The phenomenon of the administration of territories by international actors has a long tradition in the history of international law. State-based forms of administration, such as the internationalisation of territories, Mandate administration, Trusteeship System administration or multinational forms of occupation have been studied in some detail throughout the twentieth century. The exercise of territorial authority by international entities, however, has received less attention. Experiments of this kind were addressed at particular moments in time in the pre-, interand post-war years and the 1990s. But scholarship has remained focused on classical questions of public international law (e.g. the legal basis of territorial administration, the status of territories, legal personality) and an analysis of specific phenomena (e.g. the engagements of the League of Nations in the Saar Territory and Danzig and individual United Nations missions).

This focus has slightly changed over the last decade. The topic of international territorial administration has grown into a discipline of legal scholarship, with an ever-increasing amount of literature on different aspects of this type of activity. International territorial administration is thus no longer perceived as the sum of some “sui generis” type of international engagement, but as a distinct form of international authority that may serve as tool of dispute settlement and conflict management. This type of authority shares some conceptual groundwork with related forms of administration, but it has at the same time its own distinct features and problems.