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SETTLER COLONIALISM, RACE, AND THE LAW: WHY STRUCTURAL RACISM PERSISTS BY NATSU TAYLOR SAITO (NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2020) 368 PAGES. PRICE USD60.00 (HARDCOVER). ISBN 9780814723944. I Introduction 1 II [...]

The recent revival of geopolitical competition has been accompanied by the meteoric rise of military spending across the globe. In light of this development, this article advances three claims. First, I posit that the political economy of war should be of concern to international lawyers and to anyone who is committed to peace. Second, I show that international law has been consistently unsuccessful and is currently singularly unambitious when it comes to naming, regulating, and sanctioning the political economy of war. Finally, I argue that the consistent failure of the field cannot be wholly attributed to historical contingencies. Rather, this is because armaments exist in the intersection of two logics, the logic of the state and the logic of the market, that have mystifying effects, even though the modalities of obfuscation are markedly different. The logic of the state makes the political economy of war hard to counter by law because it treats it as too exceptional, while the logic of the market does the same but by treating it as too pedestrian and ordinary. This convergence of logic creates layers of obfuscation that are not reducible to (international) law, but (international) law can nevertheless play a role in making it more or less opaque. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including work of international financial institutions; struggle between the juridical infrastructure of racial capitalism and its detractors and question of slavery, and forced labor.

Scholars and practitioners of international investment law have repeatedly attempted to legitimise the field by presenting it as an antidote against the arbitrary and excessive powers of the (postcolonial) state. Early cases, such as AAPL v. Sri Lanka , have contributed to this popular, yet ultimately unpersuasive, argument by seemingly constraining the conduct of warfare in the Global South. My contribution questions this received wisdom and in so doing it shows that repressive state violence is not simply permitted but even mandated by international investment law. My analysis focuses on the obligation of host states to provide 'full protection and security' (FPS) to foreign investors. My argument unfolds in three steps. First, I examine in detail the tribunal's approach to FPS in the von Pezold case, an award that stands out amongst the jurisprudent of investment tribunals due to its explicit engagement with questions of race/ism. Secondly, I construct a theory of FPS that draws from US legal realism in order to show that international investment law does not create bilateral legal relations (state-investor) but rather directly determines (and in particular, diminishes) the sphere of lawful action of a potentially indefinite number of actors subject to the host state's jurisdiction. In other words, I read FPS as a legal standard that aims to create an authoritarian form of statehood and mobilise the state against the exploited and racialised sections of its population. Finally, I link the above observation to broader debates about 'racial capitalism'. I show that the FPS demands a particular form of racial sovereignty in defence of global capitalist accumulation, and it does so as a matter of structural allocation of violence, and not simply due to bigoted or insensitive language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her Foreword, Karen J. Alter paints an elaborate picture of the multilayered relationship between law and capitalism, while at the same time offering important insights into recent developments in international law, international relations, and international history. In this brief Afterword, I will take a step back and reflect on the often-unarticulated theoretical assumptions of Alter's conceptualization of both law and capitalism. Situating this account within the broader trend of "law and political economy" and "new histories of capitalism," I argue that understanding the juridical and bureaucratic underpinnings of capitalism does not require us to reduce the latter to the former. In fact, I posit that the centering of lawyers, bureaucrats, and administrators—instead of workers, peasants, or Indigenous peoples—in these new histories of capitalism leads to both theoretical and political impasses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs about debate surrounding Eurocentrism in international legal history, highlighting the irreconcilable differences among scholars regarding the implications and emphasizing importance of understanding Eurocentrism as a culturalist distortion linked to global capitalist expansion.

This Article reflects on the ongoing synergies between international law, race, and empire, as they are articulated in the regulation of mercenarism. It does so by examining the role of the racialized and gendered narratives about "African mercenaries" in the context of the UN Security Council authorization of the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya. By recovering the efforts of the Global South to outlaw the use of (white) mercenaries for the promotion of imperialist causes, and the resistance of Western states against these initiatives, this Article documents the reversal of these attitudes in the case of Libya. In so doing, the authors argue that international law is deeply implicated in the reproduction of racial domination and exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconstructs how democratic participation and interference can be fended off by the construction of an international authoritarian political architecture and a strongly legalised and specific form of market economy. We do this by interrogating International Territorial Administration (ITA) regulations established to administer post-conflict Kosovo and post-invasion Iraq. In following the regulations and executive decrees of a largely unaccountable international policy-making bureaucracy in reforming the agricultural sector, the article demonstrates how and with what impact an authoritarian-liberal approach to economic reform materialised in the agricultural sectors of post-conflict Kosovo and Iraq. The regulation of land reform and patent law in turn served in these cases to establish distributional outcomes in favour of large-scale agricultural interests and multinational corporations. Even though the two administrations focused on different aspects of land and agriculture regulation, we argue that significant commonalities exist between their political preferences and interests. Our work draws on the tradition of critical legal studies in International Law (IL) and we posit that by drawing on this tradition, scholarship on post-conflict international territorial administration is better able to capture the long-term ramifications of international intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of national statehood in the Balkans. It traces this transitional process between the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and the United Nations involvement in the Greek Civil War (1946–1949). I show that this transition from empire to the nation-state was overdetermined by the partial and fragmented, yet influential, internationalization of significant questions regarding state building, including decisions about autonomy and independence, the drawing of boundaries, the protection of minorities and the continuation of economic relations. In fact, the Balkans became a site of experimentation for international legal techniques, such as fact-finding, peacekeeping missions or the administration of population exchanges, that would later acquire wider significance in the process of decolonization. The image of international law emerging from this account troubles the liberal understanding of international law and institutions as benevolent, cosmopolitan forces opposing, restraining and taming 'nationalist passions'. Rather, it was precisely because the relationship between nationalism and internationalism was one of cooperation and co-constitution, as much as one of antagonism, that this multitude of international legal techniques conditioning sovereignty in the Balkans arose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the occupation of Iraq between 2003 and 2004. The focus of my analysis is the agricultural reforms promoted by the occupying power, the Coalition Provisional Authority, which aimed at the marketisation of agricultural production, at the enhancement of the position of multi-national agribusiness and in the total integration of Iraq in global food markets. More specifically, this article maintains that the aggressively neoliberal reform of Iraq's agriculture can be better understood as the extreme end of a wider spectrum of promotion of neoliberal state-building through international law and international institutions post-1990. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article intervenes in the growing academic discussion about the potential impact of currently negotiated trade and investment agreements such as the TTIP, the CETA, and the TPP. To do so, our contribution focuses on the rarely asked question of how these agreements will impact the Global South. After showing that there is no stable and clear international legal definition of a ‘developing’ state, this contribution argues that the EU already has a number of legal obligations towards the Global South (for example, the Cotonou Agreement) that need to inform the debate about the objectives and potential impact of the TTIP. Further, our argument emanates from the position that it was the failure of the Doha Development Round of negotiations in the WTO that paved way for what we understand to be a ‘strategic bilateralism’ of the Global North. The second part of this article attempts to evaluate the potential impact of this strategic bilateralism on three distinct fields, first, on the relations between the West and emerging peripheral powers, such as China or Brazil; second, on the economic stability and viability of the Least Developed Countries; and third, on the most marginalised and vulnerable sections of the society regardless of their nationality. Our tentative conclusion is that given the potential adverse impact on all these three fronts, it is essential for the EU to re-evaluate its strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting upon critical international scholarship and its evolution through time, this review essay focuses on a volume co-edited by José María Beneyto and David Kennedy, along with assistant editors, Justo Corti Varela and John Haskell, on the history of the new approaches to international law (NAIL) and the work of David Kennedy. Considering the individual contributions to this book, this essay argues that while the influence of NAIL upon younger scholars, critical or 'mainstream', is beyond contestation, it is questionable to what extent the intellectual priorities and institutional anxieties of the discipline (should) remain the same. Drawing heavily on the theme of professional responsibility that underlies most of the contributions to this volume, this essay proposes a re-orientation of critical inquiry in the light of the implication of international law and institutions in the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath. Echoing Kennedy's call to engage with questions of political economy and global governance, this review essay suggests that for critical international law to reclaim its radical and innovative character, it is imperative to engage with the concerns of a post-crash world and to identify and disrupt the role of international law in the constitution of an unstable and unjust international economic order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The revelation of a series of child abuse incidents committed by Catholic priests and other members of religious orders has given rise to the question of establishing the responsibility of the Holy See for these acts under international human rights law. This article focuses on the report issued in 2014 by the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the monitoring body of the Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC). It is argued that in order to fulfil this task we need to take three steps: first, to establish the relationship between the Vatican City state and the Hole See, a distinct and peculiar international legal subject. To do so, a historical account of the Holy See and its position within the fabric of international law is considered necessary. Secondly, this article argues that the CRC was ratified by the Holy See both in its capacity as the government of the Vatican City and as a non-territorial legal subject. Hence, the application of the CRC is not confined within the limited territory of the Vatican City, but ‘follows’ the authority of the Holy See irrespective of state borders. Thirdly, it is argued that the vertical, hierarchical structure of the Holy See is homologous to that of the modern state and, therefore, attribution rules can be applied by analogy in this case. The final conclusion is that it is possible to hold the Holy See responsible under the CRC for acts of child abuse that occurred under its authority around the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]