Chapter 9 provides the most comprehensive appraisal yet not just of the unparalleled range of pressing problems but also of the underlying structural and systemic challenges that the principal peacemakers confronted in the aftermath of the Great War. In particular, it throws into relief that by the end of 1918 not only eastern Europe had to be fundamentally reorganised after the collapse of the eastern empires and, crucially, the cardinal German question had to be settled in a new way but also, and above all, the need had arisen to create, for the first time, a functioning Atlantic order that included both the old and new European states and the newly pivotal American power. At the same time, it argues that the war had radically changed the international, national and transnational conditions in which a peace settlement had to be negotiated and cardinal decisions about the shape of the postwar order had to be made. And it shows that the unprecedented catastrophe had given rise to unprecedentedly far-reaching – and conflicting – expectations on all sides of a “peace to end all wars” that was to be forged and compensate the different societies and populations for the unprecedented sacrifices they had made.

Chapter 6 seeks to capture the tectonic changes the unprecedented cataclysm of the Great War engendered. It analyses both the catalytic and the transformative impact the war had on Europe, the United States and the wider world in every relevant sphere – international, domestic and transnational politics, economic order, finance as well as the realms of culture and worldviews. It then concentrates on mapping out how, at the core, the war fundamentally recast the transatlantic constellation, precipitating both the destruction of the pre-war European states-system and casting the United States in the role of the power that not only ultimately decided the outcome of the conflict but also seemed poised to dominate efforts to reorder Europe and the world in its aftermath.

This chapter begins by introducing a number of foundational concepts, which serve as the starting point in the field of public international law. Section 1 of this chapter begins with the notion that states are sovereign equals, which must consent to be bound by nternational law. This section also introduces the critical distinction that international law makes between states and “non-state actors.” Section 2 of this chapter discusses the inevitable comparison of public international law with domestic legal systems, and the significant limitations of this analogy as a means for understanding the field of public international law. Section 3 concludes by explaining this book’s overarching structure, as well as the approach of this book to the introduction of public international law.

The interaction of developing states with investment treaty law and arbitration constitutes an important part of the ongoing debate about the legitimacy of the investment treaty regime. However, the authors contend that the concern is often sidelined and that developing states and their concerns are frequently lumped together under the broader rubric of investment treaty law as a threat to national sovereignty and a constraint on regulatory autonomy. By focusing on the formal equality between contracting state parties and the reciprocal nature of international investment agreements (IIAs), the chapter contends that such narratives tend to mask the presence of power disparities, which considerably shape the involvement of developing states in the creation, diffusion and internalization of investment treaty law. The authors seek to counter these narratives by drawing on new empirical data to expose a range of structural, normative and institutional power inequalities. By using the optics of power and focusing on how developing states learn from and internalize investment treaty law, the chapter peers behind the formal structures of investment treaties and ISDS to identify the underlying processes and actors and to question the legitimacy of the prevailing norms and institutional arrangements.

Over a month after 2020 election night had ended, the results of the presidential contest between former Vice President Joe Biden and Donald J. Trump seemed obvious to all except President Trump and his supporters in the Republican Party. Even as Biden’s victory over Trump became clear in the days following the election, a campaign unfolded to overturn the vote totals and deny Biden his victory. The most worrisome elements have involved armed supporters of President Trump threatening election officials with violence or death. No less extreme has been unprecedented litigation supported by seventeen Republican state attorneys general and more than half of House Republicans asking the US Supreme Court to reverse the election. The case is sure to lose. But in the process, broad swaths of the Republican Party leadership have indicated they are willing to use every institutional lever at their disposal to overturn public opinion as expressed in the voting booth.

By 1953, the communist-led Resistance had been marginalized in much of the Mekong delta. But the cost was high. "Traditional" institutions of the village had, in large swaths of the delta, been destroyed. The Franco-Vietnamese "coalition" had defeated the communist-led Resistance. But who would win the peace? The militia leaders, so skilled in war, were not fluent in the arts of peace. This chapter looks at the endgame of empire, when France was withdrawing from rural areas all over the South, downsizing its military presence, and shifting its support to the State of Vietnam. The end result by 1954, however, was a balkanized southern Vietnam with fragmented sovereignty where militias entrenched themselves in rural fiefdoms. The chapter shows how Ngo Dinh Diem, faced with this divided South, won the battle for post-war control of the South. It pays particular attention to his expulsion to Cambodia of the Cao Dai leader Pham Cong Tac, the co-optation of the Hoa Hao militia leader Tran Van Soai, and the arrest, trial, and execution of the Hao Hao militia leader Ba Cut. The chapter also examines the regional, national, and international legacies of the war.

This chapter considers how certain values may come to shape the law. It explores the institutions, processes and actors that facilitate the emergence of altruistically oriented legal norms. In doing so, the link between ideology and law will become more apparent. The evolution in international law presented in this book is the product of an underlying cosmopolitan altruistic ideology which coexists with a statist individualistic ideology that shape the content of legal rules. A legal system can be influenced by one or more philosophical ideologies, and the international legal system has been and continues to be shaped by different variations of these two major ideologies. As such, cosmopolitan altruism and statist individualism have a dialectic existence in the formation of law and its interpretation. Despite the fundamental differences in the nature and effect of these ideologies, they are capable of having simultaneous normative influence on the behaviour of states and the formation of international law.

This chapter examines how internal self-determination applies to populations of states. It argues that populations have a right to internal self-determination amounting to democratic governance. But this is not all. What democratic governance means is a contestable topic, and the very concept of democracy encapsulates many things. Also, states can promote internal self-determination as a continuing right which legitimizes pro-democratic intervention, if necessary. In short, to understand internal self-determination as a right of a population is an important task, but such an understanding carries implications which need to be noted.

States and international organizations are central to global governance, and are significant formative agents of justice (and injustice), in advancing, sifting, or undermining principles. Despite their formal authority, states and international organizations cannot be relied upon to promote global justice. States in practice often veil their material self-interest in the language of justice. International organizations too can promote their own interest, as well as adhering rigidly to dominant discourses such as neoliberalism that restrict the kind of justice they can advance. Thus states and international organizations should primarily act as effectors of global justice whose task is to ensure the outcomes determined in more extensive deliberation are implemented. Some of their problematic formative agency aspects can be ameliorated by deliberative democratic means. The Open Working Group that finalized the content of the Sustainable Development Goals is indicative of the possibilities here, as it embodied novel deliberative features that curbed polarization, overcame impasse, and facilitated common-interest justifications. Engagements with civil society of the kind now glimpsed in global climate governance can open international organizations to deliberating competing conceptions of justice. This chapter concludes by showing how states and international organizations might expand their deliberative engagements.

The success of any arms control treaty generally depends on its ability to achieve its primary objectives and intended outcomes. At the heart of measuring such success are effective compliance criteria and verification mechanisms. This includes the ability to apply metrics to assess tangible outcomes and measurable outputs and benchmarks of achievement, including on-site visits. In relation to nuclear issues, this also means that verification of both the non-diversion of nuclear material from declared peaceful activities (i.e., correctness of conduct), and the absence of undeclared or clandestine nuclear activities in a particular state (i.e., completeness in following treaty terms).

This chapter introduces a basic theoretical conception of law as an obliging force, which binds us together in governing communities, thereby enabling property of various types to exist. The chapter also sketches a stylized historical narrative, drawn from Max Weber's developmental sociology of law, about how intellectual property emerged, as a new type of legal property. The stylized narrative envisions three basic "layers" to the modern institution of intellectual property, which roughly correspond to three different paradigms for the obliging force of law: empirical formality, semantic formality, and substantive rationality. The historical development and weaving together of these three "layers" in the obliging force of law thus becomes an overarching narrative (or meta-narrative) for the book.

Presents the main arguments of sociological neoinstitutionalism in the areas of organizations, states, and identities. Illustrates the arguments with empirical research conducted through the year 2000.

Latin America’s recent inclusionary turn centers on changing relationships between the popular sectors and the state. Yet the new inclusion unfolds in a region in which most states are weak and prone to severe pathologies, such as corruption, inefficiency, and particularism. The first part of the chapter outlines an argument, developed at more length elsewhere, regarding how “state crises” helped drive the consolidation of three distinct party system trajectories among the eight South American countries where the Left would eventually win power. The second part of the chapter argues that these trajectories differed in three ways that likely conditioned how the concomitant inclusionary Left turn unfolded in each case: the institutionalization of left-wing parties, the occurrence of state transformation via constitutional reform, and the level of state capacity. The discussion helps highlight the central role of the state and its pathologies in both driving alternative paths of political development and in conditioning the politics of inclusion. By putting the emphasis on the state and its pathologies, we can better consider not just the sources of sociopolitical exclusion but also the limits of sociopolitical inclusion.

This chapter discusses the subjects of international law: how states come into being, and how international organizations are created.