This chapter shows how involuntary sterilisation and castration have become problematised in international law. The chapter discusses the rise of international law and human rights in the post-war context. Despite being regarded as international crimes on meeting certain criteria since the Nuremberg trials, the interventions are rarely prosecuted in practice. Efforts to mainstream involuntary sterilisation as human rights violations have been more successful. This development began in the 1990s and has since gone from soft law to binding legal obligations. The chapter shows that uncertainty prevails regarding the legal and remedial conceptualisation of involuntary sterilisation and castration in international human rights law due to inconsistent and incidental treatment of such cases. Ultimately, the argument is made that international law provides a socio-legal master frame for national legal claims. In the case of involuntary sterilisation and castration, however, this master frame is not sharply defined, effectively impeding investigation and problematisation of the practices in national contexts.

The chapter opens the analysis of social structure in the transition from the CAPE to the modern eras by reviewing the primary institutions carried over from the CAPE era into the transition, seeing which became obsolete, and which adapted to the new conditions and survived. It constrasts the relative simplicity and straightforwardness of the material developments during this period to the complexity, contradictions and turbulence of the social structure.

The legitimacy crisis of ISDS in Europe has prompted the EU – an emerging actor in international investment law – to reform this field. In particular, the EU reform was designed to enhance the rule of law in international investment law, as a means of legitimising the field. However, the reform of international investment law has ultimately exposed the clash of different visions of the rule of law in international law and the multifaceted nature of this concept. The purpose of this book was to evaluate the EU’s vision and its contribution to the development of international law in the field of investment. In particular, the book sought to assess whether the EU reform addresses the key international investment law problems and in doing so contributes to the achievement of the rule of law and legitimacy. To answer this question, a substantial analysis was undertaken of EU investment law and policy in both its internal dimension (Part II) and external relations (Part III), and placed in the broader context of international investment law and its reform (Part I). As many scholars have written about international investment law, what value does this book add? The following observations encapsulate the findings of this research and attest to its relevance and contribution to the international investment law reform debate.

Describing drone programs as a network of interacting and interdependent factors including the contemporary technological capacities of drones, law and military strategy is one of the main aspects of this study. All chapters identify where and how these factors converge or diverge and examine the result of this interaction. This description shows that combat drone technology facilitates anticipatory warfare – the scope of which is indefinite in time and space – and that the law is rearranged around anticipation. Further examining the socio-techno-legal phenomena produced by drone programs, the book explores the long-term effects produced by drone programs over populations living under drones as well as the international legal order. This book can be thought of as an act of compiling the textual, bureaucratic, and material traces of these programs in order to lay bare the infrastructure that is extending warfare in time and space and exacerbating state power.

How did the new kind of deterritorialized, dematerialized, and individualized warfare ‒ extensive in both time and space ‒ become durable? To what extent can it be considered as part of the normal functioning of the states that use drones? This chapter finds that the development of the use of drones in the US, in comparison with the use of France in the UK and France, is best described as one of institutionalization. The institutionalization of drone programs is defined as the process whereby drone practices become stable and durable activities embedded in the normative fabric of the state. This process derives from a combination of factors, from the formation of a bureaucracy – narrowly defined as the structured, harmonized, and depersonalized interaction of agents – to the formulation of legitimizing legal rationales, and the stabilizing force of the technology itself. The US drone program was stabilized through the creation of structures and bureaucratic interactions, a highly legalistic mode of justification, and narratives about drones being tailor-made to fight a transnational and polymorphous enemy.

International law (IL) draws its legitimacy and authority from public affirmations and diffuse support for the rule of law, yet contestation about IL is to be expected. States collectively rule and contest international politics through the crafting, invocation, and interpretation of IL. The chapter explores both ordinary and extraordinary contestations of IL authority. Ordinary contestation takes place within a legal field, when lawyers, stakeholders, judges, and government officials debate, contest, and disagree about the meaning of IL. Political tactics are also part of ordinary contestation, but because the curators of IL authority are transnational, a state may be unable to impose its preferred IL interpretation. Instead, states can use three extra-ordinary contestation strategies to escape IL authority: they can 1) seek to replace international law’s authority with domestic law’s authority; 2) pit different international laws against each other by maneuvering within and around international regime complexes; and (3) attack the legitimacy and authority of international law altogether. Extraordinary contestation can make IL more accountable, but it can also undermine the permissive conditions that make IL both constraining and effective.

This introductory chapter sets the stage for the contribution advanced in this volume. First, it provides a brief overview of IOM’s history and structure. Second, it offers a primer on IOM’s entry into the UN system as a related organization in 2016. Third, it situates the book in relation to the core concepts underpinning it, including the obligations, accountability, and expansion dynamics of international organizations (IOs). Fourth, it draws out key themes running through the volume, particularly in relation to grounding assessments of IOM in international law; understanding IOM’s roles as a norm ‘breaker, taker and shaper’; analysing IOM as a protection actor; and developing more complex accounts of institutional change at IOM. Fifth, it maps out the structure, scope and limitations of book. Finally, it reflects on the legal and political implications of this volume, focusing on the need to recast the IOM Constitution to centre not only the organization’s obligations to its member states but also to the migrants it claims to serve.

In the decades before the First World War, Europeans developed new institutions and information networks to try to understand and manage a rapidly changing world economy. This was a diffuse organizational web without a clear institutional centre, but it was grounded in an increasingly standardized and professionalized set of treaty practices. This chapter traces Lucien Coquet, Hubert Llewellyn Smith, Bernhard Harms, and Richard Riedl as they began to build careers in a globalizing economy that was marked by sharp social and political tensions.

This chapter explores the legality of the IMF’s shift in mandate, and considers the overarching question of whether the institution was legally entitled to expand its mandate over time through de facto legal doctrines rather than express or implied consent of the members. The analysis begins with a consideration of the legal basis of the Fund’s initiative by examining the international legal theory on the legal personality of international organisations. That is, whether the mandate of an international organization is strictly dependant on the wording of its constitutive instrument(s), or whether the mandate can evolve so as to accommodate new de facto attributions and competences. The Fund’s mandate shift is then tested by taking into account the power of soft law. A key aspect in the legal literature is whether the constituent doctrine of ‘separate will’ or ‘volonté distincte’, which allows an organisation to act independently – that is without the express or implied consent of members – would apply to the mandate expansion as the move ensured the Fund maintained relevancy in an ever-changing world. Finally, the chapter concludes that the Fund’s mandate expansion was in line with the standards of international law applicable to international organisations.

Upholding international law was crucial for the line of reasoning of the Allied powers during the Great War. German aggression was confronted with ideas about the sanctity of treaties, about sovereign equality, or about the binding force of law governing the relations between nations as standard of civilisation. But what happened with these rationalisations after the armistice of 1918? Mostly dismissed as propaganda, meaningless once the guns fell silent, the lingering influence of those ideas on the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 is often under-appreciated. This chapter assesses how the Allied invocation of international law informed and influenced negotiations in Paris. It demonstrates different understandings of legal arguments and international norms among the delegates and why, or why not, these were seen as meaningful for the restructuring of the international order. Even if there was no coherent plan among the Allies to promote the codification of international law, the peace settlement was characterised by an inherent normativity. Three features stand out: the formalisation of international relations through the League of Nations, the stabilisation of the international order by means of defining borders and peoples, and the effort to legally sanction violations of international norms. These ideas mark the recasting of nineteenth-century ideas about the ’fabric of civilisation’ in the shape of a new international order based on legally responsible nations and overseen by the League