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This edited collection represents the first comprehensive analysis of international legal debates between 1955 and 1975 related to the formal decolonization process, which brought a new perspective on topics such as self-determination, wars of national liberation, and multinational corporations.
List of contents
- Introduction
- The Battle for International Law: A Sketch
- Part I: Sites of Battle
- A. Concepts - Kampfbegriffe
- 1: Surabhi Ranganathan: The Common Heritage of Mankind: Annotations on a Battle
- 2: Jochen von Bernstorff: The Battle for the Recognition of Wars of National Liberation
- 3: Luis Eslava: The Developmental State: Independence, Dependency and the History of the South
- 4: Matthew Craven: Colonial Fragments: Decolonisation, Concessions and Acquired Rights
- 5: Anna Brunner: Acquired Rights and State Succession - The Rise and Fall of the Third World in the International Law Commission
- 6: Sundhya Pahuja and Anna Saunders: Rival Worlds and the Place of the Corporation in International law
- 7: Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah: The Battle Continues: Rebuilding Empire through Internationalization of State Contracts
- 8: Florian Hoffmann and Bethania Assy: (De)colonizing Human Rights
- 9: Rotem Giladi: Picking Battles: Race, Decolonization, and Apartheid
- B. Institutions
- 10: Ingo Venzke: The International Court of Justice During the Battle for International Law (1955-1975)-Colonial Imprints and Possibilities for Change
- 11: Guy Sinclair: The Battle and the United Nations
- 12: Philipp Dann: The World Bank in the Battles of the 'Decolonization Era'
- Part II Individual Protagonists and Regional Perspectives
- A. Individual Protagonists
- 13: Prabhakar Singh: Reading R.P. Anand in the Postcolony: Between Resistance and Appropriation
- 14: Carl Landauer: Taslim Olawale Elias: From British Colonial Law to Modern International Law
- 15: Umut Özsu: Determining New Selves: Mohammed Bedjaoui on Algeria, Western Sahara, and Post-Classical International Law
- 16: Emamanuelle Tourme Jouannet: Charles Chaumont's Third World International Legal Theory
- B. Regional Perspectives
- 17: Christopher Gevers: Literal 'Decolonisation': Re-reading African International Legal Scholarship through the African Novel
- 18: Bill Bowring: The Soviets and the Right to Self-Determination of the Colonized: Contradictions of Soviet Diplomacy and Foreign Policy in the Era of Decolonization
- 19: Olivier Barsalou: The Failed Battle for Self-Determination: The United States and the Postwar Illusion of Enlightened Colonialism, 1945-1975
- Epilogue
- What's Law Got to Do with it? Recollections, Impressions
About the author
Jochen von Bernstorff is currently the Dean of the Tübingen Law Faculty (since 2018), holds the Chair for Constitutional law, International Law and Human Rights (since 2011), and has taught international law as a visiting professor at the German Federal Foreign Office Academy Berlin, Université Panthéon-Assas (institut des hautes études internationales), Université Aix-Marseille and National Taiwan University Taipei. He has acted as a consultant for the German Government and various UN-institutions on human rights, development and international environmental law issues.
Philipp Dann holds the Chair of Public and Comparative Law at Humboldt University Berlin (since 2014) and is principal investigator in the Cluster of Excellence 'Contestations of the Liberal Script' (since 2019). He holds degrees from Frankfurt University (PhD and post-doctoral Habilitation) and Harvard Law School (LL.M.) and has taught German, European and public international law in Germany, France, India, Kenya, the Sudan and the US.
Summary
This edited collection represents the first comprehensive analysis of international legal debates between 1955 and 1975 related to the formal decolonization process, which brought a new perspective on topics such as self-determination, wars of national liberation, and multinational corporations.
Additional text
In the present moment of heightened scepticism about the liberatory potential of both international law and formal decolonisation, the volume's critical redescription of the tactics employed by Western actors to delegitimise newly decolonised states' efforts to transform international law is highly relevant... As a whole, the volume offers a provocation to pay attention to 'how legal forms emerge and are stabilized as authoritative, and to what might be at stake in that stabilization'... Ultimately, the volume's assessment of Third World actors' varied and overlapping attacks on colonial international law, and the reaction to it, helps us understand the persistent 'oscillation between inclusion and exclusion, recognition and rejection, universalization and particularization' that characterises international law today.
