This book examines the everyday functioning and impact of international law and the development project, particularly across cities in emergent nations.

Radical international legal history of the expansionary project of statehood and its role in generating profound distributional inequalities

This groundbreaking Research Handbook provides a comprehensive analysis and assessment of the impact of international law on cities. It sheds light on the growing global role of cities and makes the case for a renewed understanding of international law in the light of the urban turn.

The Oxford Handbook of International Law and Development is a unique overview of the field of international law and development, examining how normative beliefs and assumptions around development are instantiated in law, and critically examining disciplinary frameworks, competing agendas, legal actors and institutions, and alternative futures.

International law's rich existence in the world can be illuminated by its objects. International law is often developed, conveyed, and authorized through its objects and/or their representation. From the symbolic (the regalia of the head of state and the symbols of sovereignty), to the mundane (a can of dolphin-safe tuna certified as complying with international trade standards), international legal authority can be found in the objects around us. Similarly, the practice of international law often relies on material objects or their image, both as evidence (satellite images, bones of the victims of mass atrocities) and to found authority (for instance, maps and charts). This volume considers these questions: firstly what might the study of international law through objects reveal? What might objects, rather than texts, tell us about sources, recognition of states, construction of territory, law of the sea, or international human rights law? Secondly, what might this scholarly undertaking reveal about the objects-as aims or projects-of international law? How do objects reveal, or perhaps mask, these aims, and what does this tell us about the reasons some (physical or material) objects are foregrounded, and others hidden or ignored. Thirdly what objects, icons, and symbols preoccupy the profession and academy? The personal selection of these objects by leading and emerging scholars worldwide will illuminate the contemporary and historical fascinations of international lawyers. By considering international law in the context of its material culture the authors offer a new and exciting theoretical perspective on the subject. With an image of each object reproduced in full colour, the book will make an engaging and interesting read for scholars, practitioners, and students alike.

"In 1955 a conference was held in Bandung, Indonesia that was attended by representatives from twenty-nine developing nations. Against the backdrop of crumbling European colonies, Asian and African leaders forged a new alliance and established anti-imperial principles for a new world order. The conference captured the popular imagination across the Global South. Bandung's larger significance as counterpoint to the dominant world order was both an act of collective imagination and a practical political project for decolonization that inspired a range of social movements, diplomatic efforts, institutional experiments and heterodox visions of the history and future of the world. This book explores what the spirit of Bandung has meant to people across the world over the past decades and what it means today. Experts from a wide range of fields show how, despite the complicated legacy of the conference, international law was never the same after Bandung"--

This book contributes to current debates about “queer outsides” and “queer outsiders” that emerge from tensions in legal reforms aimed at improving the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer people in the United Kingdom. LGBTIQ people in the UK have moved from being situated as “outlaws” – through prohibitions on homosexuality or cross-dressing – to respectable “in laws” – through the emerging acceptance of same-sex families and self-identified genders. From the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in the Sexual Offences Act 1967, to the provision of a bureaucratic mechanism to amend legal sex in the Gender Recognition Act 2004, bringing LGBTIQ people “inside” the law has prompted enormous activist and academic commentary on the desirability of inclusion-focused legal and social reforms. Canvassing an array of current socio-legal debates on colonialism, refugee law, legal gender recognition, intersex autonomy and transgender equality, the contributing authors explore “queer outsiders” who remain beyond the law’s reach and outline the ways in which these outsiders might seek to “come within” and/or “stay outside” law. Given its scope, this modern work will appeal to legal scholars, lawyers, and activists with an interest in gender, sex, sexuality, race, migration and human rights law.

This book is about home and international law. More specifically, it is about the profound, and frequently devastating, transformations of home that are happening almost everywhere in the world today and what international law has to do with them. Through three stories of home – the desert home, the lake home and the city home – this book traces how the everyday operations of international law shape the material, affective and imaginative experience of home. It argues that international law’s ‘homemaking work’ is characterised by acts of domination, practices of resistance and the production of unhomely spaces. However, the book also considers whether and how the liberatory potential of international law could be unlocked through the metaphor of home. This book draws from fieldwork conducted by the author in Palestine, Cambodia and the United Kingdom. It takes a global socio-legal approach to home and international law, informed by feminist political theory, feminist geography, home studies and contemporary critical approaches to international law. It is the first academic work to examine the relationship between home and international law. This book’s global socio-legal approach to home and international law will be of interest to those teaching and studying in international law, socio-legal studies, legal pluralism and legal geography.

This book provides a critical legal perspective on the legitimacy of international courts and tribunals. The volume offers a critique of ideology of two legal approaches to the legitimacy of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) that portray it as a supranational tribunal whose last say on human rights protection has a transformative effect on the democracies of Latin America. The book shows how the discussion between these Latin American legal strands mirrors global trends in the study of the legitimacy of international courts related to the use of constitutional analogies and concepts such as the notion of judicial dialogue and the idea of democratic transformation. It also provides an in-depth analysis of how, through the use of those categories, legal experts studying the legitimacy of the IACtHR enact self-validation processes by making themselves the principal agents of transformation. These self-validation processes work as ideological apparatuses that reproduce and entrench the mindset that the legal discipline is a driving force of change in itself. Further, the book shows how profiling the Court as an agent of transformation diverts attention from the ways in which it has pursued a particular view of human rights and democracy in the region that creates and reproduces relations of inequality and domination. Rather than discarding the IACtHR, this book aims to de-centre the focus away from formal legal institutions, engaging with the idea that ordinary people can mobilise and define the content of law to transform their lives and territories. The book will be a valuable resource for scholars working in the areas of human rights law, law, public international law, legal theory, constitutional law, political science and legal philosophy.

The Oxford Handbook of Jurisdiction in International Law provides an authoritative and comprehensive analysis of the concept of jurisdiction in international law. Jurisdiction plays a fundamental role in international law, limiting the exercise of legal authority over international legal subjects. But despite its importance, the concept has remained, until now, underdeveloped. Discussions of jurisdiction in international law regularly refer to classic heads of jurisdiction based on territoriality or nationality, or use the SS Lotus decision of the Permanent Court of International Justice as a starting point. However, traditional understandings of jurisdiction are facing new challenges. Globalization has increased the need for jurisdiction to be applied extraterritorially, non-State forms of law provide new theoretical challenges and intersections between different forms of jurisdiction have become more intricate. This Handbook provides a necessary re-examination of the concept of jurisdiction in international law through a thematic analysis of its history, its contemporary application, and how it needs to adapt to encompass future developments in international law. It examines some of the most contentious elements of jurisdiction by considering how the concept is being applied in specific substantive and institutional settings.