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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]

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 author examines Eurocentrism and its significant role in the history and historiography of international law, and discusses the debate on the meaning and implication of Eurocentrism, and its role as a culturalist distortion linked to global capitalist expansion.

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]