On my way in II : countering gender stereotypes in letters of reference and shifting academic valorization while we are at it

Published online: 14 July 2021Discussing both the agentic and community-orientation characteristics of all candidates, male and female, will benefit not only our institutions (which need bright and thoughtful intellectuals who collaborate within and beyond their communities) but eventually also all candidates, not just women. More and more panels seem to begin by asking questions such as ‘what does the candidate contribute to the community?’ and ‘what are they like as a colleague?’. ‘Give, not take’, was the key criterion of the director leading an academic search that I recently participated in

Representational Practices at the International Criminal Court: The Gap between Juridified and Abstract Victimhood

In the context of a special issue on ‘practices’ at the International Criminal Court, this article focuses on the practice of representation, and in particular on the practice of representing victims. As political and social theorists such as Pitkin and Bourdieu have argued with respect to politics, representation does not merely reflect reality, it is constitutive of it. In the ICC, two practices of victim representation have been prevalent. The first is the rather novel and widely welcomed practice of representing victims as participants in ICC proceedings. The second is the older practice of the discursive invocation of victims as the telos of international criminal law. But these two practices lead in different directions. Victim participation in court proceedings has led to the juridification of victimhood — the legal categorisation of victims — and as a result of this juridification, very few individuals are actually personally represented in the Court’s proceedings. The discursive invocation of victims as the telos of the Court’s work has created a deity-like and seemingly sovereign entity — ‘The Victims’ — that transcends all actual victims and corresponds to no individual victim in their particularity. The result of the two practices is an increasing gap between the limited role that victims play in international criminal proceedings due to the juridification of victimhood and the continued presentation of ‘The Victims’ as the raison d’être of international criminal law. The overdetermined presence of the figure of ‘The Victims’ as a rhetorical construct obscures the representative challenges faced by conflict-affected individuals in accessing the form of justice that is practiced in their (abstract) name.COST travel gran

Exporting peace? The EU mediator’s normative backpack

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2022On the occasion of the launch of the European Law Open, this article analyses two policy documents of the European Union (EU) on its ambitions in peace mediation, to think about what it could mean for European law to be open to the world. Reading these documents – ‘the Concepts’ – through the lens of the theme that I have been assigned for this opening issue – ‘Europe in the world’ – one discerns an outward-looking EU searching for a greater role in the international field of peace mediation. One also sees instances of eurocentrism: a set of assumptions about the superiority of European (or ‘western’) ways of knowing and doing. In these Concepts, the EU envisages sending EU mediators into the world – either to mediate themselves or to support mediation efforts by others. The Concepts also contain increasingly long lists of EU values to be carried along and distributed during peace mediation. But the Concepts do not consider that in the countries where the EU mediator arrives, this backpack filled with normative baggage may bring other associations. Without more explicit recognition of the EU’s obstinate baggage, the EU is unlikely to be an effective peace mediator or, indeed, a credible global actor. More generally, critical reflexivity could help the EU to address the lingering Eurocentric tendencies that these Concepts reveal. Such critical questioning by the EU of its own assumptions, as well as learning from perspectives from outside the EU or the past, can be a process of focusing on Europe in order to decentre it. That, then, could also be a mission for this bold new European journal

Peacemaking

Unlike intuitively related areas such as dispute settlement, the use of force, the law of armed conflict, human rights and international criminal law, ‘peacemaking’ is not a recognised subfield of international law. It was not recognised as such in the beginning of the period under review in this volume (1989), nor by the end of it (2021). However, after the term ‘peacemaking’ rose to prominence in the 1990s as a concept and objective of global governance, legal scholars sought to capture the proliferation of peacemaking practices in legal language, coining or invoking concepts such as lex pacificatoria, ‘legal tools for peacemaking’ and jus post bellum. By the end of the period under review, none of these projects had managed to establish their version of a ‘law of peacemaking’ as a generally recognised subfield of international law. Lawyers had come relatively late to the practice of peacemaking, and when they did, the terrain – both in terms of political thought and practices – had already begun to shift. But while falling short of establishing a recognised subfield of international law, attempts to let law speak to peacemaking continue, albeit in less universalist terms

The politics of global lawmaking : a conversation

Published: 04 February 2022This is an edited version of the – online – keynote conversation between Martti Koskenniemi and Sarah Nouwen on ‘The Politics of Global Lawmaking’, which opened the 16th annual European Society of International Law meeting, which took place in September 2021

In defense of international law?

Questions about methods hardly featured at PhD defenses in international law at a specific university some twenty years ago. Doctrinal scholarship was the default, and its method was supposed to be so obvious that it did not require elaboration: this was simply the legal method.Some (usually external) examiners caused a stir much to the frustration of the candidates supervisors, giants in the field of international law when they insisted on corrections on the ground that the dissertation did not have a methods section. The candidate then had to justify indeed, think aboutthe method after all the substantive research had been done. Where to start for writing this add-on? Prompted by the words method and international law, Google and legal databases took the almost-Doctor to an issue of the American Journal of International Law (AJIL) that had come out in the late 1990s: Symposium on Method in International Law, edited by Steven Ratner and Anne-Marie Slaughter. To the relief of the candidate confronted with the demanding examiner, the list of methods presented in the Symposium legal positivism, the New Haven School, international legal process, critical legal studies, international law and international relations, feminist jurisprudence, and law and economics contained one that most resembled what they had been doing: legal positivism. So with reference to the Symposium, they then wrote the requested additional section by describing legal positivism, which, according to Symposium contributors Bruno Simma and Andreas Paulus, sees law as a unified system of rules. Had Martti Koskenniemi been an examiner, he would probably already in those days have taken issue with the candidate s picking a method off the shelf

A transatlantic symposium on the Restatement (Fourth)

No abstract available

A transatlantic symposium on the restatement (fourth)

Published: 22 January 2022This article introduces a Transatlantic Symposium on The Restatement (Fourth). The Symposium aims to shed light on the Restatement (Fourth) at three levels: (i) the project of ‘restating’ the law; (ii) the concept of ‘foreign relations law’ and its relationship to international law; and (iii) the substance of law as ‘restated’ in the Restatement: How does the Restatement (Fourth) approach the law of treaties, jurisdiction and immunities; does it get the law ‘right’ and how does it com¬pare to its illustrious predecessor, the Restatement (Third)

The restatement (fourth) : an interview with one of the two co-ordinating reporters

Published: 22 January 2022This is a literal Q&A between the convenors of Symposium on the Restatement (Fourth) and one of the project’s two coordinating reporters, Paul Stephan. We discuss the selection of the reporters, the writing process, the Restatement’s intended audience and the relationship with the Restatement Third

International law and democracy revisited : introduction to the symposium

'EJIL Symposium Issue: International Law and Democracy Revisited : Introduction to the Symposium'Published: 19 June 2021The European Journal of International Law was founded in 1989, coinciding with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attendant excitement encapsulated by that well-known optimistic/hubristic End of History phraseology. Many predicted or expected that liberal democracy would become regnant in the world and a New International Legal Order would replace the old First World/Second World/Third World distinctions. Thirty years later, at the occasion of EJIL’s 30th birthday, EJIL’s Scientific Advisory and Editorial Boards considered it opportune to revisit the question of international law and democracy: in 2019, the state of democracy, whether liberal or social or any other variant, seemed to be far from sanguine. In many regions of the world, democracy seemed under assault. The stakes are high. What is the state of the scholarship on international law and democracy? What has happened to that once seemingly overcrowded bandwagon? Who is still on it? Is it still moving? And if so, in which direction? What are those who are thinking about international law and democracy concerned with? In organizing this Symposium, we did not follow the classical design of a predetermined set of topics and invited scholars. Instead, in the spirit of democracy perhaps, we issued a call for papers so as not to be locked into our preconceptions of what is important and who is important, but let the field speak for itself