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Legal scholars continue to revisit historical treaties between Western and non-Western nations to challenge long-standing accounts of non-Western peoples’ engagement with international law. Following this trend, new scholarship has stressed African agency in Euro-African treaty-making. However, legal scholars have generally overlooked African perspectives, pointing to a lack of sources. Focusing on nineteenth-century treaty-making between France and the polities of the Western Sudan in West Africa, this article excavates African perspectives through a novel reading of Euro-African treaties in an African context. This reading analyses treaties within the Western Sudan’s broader diplomatic corpus in both French and Arabic. By focusing on markers of translation, transcription, and negotiation left on different copies of treaties, this method brings to light arguments and practices that have been obscured in published European-language versions. Reading Franco-Sudanian treaties in a Sudanian context reveals that different norms governed the ratification of treaties in the Western Sudan and Europe. Treaties that scholars have long considered unratified were in fact ratified according to Western Sudanian norms, which designated the governor of French Senegal rather than the French president as the official competent to ratify treaties for France. However, when French officials sought to use treaties to claim sovereign rights in West Africa against Great Britain, they pressed the president to ratify them again. Presidential ratification thus served to transpose Franco-Sudanian treaties from an African to a Western normative order. Uncovering the African origins of Euro-African treaties thus reveals their differential operation across autonomous inter-polity orders.
Do recent increases in women’s representation around the world have implications for international relations? We argue that greater representation of women in legislatures increases the likelihood of human rights treaty ratification for two reasons. First, given their shared gendered experiences of exclusion and discrimination, women legislators will advocate on behalf of marginalized groups on an international scale as transnational surrogate representatives. Second, women legislators may be more inclined to prioritize the ratification of human rights treaties because these treaties align with their domestic policy preferences, which aim to support marginalized groups. We contend that, in countries where ratification depends upon legislative approval, legislatures are more likely to ratify human rights treaties as women’s presence increases. Using an original dataset of 201 multilateral treaties, we find that countries become more likely to ratify human rights treaties as levels of women’s legislative representation increase.
The violent and competitive context in which trade relations between the states of Senegambia and Europeans evolved required moments of calm and stability, which were decisive and important factors in the cohabitation of trade actors. Diplomacy was a fundamental political lever for European trade in Senegambia. It had become a major stake in the daily lives of the actors. Diplomacy was generally reserved for field actors from different political cultures and with different political and economic ambitions. Diplomacy took the form of negotiations, and took the form of simple agreements of principle, notably in the context of palavers, or the conclusion of trade and peace treaties. The aim of diplomacy, for example, was to establish strong, peaceful commercial relations between trade players and to regularize the tax system, which was the fundamental basis of trade and the expression of the sovereignty of local chiefs towards the Europeans.
Chapter 4 surveys a wide range of friendly and hostile interstate relations in ancient societies, where war was often the normal state of affairs. Notwithstanding the numerous conflicts, polities tried in the end, through alliances and diplomatic relations, to establish peaceful relations in view of political stability and economic prosperity. The chapter analyses hospitality rules regarding foreigners, treaties between polities and the establishment of diplomatic relations, which emerged as an international system in the ancient Near East during the mid-fourteenth century bce. An alternative to diplomacy in conflict management, typical of the Greek world, was arbitration and mediation with the help of a third party. In a final section, the chapter outlines how states, when diplomacy failed, started a war procedurally. In conclusion, the chapter argues that, in the absence of an international court, the enforcement of diplomatic rules and treaties was in many ancient societies ensured by the supranational authority of the gods.
The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is one of the most important mega-regional trade agreements signed to date. Yet, it failed to include an Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism in its investment chapter. What explains this omission? To unpack this, we examine international negotiations as a two-step process. In the first stage, we theorize that initial preferences towards ISDS are based on countries’ orientation toward foreign direct investment (FDI), experience with ISDS, and past treaty practice. Second, we theorize that during protracted negotiations, adverse regime developments and domestic politics can have a profound impact on treaty design. To test our framework, we examine the RCEP negotiations. Our analysis shows that mounting cases as well as the eroding norm of ISDS in other treaties lowered support for ISDS as the negotiations progressed. Then, a change of government in Malaysia shifted that country’s position dramatically, which tipped the balance against ISDS in the final round of negotiations. Our findings have important implications for the international investment regime. They highlight the factors that determine countries’ initial preferences while also demonstrating the importance of developments during the negotiations, which can lead to the abandonment of the institutional status quo.
This chapter explores the way in which Shelley’s verse speaks to, and influences, two kinds of texts: the treaties between the various Indigenous peoples of North America and European or settler governments, and Indigenous-authored poetry that interacts with these treaties. The chapter will begin by conceptualizing 1819 (an iconic year in Shelley studies) as a “treaty year,” one in which Shelley’s “England in 1819” and The Mask of Anarchy, despite their apparent focus on domestic politics, can be read alongside major global diplomatic events that occurred in settler-Indigenous relationships in North America. The chapter then turns to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Native American poets who used Shelley’s political poetry as a source for considering treaties and the disastrous consequences of colonization, including the Cherokee authors John Rollin Ridge and Too-qua-stee, James Roane Gregory (Yuchi and Muscogee/Creek), and Arsenius Chaleco (Yuma). Their different allusions to and adoptions of Shelley’s 1819 poems in their poems demonstrate that both “England in 1819” and The Mask of Anarchy were interpreted by Indigenous poets as highly relevant to their contemporary concerns about broken treaties. Finally, the chapter considers the ways in which Shelley’s more meditative poems, including “To a Skylark” and “Mont Blanc,” might also be drawn into a wider conversation about colonization, treaty-making, and Indigenous peoples.
This chapter examines the ways in which the sovereign, monocultural, and monist state that was dominant in Latin America starting in the nineteenth century has mutated over the last thirty-six years. It begins by offering a description of the initially dominant model and then introduces the multicultural liberal and radical intercultural models that replaced it by politically and legally recognizing the cultural diversity that characterizes Latin American societies. The chapter then explores the discursive and practical challenges generated by illegal normative systems (such as those managed by guerilla or paramilitary groups, or criminal organizations), and by extralegal normative system (such as the regulation of private property in peripheral urban neighborhoods) which compete with the sovereignty of states and official law. The constitutional bloc, the Inter-American Human Rights System, and bilateral or multilateral treaties signed by Latin American states further pluralize legal creation and weaken the concept of absolute state sovereignty. This chapter characterizes these developments as instances of either weak or strong legal pluralism.
This chapter examines the history and development of collective self-defence. It is argued that – contrary to the common assertion that the concept was created in 1945 – its roots can be seen throughout history. The chapter maps that history, starting briefly with the alliances of ancient Greece and moving through to the writings of the seventeenth century, when recognisable characteristics of the modern concept truly began to emerge. It then focuses on the developments in the interwar years and during the Second World War, which saw an increase in the number of collective defence treaties. This period concluded with the emergence of a collective defence system in the Americas, which was extremely influential for the drafting of Article 51 of the UN Charter. The chapter concludes by analysing the drafting process, and the changes to collective self-defence that the adoption of the Charter brought about. It is argued that Article 51 ‘conjoined’ individual and collective self-defence in a way that had little basis in the previous historical development of collective defence arrangements under international law. This has had significant implications for how collective self-defence is understood today.
This chapter examines collective self-defence treaty arrangements. It engages with a diverse range of examples of the collective self-defence treaties (or treaties that contain collective self-defence aspects) that have emerged since 1945 to draw out common themes as to the nature, process, and role of such arrangements, as well as to establish notable variations. The aim is to contribute an overall picture of collective self-defence today specifically in the context of treaty relationships. The chapter argues that such relationships inevitably impose only weak obligations on their parties to defend each other and also can cause notable issues related to overlapping memberships, bureaucracy, and antagonism amongst members (amongst other difficulties). Equally, these arrangements – of which there are now hundreds – are concluded for good reason(s). They provide a range of benefits, especially in terms of their deterrent effect.
Chapter 2, ‘Finding Support for Indigenous Peoples’ Participation in the Sources of International Law’, turns to a doctrinal analysis. It undertakes an examination of relevant sources of international law on self-determination and Indigenous peoples’ rights, in treaties, declarations, and decisions of international judicial and quasi-judicial bodies. We see how the law of self-determination has been interpreted by the latter bodies as meaning – among other things – participation of peoples at the national (but not necessarily the international) level, and how participation is at the heart of the law on self-determination specific to Indigenous peoples. The chapter then turns to customary international law, reviewing and contextualizing various methodologies for its identification and summarizing how the evidence described in later chapters can be interpreted through these methodologies. Through these lenses, I discuss methodological debates, including the legal status we should assign to the UNDRIP in and of itself, how a provision of the UNDRIP might later crystallize into a rule of custom, and how to regard international organizations in relation to the identification of custom.
This chapter examines the process whereby the concept of jus cogens was introduced into international law during the 1968–69 Vienna Conference on the Law of Treaties. The 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, the conference’s final product, declared that some rules of international law command universal authority, with Article 53 recognizing ‘peremptory norms of general international law’ (without specifying which norms counted as such). Yet the negotiations through which jus cogens entered into the law of treaties were marked by wide-ranging debates about the nature and limits of the treaty-making power, and ultimately about the basic structure and orientation of international law more generally. On the one hand were lawyers and diplomats from socialist and nonaligned states for whom the concept was potentially useful as a means of undercutting the legality of unequal treaties, colonial concession agreements, and other substantively unjust instruments. On the other hand were lawyers and diplomats from industrialized countries who were committed to the traditional principle of pacta sunt servanda—the ‘sanctity of compacts’—and deeply skeptical of any attempt to introduce a normative spectrum in which a select group of rules would have controlling authority over all others.
The author argues that ‘will’ and ‘consent’ are different. According to him, no State’s will is entirely free. However, this does not preclude its consent from being valid. State consent displays different shades of will: while unilateral acts are the epitome of ‘willing consent’, the degree of willingness required when accepting a treaty is weaker, until it almost disappears in the case of custom, or general principles of law. The author argues that opinio iuris and consent are also different notions: you may feel legally bound even if consent is very remote. However, whatever role ‘will’ plays in the formation of rules, once the rules exist, States are, according to the author, bound and their will is trapped. The author makes the argument that, if neither will nor consent explain the basis of a State’s obligation when it is no longer willing to implement it, they nonetheless have a stabilizing and legitimizing role. He argues that consent makes the acceptability of the obligation stronger, by comforting its legitimacy, which also makes its implementation more effective.
The author starts by observing that discussions about the foundations and the limits of the powers of international courts, including those of the European Court of Human Rights (hereafter ECtHR), turn around the aims of achieving legal certainty, ensuring legitimacy and justice, and avoiding conflicting obligations which may emanate from different regimes of international law. The chapter reflects on these aims from the perspective of consent as the common basis of the main sources of international law, as listed in Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice. Proceeding from the case law of the ECtHR, the chapter explores how the recent work of the International Law Commission conceives the role of consent in respect of the main sources of international law, and whether the jurisprudence of the ECtHR remains within the framework of general international law so enunciated.
History typically portrays the Revolution as an American war for independence in which the colonists severed their ties with the mother country across the Atlantic and incidentally fought off Indian raids on the western frontier. Native Americans did little to affect the outcome of the Revolution so they are usually accorded a minimal role in its story. This chapter, in contrast, recognizes that Native peoples, and their lands, played a significant role in the causes and course of the Revolution and demonstrates that the Revolution mattered profoundly and had huge repercussions in Indian country. Rather than simply fulfilling the negative role prescribed for them in the Declaration of Independence, Native Americans waged their own wars of independence and fought to defend their lands, lives, and freedom.
Regional integration blocs are subject to the admission of new members, which must be approved by domestic institutions. This article analyzes how the incorporation of Venezuela and Bolivia into Mercosur passed in the Paraguayan Congress. While the first case lasted from 2007 to 2013, demonstrating parliamentary opposition, the second episode took place between 2015 and 2016, suggesting convergence between the executive and legislative branches on the issue. Using process tracing, the unveiled mechanism shows how government and opposition forces act to alter the duration of the bill in Congress and that political parties have a pendular behavior according to political cleavages. Moreover, the findings of this study suggest the existence of a parliamentary veto power in foreign affairs and the importance of having homogeneous coalitions to achieve faster approvals.
This chapter begins in Paris in 1919, a year in which prognostications of the collapse of civilization became widespread. By the end of that year, the largely imagined crisis of civilization had become a tangible one; the ongoing conflicts in central and eastern Europe presented a material threat to the lives of intellectuals and institutions, reports of soaring prices and starvation in central and eastern Europe became widespread, and the spectre of Bolshevism threatened the new democratic order. The chapter explores how intellectual reconstruction was framed – but mostly not acted upon – at the Paris Peace Conference and that it was not until early 1920 that intellectual humanitarianism began to take shape.
The gold rush in the 1890s and the discovery of oil in 1920 prompted the Canadian government to negotiate treaties 8 and 11 with the Dene and Gwich’in. With the arrival of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, these treaties formalized colonial control over the Yukon and Northwest Territories. Medicine, hospitals, and healthcare were promised as part of treaty negotiations, but the infrastructure of care erected in this period was underfunded and racially contingent, prioritizing settlers and sojourners. Sanitary infrastructure appeared as a necessary response to the surge of newcomers in search of gold in the Yukon. Otherwise, healthcare for Indigenous northerners was designed around the objectives of the Christian missions upon whom the government depended to deliver its treaty promises.
The chapter summarises the main international drivers (other than the EU) of nature conservation in Europe, and their effects on policies and actions, especially within the EU. It starts with a list of key international events that most influenced the evolution of nature conservation, and then provides a tabular summary of the main objectives, obligations and effects of the multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) and other initiatives that have had a significant impact on nature conservation. Further brief descriptions (with more detail in online Annex I) are given of the Convention on Wetlands (Ramsar Convention), Convention on Migratory Species (Bonn Convention), Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats (Bern Convention), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), a number of Regional Sea Conventions (particularly the OSPAR Convention) and the North Sea Ministerial Conference declarations. The CBD Strategic Plans for 2010 and 2020 are summarised, with a simplified list of targets for 2020 (Aichi targets). A summary is provided of the proposed post-2020 CBD Global Biodiversity Framework (according to plans published as of May 2022).
The starting point for discussion and analysis of the sources of international law is almost invariably art 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (‘ICJ Statute’), the International Court of Justice being the primary judicial organ of the United Nations. Article 38 lists the sources of international law as comprising treaties, custom, general principles of law, and – as subsidiary means for determining the law – judicial decisions and academic writing. However, in the 75 years since the adoption of the ICJ Statute, newer sources of legal obligation have emerged for the international community. These often involve non-state and intergovernmental actors in their creation. This chapter explores both the traditional and newer sources of international law and assesses how they are adopted and created.