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This article revisits Ibrahim Shihata's role in developing the financial aid policies of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) after the formal inauguration of the New International Economic Order project (NIEO) in 1974. As director of the OPEC Special Fund, subsequently the OPEC Fund for International Development, after its establishment in 1976, Shihata spearheaded the development of the organization's aid policies. He also defended the NIEO as a set of sensible reform measures for redistributing wealth, resources, and technology. This article contends that Shihata's vigorous defence of OPEC's aid record aimed to demonstrate that the NIEO – an enterprise OPEC supported – involved not simply structural reform of the inter-state system but direct engagement with questions of intra-state distribution, and that OPEC aid was designed partly to keep the 'Third World bloc' from disintegrating due to the growing distance between oil-producing and non-oil-producing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why and how have 'Third World' international lawyers engaged with the law of international organizations? This article considers Georges Abi-Saab's 1978 work The United Nations Operation in the Congo 1960–1964 , an important but largely forgotten intervention in debates about the power and authority of the United Nations (UN) at the height of the post-World War II wave of decolonization. Fusing careful analysis of the legal rules and instruments that underwrote UN operations during the Congo crisis with a narrative reconstruction of the accompanying political and diplomatic negotiations, Abi-Saab's book examines the organization's involvement in the conflict following Congo's formal independence from Belgium in June 1960, both during and after Dag Hammarskjöld's tenure as UN Secretary-General. This article takes up Abi-Saab's account of Hammarskjöld's role in, and management of, the crisis. It demonstrates that Abi-Saab understood the Secretary-General's office to be not only hedged in by significant 'constitutional' constraints on publicly justifiable action but also uniquely equipped to coordinate competing interests and facilitate collective action. It also demonstrates that this dual understanding of the Secretary-General – both 'legalistic' and overtly 'political' – informed Abi-Saab's commitment to developing international law in and through international organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article attempts to destabilize the assumption that self-determination can be restricted to a "purely legal" analysis of the sort to which most international legal scholars have conventionally confined themselves. It does so by focusing upon the conditions under which the legal rhetoric of collective self-determination came to be mobilized during the course of Russia's incursion into and subsequent annexation of Crimea in early 2014, as well as its ongoing deployment in the context of Russia's political, military, and financial support for self-declared "people's republics" in Donetsk and Luhansk. After briefly examining legal arguments in support of and in opposition to Russia's actions, the article argues that the Ukraine crisis problematizes the traditional reluctance of international lawyers to engage with the complex, and often counterintuitive, articulations of self-determination offered by participants in armed conflict. Recourse to self-determination cannot be understood without appreciating the concrete politico-economic pressures in response to which states are created and recreated. The alternately "lofty" and "cynical" formulations of self-determination that have characterized the ongoing struggle in and over Ukraine can only be understood in light of protracted competition between rival class projects that generate significantly different visions of world order. This compels us to confront the class dimensions of the concept of collective self-determination rather than continuing to conceive it as a purely national, or ethno-national, project of recognition or emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prolific as a scholar, active in the League of Nations, and agent for Greece before the Permanent Court, Nicolas Politis is remembered today as a key figure both in the development of international legal doctrine and in the organization of international political relations. This short article examines three of Politis’ texts – the first an early foray into scholarship dealing with issues arising from the 1897 Greek–Turkish War, the second a set of mid-career lectures at the Hague Academy of International Law, and the third the posthumously published La morale internationale, a work of considerable ambition that never quite managed to find its audience. The article’s chief aim is to demonstrate that Politis’ trajectory was marked by recurring appeals to extra-legal ideas and arguments – a broadly anti-formalistic tendency which made its influence felt with increasing visibility over time, but which was present even in his earliest and most conventional work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The promulgation of the Turkish Civil Code of 1926, a nuanced translation of the Swiss Civil Code of 1907, has long been celebrated as an exceptionally thoroughgoing instance of 'legal transplantation'. Despite their pervasiveness, such assessments cloud appreciation of the multifarious power dynamics at work in the Code's preparation and implementation, especially the mechanisms through which it was made to serve Kemalist ideology's twofold agenda of 'modernising' socio-legal relations while retaining - and, in certain instances, augmenting - those 'traditional' practices which early republican legislators and administrators found to be of especial value for their 'nation-building' project. The chief objective of this study is to reveal the inadequacies of the Turkish Civil Code's standard characterisation as a 'success story' in comparative legal scholarship. Specifically, I demonstrate that the 1926 Code is best understood as the product of a deeply gendered tension between Kemalism's dedication to a state-driven programme of national 'modernisation' and elements of the 'tradition' this programme was crafted for the sake of mobilising, radicalising and transforming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]