International Law

Whether from the perspective of Islamic law’s advocates, secularism’s partisans, or communities caught in their crossfire, many people see the relationship between Islamic law and secularism as antagonistic and increasingly discordant.

This paper draws on regulatory governance scholarship to argue that the analytic phenomenon currently known as ‘Big Data’ can be understood as a mode of ‘design-based’ regulation. Although Big Data decision-making technologies can take the form of automated decision-making systems, this paper focuses on algorithmic decision-guidance techniques.

This article questions the characterization of the 1999 Declaration as a complete turnaround by studying the role that the 1947 Statement has played in the development of anthropological views on human rights. In particular, it takes a diachronic look at the institutional actions of the AAA of the 1940s and those of the 1990s by comparing the 1947 Statement with the 1999 Declaration.

While international criminal procedure should be governed by standards of fairness, this does not necessarily imply that fairness demands are to be identical to the ones applicable in domestic proceedings. The context within which international criminal courts and tribunals operate should be taken into account.

The end of the Cold War has brought a new form of world disorder. The systems and strategies imposed by the global balance of power of the Cold War have evaporated. The international system is seeking a new equilibrium between global integration and global disintegration. Natural forces of economic and cultural integration are opposed by equal and opposite forces of national and cultural particularism, and by the conflicts flowing from gross inequalities and injustices of social and economic order.

The vocabulary of “reasonableness” invokes a wide margin of discretion that is often needed to temper the excessive rigour of legal rules and to deal with the inevitable problems of over- and under-inclusion associated with application of formal law to individual cases. The acceptability of the use of discretion by a law-applying institution such as the Israeli High Court of Justice is based on the assumption that its preferences and moral sensibilities are broadly reflective of the preferences and sensibilities of the community in which it exercises its jurisdiction.

The essay examines some of the changes in the author’s thinking about the politics of engaging in international law since the original publication of the article that opened the first issue of EJIL in 1990. The essay points to the change of focus from indeterminacy (to which the author is as committed as ever) of legal arguments to the structural biases of international institutions. It then discusses the politics of definition, that is to say, the strategic practice of defining international situations and problems in new expert languages so as to gain control over them.

Instead of appearing as a stable set of normative demands opposed to international politics, international law is better understood as an aspect of hegemonic contestation, a technique of articulating political claims in terms of legal rights and duties. The controversies in the law concerning the use of force, the law of peace, human rights, trade and globalization reflect strategies through which political actors seek to make their preferences appear to be universal ones.

This book argues that the colonial confrontation was central to the formation of international law and, in particular, its founding concept, sovereignty. Traditional histories of the discipline present colonialism and non-European peoples as peripheral concerns. By contrast, Anghie argues that international law has always been animated by the ‘civilizing mission’—the project of governing non-European peoples, and that the economic exploitation and cultural subordination that resulted were constitutively significant for the discipline.