of Kant via the democratic peace, and international
lawyers continue to rely on and contest (Koskenniemi 2012; Howse and Teitel 2013) Kant.
A recent effort to bring some of these tendencies together and to weld them to a
normative and institutional thickening in the human rights and international criminal law
fields is found in the recent work of Ruti Teitel (2016). She has argued for a “humanity’s
law” in which certain moral prohibitions have become universalized and concretized in
institutions like the International Criminal Court or in norms like the prohibition on
“crimes against humanity.”
Of course, there are many different stripes of liberal theory in international law
(p. 64)
and at least two apparently opposed liberal projects at the heart of the discipline: one
applying liberal normativism to international law, the other accentuating the cooperative,
agnostic face of liberal thought. An important, if flawed, attempt to bring these under
some sort of philosophical structure is found in the work of John Rawls. Rawls has been
widely regarded as the pre-eminent liberal scholar of his generation, and yet his major
works (Theory of Justice, Political Liberalism) each contained only the odd aside about
global politics. Initially, a Rawlsian international law consisted either in cataloguing these
asides or in imaginative reconstructions of his central claims as international law (Franck
1989).
When Rawls himself came to international law, the results were decidedly mixed. The Law
of Peoples applies one of the boldest contemporary restatements of liberal theory to
international law, but the combination yields a rather banal set of principles (many of
which are found in the UN Charter already) as well as a tripartite distinction (between
outlaw states, decent but illiberal states, and liberal states) that resembled some of the
more regressive nineteenth-century ideas about political community (Lorimer 1883), and
have been subjected to a fair bit of criticism from within international law (Varaki 2016)
and political philosophy. This raises a question about the whole political theory of
international law. Why does it sometimes feel so thin? In the case of Rawls, there is
clearly a sense that possibilities are foreclosed by the nature of international politics, and
that accordingly ambition has to be curtailed and the range of political choices rendered
smaller. The parsimony of these late-style career swerves, though, has not prevented
international lawyers from developing richly imagined forms of liberal legalism which
Page 5 of 17

seek to thicken out international law’s constitutional (Klabbers et al. 2012) or

administrative (Hovell 2016) frameworks by treating the political theory of the
international as an analogue to the political theory of the state. Meanwhile, cosmopolitan
thinking has not entirely run out of steam, and normative individualism is now reflected
in the work of international criminal courts as well as in the human rights movement. In
the end, though, if there is a liberal political ideal that has flourished since the end of the
Cold War, it lies in the belief that that judicial and quasi-judicial institutions can promote
a liberal or decent international order through the proliferation (Alter 2014),
fragmentation (Young 2012), or constitutionalization of liberal norms.
Alongside this liberal revival, there have been efforts to reconstruct a natural law among
nations (Tasioulas 1996) or recuperate an idealist tradition in the radical rethinking of the
international political and social order (Allott 1990). And, of course, the political theory of
international law has also responded to specific problems of international ordering and
disordering. These projects have encompassed climate change, poverty, self-
determination, and fragmentation and two problems I will discuss shortly: intervention
and punishment (see Chapters 9 and 25).
Perhaps these liberal, post-positivist efforts can all be understood as an attempt to

dissolve sovereignty and establish a single juridical space by building cooperative
institutionalisms (Kennedy 1987) or by designing systems of consensual and non-
consensual (judicial and arbitral) adjudication (Lauterpacht 1933).
(p. 65) Modern International Law II: Critique

These normative political theories have not lacked detractors, of course. The great
classical realists had issued warnings about the tendency to imagine humanity’s law as a
law somehow free of ideological contestation. A relatively recent revival of interest in
Carl Schmitt, the German constitutional theorist, has provoked a fresh round of
scepticism among lawyers (Howse 2016). Schmitt’s anxieties that international law might
be transformed from an (idealized) inter-sovereign order (the great achievement of the
European ius publicum) to a repressive criminal law or policing order with its centre in
Washington or New York have influenced a generation of international lawyers (Simpson
2007; Koskenniemi 2002). But this has been part of a broader resistance to normative
(liberal) political theory itself on the part of critical international lawyers.
This critical scholarship has tended, instead, to celebrate the work of anthropologists
(Eslava 2016), geographers, science and technology scholars, and feminist theorists (Otto
1999) to rethink the international legal order not as a normative structure or basket of
rules but as a terrain of expert struggle (Kennedy 2016) or a language and practice of
empire (Anghie 1999; Becker-Lorca 2015; Miles 2015) or an encounter of jurisdictions
(drawing on the work of McVeigh 2007) or as a literary (Berman 2011), sentimental
(Simpson 2015), acoustic (Parker 2015), or gendered (Heathcote 2011) enterprise. This
Page 6 of 17

can be thought of as pre-normative legal theory: a sweeping away of some unfortunate

habits and dispositions in order to move to a thoroughly historicized and politically
responsible practice of international law. The politics of international law, then—by
rejecting the siren song of abstract normative theorizing from universal positions—
becomes a way of bringing out the choices made by international lawyers in fully situated
moments of decision.
War and Crime: Two Interventions in Practice

In each case these various traditions in international political theory have engaged in,
sometimes charged, debates about the shape and purpose of international order, and
have played out in particular in relation to the juridical status of “humanity.” For state-
oriented conceptions of international law, humanity had very little status as a moral or
political agent. Political theories of global life (from Vattel to Morgenthau and on to Waltz
and Kissinger) emphasized the ethical priority of the national interest or the need for
international law to be founded on the inclinations and practices of states. More latterly,
this became a concern for protecting “domestic jurisdiction” or a prohibition on
intervention. On the whole this sovereignist credo had little truck with grand schemes to
remake the world under the banner of “mankind” or even “civilization.” Bismarck’s
scepticism towards leaders who invoked “Europe” belongs firmly in this camp. It’s
(p. 66)
not as if this tradition lacks radical potential, however. It was precisely the sovereigntist
claims of the Third World that helped undercut the project of Empire during the period of
decolonization. Self-determination—first invoked by John Stuart Mill in the late
nineteenth century—was in effect a claim to remake the imperial world as a collection of
free sovereigns. This suspicion of “humanity” has carried over into critical approaches to
intervention and punishment where the concept of “humanity” is disentangled to reveal a
form of politics both imperial and violent.
In the case of intervention, the classical conception of war was understood as a clash of
sovereignties in which either international law was absent from any final reckoning about
the war (that would occur at the level of ethics or religion or prudence) or it was engaged
only at the level of applying a legalized ethics of war to the conduct of the armed conflict
itself (ius in bello) (see Chapter 16). The position of the nineteenth-century international
lawyer was not so different from that of the mid- to late twentieth-century realist in that
regard. War was a matter for the political realm and not the legal.
But by the middle of the twentieth century, the inter-sovereign war had been subjected to
quite an extensive network of legal rules found in the UN Charter and in customary
international law (Nicaragua v. United States, 1986) (see Chapter 17). These rules were
agreed to by states and were largely adhered to or subject to widespread breach
depending on whom one consulted in the pages of the American Journal of International
Law. These rules had been laid down, however, under a largely positivistic conception of
Page 7 of 17

international law—states had agreed to the prohibition on the use of force and on the
narrow exceptions to it.
The normative theory of force was developed by both political theorists (e.g. Wheeler
2002) and by international lawyers frustrated by the constraints of this legal regime. If
anything, the normative turn was aimed at loosening or liberalizing the Charter regime in
favour of allowing more force. Normative political theory very often argued for the right
to defend vulnerable communities from oppressive or violent or genocidal local regimes.
More recently, critical scholarship has come to this problem by noticing the way in which
law and war have become entwined in a “humanitarianization” of war and a militarization
of humanitarian action (Kennedy 2006), by pointing to the roots of humanitarian
intervention in a history of executive action in the international realm (Orford 2011) or by
showing how the hegemons have traditionally projected power through ethical
programme (Simpson 2004).
In the case of war crimes trials, similar patterns can be observed. The pre-twentieth
century can be seen as somehow pre-normative. Impunity was the rule and international
law was a law of impunity. So, if a reader picks up, say, a history of the Concert of Europe
1815–1914 and reads its passages on war crimes trials or looks for a reference to ending
impunity, such references are simply absent: there are ellipses where there should be
trials. Instead of thunderous calls for retribution, we have a gentler language of
diplomatic nicety. “The object of this union is as simple as it is great [ . . . ] calm and
consistent in its proceedings, it has no other object than the maintenance of
peace” (Declaration of the Five Cabinets, Aix-la-Chapelle, 15 November 1818).
The high-point of impunity—perhaps also a turning point—came when Hitler

(p. 67)
celebrated, and provoked the end of, this impunity with his famous question: “Who
remembers the Armenians?” This was, more or less, the sort of amnesia demanded by the
Treaty of Munster back in 1648:
That there shall be on the one side and the other a perpetual [ . . . ] Amnesty, or
Pardon of all that has been committed since the beginning of these Troubles,
[ . . . ] but that all that has pass’d on the one side, and the other [ . . . ] during the
War, shall be bury’d in eternal Oblivion.
International law, then, was—to restate the position—the law of oblivion. International
law’s classical tradition was one in which the priority of sovereignty meant that there was
no point from which to declare an inter-sovereign armed conflict legal or illegal, and no
locus in which an international war crimes trial might take place. Criminal law was a
matter for the domestic sovereign space. The early twentieth century, then, marks a
moment when international law engaged in a normative turn, the juncture when a
political theory of punishment and retribution, deplored by Schmitt and American
Wilsonians, began to dominate our thinking about the moral and legal consequences of
defeat in war (Simpson 2007). As the prime minister of Italy, Vittorio Orlando, put it in
Page 8 of 17

1919: “It is only from today that the laws of peoples begins” (Papers Relating to the
Foreign Relations of the United States, 183).
By the middle of the twentieth century, the Westphalian fusion of sovereignty and
amnesia had become deeply unfashionable. Oblivion has given way to war crimes trials—
all this in the midst of a fetishistic culture of compulsory commemoration. The rise of
retributive legalism, or the application of a theory of criminal punishment to international
affairs, begins at Versailles with the decision to indict the Kaiser for offences against
international morality (a phrase reminiscent of Bentham’s dismissal of international law
itself) and the sanctity of treaties. Meanwhile, the war’s winners were no longer simply
the temporary beneficiaries of fate but the guardians and creators of a new legal order.
This was the politico-juridical background to the momentous decision on the part of the
Allies in Moscow, implemented later at Nuremberg, to charge the Nazi leadership with
the crime of aggression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Needless to say, this
transformation has given rise to a flourishing sub-field of theorizing about war crimes
trials, some of which seeks to place trial and punishment on a firmer philosophical
footing, or at least subject it to some sort of analysis from the perspective of political
theory (Shklar 1964), international relations (Ralph 2007), or history (Sands 2016). But
alongside this political theory of international criminal justice is a more self-consciously
critical tradition (sometimes drawing on Arendt or Shklar) that situates war crimes trials
in a history of hegemonic ordering (Krever 2014), judicial theatre (Simpson 2007),
justifications for punitive sanction (Tallgren 2002), and didactic legalism (Douglas 2001).
It is obvious, even from these brief surveys, that the applied political theory of
international law is multiple, varied, and very often interdisciplinary. It is appropriate,
then, to finish this chapter on a cross-disciplinary note.
Political, Historical: Two Interdisciplinary

(p. 68)
Turns
From the perspective of an audience of political theorists or international relations
scholars, two interdisciplinary moments seem particularly salient and emblematic. The
first goes back to the various prospectuses for a relationship between international law
and international relations. The second refers to a much more recent encounter between
historians (especially intellectual historians) and public international lawyers.
Page 9 of 17

International Relations and International Law
It would be foolish to assert the existence of a single strand of contemporary international

relations that advances, or is grounded in, an implied political theory of international law.
But excluding obvious denialists (e.g. Waltzians, who had nothing much to say about
international law) and scholars for whom international law is entirely marginal, there
exists a liberal-constructivist centre in which there is a surprising degree of continuity
about how international law works in the world. One powerful re-theorization of
international law has been an approach that emphasizes the way in which local
arrangements within states will define the shape and content of international legal norms
(Moravcsik 1997). Others have focused on the vulnerable (Clark 2013) or harmed
(Linklater 2011) to produce accounts of an international order that might redistribute
resources through international legal norms. There was then a tremendous flourishing in
the early 2000s, with the publication of work calling for a new research agenda (Byers
1999) bringing the two fields into some sort of harmony, followed by work that applied a
rather disharmonious rational choice theory to international law (Guzman 2011). This has
been supplemented, in turn, by a series of critical explorations of “the politics of
international law” both reconstructive (Scott 2004) and sceptical (Kennedy 1999).
Turn to History
The politics of international law has now become a kind of historiography of international
law. This is, after all, a peculiarly anti-historical field in some respects. Some have argued
that the history of international law really only began with Robert Ward’s An Enquiry into
the Foundation and History of International Law in Europe (1795) (Craven 2016); and
certainly since then there have been precious few histories of international law (Grewe
2000; Schmitt 2006). The publication of Anthony Anghie’s Sovereignty, Imperialism and
International Law, Martti Koskenniemi’s Gentle Civiliser of Nations, Richard Tuck’s
Rights of War and Peace, and a series of revisionist histories by David Kennedy (Anghie
2007; Koskenniemi 2002; Tuck 1999; Kennedy 1980; 1988; see (p. 69) too Bederman
2001) transformed the scene, and since then there have been a number of further
historical studies (e.g. Becker Lorca 2015; Craven 2007; Pahuja 2011).
Every sub-field now has its history and then its counterhistory, and then its anxiety that
perhaps all these previous histories were methodologically suspect or even inept—a mere
writing down of some things that happened and then some other things that happened
but weren’t noticed the first time round. We now seem to be in a third stage, in which
unusually sophisticated accounts of international legal episodes or developments are the
subject of criticism on the grounds of flawed or unconvincing historical method. And this
attention—mostly sympathetic, robust, friendly—has come both from within the discipline
and from outside it. This international history displays a willingness to see the power of
international law as an organizing idea of international political life, an international law
that matters hugely in determining how certain worlds were constructed, how certain
Page 10 of 17

practices were named and renamed, how certain possibilities were closed, perhaps
forever (Brett 2011; Hull 2014; Pedersen 2015). The easy clichés of an international law
somehow always on the outside of a politics or a social practice is less present in this
work. All of this, to take us full circle, has resulted in a sophisticated and substantial
dialogue between historians of political thought and international legal historians that
has at the same time provoked fresh and illuminating contributions to a now historically
conscious political theory of international law.
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Notes:
(1.) With thanks to Anna Saunders for expert research. I use the terms “political
philosophy” and “political theory” interchangeably throughout the chapter.
Gerry Simpson
Gerry Simpson is Professor of Public International Law in the Law Department at the
London School of Economics.
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International Law and International Political Theory

Oxford Handbooks Online

Print Publication Date: Mar 2018

Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: law, history, diplomacy, war crimes, intervention, critique

Why Is There International Thought?

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 18 July 2018

All of this will lead to a consideration of two particular problems of international

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 18 July 2018

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 18 July 2018

Classical International Law: Anarchy and

Modern International Law I: Normativity and

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 18 July 2018

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 18 July 2018

seek to thicken out international law’s constitutional (Klabbers et al. 2012) or

Perhaps these liberal, post-positivist efforts can all be understood as an attempt to

(p. 65) Modern International Law II: Critique

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 18 July 2018

can be thought of as pre-normative legal theory: a sweeping away of some unfortunate

War and Crime: Two Interventions in Practice

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 18 July 2018

The high-point of impunity—perhaps also a turning point—came when Hitler

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 18 July 2018

Political, Historical: Two Interdisciplinary

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 18 July 2018

International Relations and International Law

It would be foolish to assert the existence of a single strand of contemporary international

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 18 July 2018

Anghie, A. (1999). Finding the Peripheries: Sovereignty and Colonialism in Nineteenth-

Anghie, A. (2007). Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law

Armitage, D. (2013). Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge:

Austin, J. (1954). The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (London: Weidenfeld &

Bederman, D. (2001). International Law in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Bentham, J. (1789). An Introduction to the Problem of Morals and Legislation (London: T.

Berman, N. (2011). Passion and Ambivalence: Colonialism, Nationalism and

International Law (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff).

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 18 July 2018

Cass, D. (1996). Navigating the Newstream: Recent Critical Scholarship in International

Holland, T. E. (1898). Studies in International Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 18 July 2018

Howse, R. (2016). Schmitt, Schmitteanism and Contemporary International Legal Theory.

Johns, F. (2012). Non-Legality in International Law: Unruly Law (Cambridge: Cambridge

Kelsen, H. (1934). Pure Theory of Law (Vienna: F. Deuticke).

Kennedy, D. (1980). Theses about International Law Discourse. German Yearbook of

Kennedy, D. (1987). The Move to Institutions. 8 Cardozo Law Review 841.

Klabbers, J., A. Peters, and G. Ulfstein (2012). The Constitutionalization of International

Knop, K. (2016). Lorimer’s Private Citizens of the World. European Journal of

Koskenniemi, M. (1989). From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 18 July 2018

Krisch, N. (2010). Beyond Constitutionalism: The Pluralist Structure of Postnational Law

Lauterpacht, H. (1933). The Function of Law in the International Community (Oxford:

Linklater, A. (2011). The Problem of Harm in World Politics: Theoretical Investigations

McVeigh, S. (ed.) (2007). Jurisprudences of Jurisdiction (Oxford: Routledge Cavendish).

Orford, A. (2011). International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Pahuja, S. (2011). Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and

Subscriber: Tufts University; date: 18 July 2018

Scott, S. (2004). International Law in World Politics: An Introduction (Boulder, Colo.:

Simmons, B. A. (2010). Treaty Compliance and Violation. Annual Review of Political