Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The Acquisition of Territory in International Law has been an indispensable work in the field for 60 years. It remains so, if for shifting reasons. Robert Jennings' treatment of the applicable law is so succinct, and his bald statements of fact as to the nature of international law so unapologetic, that the text will invariably reward close re-reading by international lawyers of all persuasions. Acquisition of Territory goes far beyond its apparent brief of summarizing the relevant lex lata and offering an expert opinion on key issues of lex ferenda. Viewed from the right light, the work is a prism that refracts the world of early 1960s international law. Jennings deftly sidesteps and postpones fundamental questions of anti-colonial justice that some would have expected to be addressed in a lecture series on the acquisition of territory given in December 1962. The reading down of global anti-colonial movements to a 'policy question' beyond the strict concerns of jurists says much of the culture of British international law in the early 1960s. Jennings uses law to relegate calls for colonizing powers to be held to account to some future time, in some differently constituted international system. Amongst his kind, then and now, he is hardly alone.

Abstract
The Battle for International Law is a forceful collection that addresses the seismic challenges to the international legal order posed by the formal decolonization movements of the mid-20th century. The editors borrow from Reinhart Koselleck to frame the decades between the Bandung Conference in 1955 and the declaration of a New International Economic Order in 1974 as a Sattelzeit, or 'bridging period', between two eras of Western domination. The concept provides a coherent, flexible frame for a strong field of 19 chapters, organized around concepts, institutions, protagonists and regional perspectives emblematic of the period in question. At a time when exhibitionist defences of colonialism and imperialism are resurgent, this collection's solidarist restatement of key themes of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and Marxist international law is timely. However, in reproducing international law's long-critiqued statist concept of decolonization, the editors effectively consign the politics of decolonization to the past, and to the South. This does not reflect contemporary debates on the meaning of decolonization as an on-going struggle with material and epistemic dimensions. As a result, the volume leaves a crucial question open for consideration: How might contemporary international lawyers conceive of their relationship to decolonization, understood not as an era of the 20th century, but as an unresolved challenge for the 21st?