Koskenniemi, Rech, Fonseca and others on international law and empire

We missed this one back in 2017. Martti Koskenniemi, Walter Rech, and Manuel Jiminez Fonseca (all at the University of Helsinki) co-edited International Law and Empire: Historical Explorations, out with Oxford University Press. From the publisher:

In times in which global governance in its various forms, such as human
rights, international trade law, and development projects, is increasingly promoted by transnational economic actors and international institutions that seem to be detached from democratic processes of legitimation, the question of the relationship between international law and empire is as topical as ever. By examining this relationship in historical contexts from early modernity to the present, this volume aims to deepen current understandings of the way international legal institutions, practices, and narratives have shaped specifically imperial ideas about and structures of world governance.

As it explores fundamental ways in which international legal discourses have operated in colonial as well as European contexts, the book enters a heated debate on the involvement of the modern law of nations in imperial projects. Each of the chapters contributes to this emerging body of scholarship by drawing out the complexity and ambivalence of the relationship between international law and empire. They expand on the critique of western imperialism while acknowledging the nuances and ambiguities of international legal discourse and, in some cases, the possibility of counter-hegemonic claims being articulated through the language of international law. Importantly, as the book suggests that international legal argument may sometimes be used to counter imperial enterprises, it maintains that international law can barely escape the Eurocentric framework within which the progressive aspirations of internationalism were conceived.

The Table of Contents follows the jump. We believe that only two of 16 chapters (including the introduction) are by women (Julie Saada, Hatsue Shinohara):

Introduction, Martti Koskenniemi

Part I: Epistemologies of Empire and International Law

1. Provincializing Grotius: International Law and Empire in a Seventeenth-Century Malay Mirror, Arthur Weststeijn
2. Indirect Hegemonies in International Legal Relations: The Debate of Religious Tolerance in Early Republican China, Stefan Kroll
3. International Law, Empire, and the Relative Indeterminacy of Narrative, Walter Rech

Part II: Legal Discourses of Empire

4. The Concepts of Universal Monarchy and Balance of Power in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century-a Case Study, Peter Schroder
5. Between Faith and Empire: The Justification of the Spanish Intervention in the French Wars of Religion in the 1590s, Randall Lesaffer
6. Jus gentium and the Transformation of Latin American Nature: One More Reading of Vitoria?, Manuel Jimenez Fonseca
7. Cerberus: The State, the Empire, and the Company as Subjects of International Law in Grotius and the Peace of Westphalia, Jose-Manuel Barreto
8. Revolution, Empire, and Utopia: Tocqueville and the Intellectual Background of International Law, Julie Saada

Part III: Managing Empire: Imperial Administration and Diplomacy

9. Towards the Empire of a 'Civilizing Nation': The French Revolution and its Impact on Relations with the Ottoman Regencies in the Maghreb, Christian Windler
10. A Comporting Sovereign, Tribes, and the Ordering of Imperial Authority in Colonial Upper Canada of the 1830s, PG McHugh
11. Territory, Sovereignty, and the Construction of the Colonial Space, Luigi Nuzzo

Part IV: A Legal Critique of Empire?

12. An Anti-Imperialist Universalism? Jus Cogens and the Politics of International Law, Umut Ozsu
13. Drift towards an Empire? The Trajectory of American Reformers in the Cold War, Hatsue Shinohara
14. Imperium sine fine: Carneades, the Splendid Vice of Glory, and the Justice of Empire, Benjamin Straumann

15. Scepticism of the Civilizing Mission in International Law, Andrew Fitzmaurice

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi