Chapter 2 traces the historical development of the law on the use of force from antiquity to the end of World War I.

This chapter considers debates about the ‘common heritage of mankind’ during the 1973–82 UN Conference on the Law of the Sea. Postwar jurisdictional claims over ever-larger portions of the world’s oceans raised the possibility of an unregulated and destabilizing scramble for maritime rights, resources, and territories, culminating in what was often described as the enclosure of the oceanic commons. It also lent urgency to developing countries’ calls for a new law of the sea treaty that would reflect their own rights claims. The result was a series of fractious negotiations spanning nine years, at the centre of which was the question of how the deep seabed and its resources would be managed. Third World states sought an international organization authorized to oversee the deep seabed’s exploration and exploitation, coordinating the global distribution of resulting benefits. Industrialized states proposed a licensing system in which states and corporations would be granted concessions to mine in the international zone. Ultimately, ‘common heritage’ rhetoric proved central to the resulting treaty, but the ‘parallel’ system of seabed mining it legalized had the effect of ensuring that the ocean floor’s resources would be controlled largely by those with financial wealth and technological means.

Chapter Eight focuses on the carbon offset scheme in China, with a particular emphasis on forestry carbon sequestration, which is a critical element of the nature-based solution to meet carbon neutrality requirements. This chapter examines the substantive and procedural requirements that support the functionality of the domestic carbon offset scheme. However, the existing regulatory framework for the offset scheme does not fully support the proliferation of forestry offset projects. The chapter identifies the challenges that affect the development of forestry carbon sequestration projects. To address these challenges, improvements are needed in the parameters of the methodologies and admission standards for new projects. Additionally, the legal ambiguity concerning the ownership of forestry carbon sinks needs clarification.

On 24 October 1945, when the UN Charter entered into force, an estimated 750 million people, nearly a third of the world’s population, lived in territories under direct or indirect foreign rule. By the end of 1990, thirty years after it adopted the landmark Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples and established a special committee to oversee the process of decolonization,1 this number had cratered to a few million and the UN General Assembly felt enough pride in its track record to celebrate the inception of an ‘International Decade for the Eradication of Colonialism’.2 Today, roughly 70 per cent of the world’s population is descended from colonizers or colonial subjects, in many cases from both.3 The experiences of countless occupied territories, oppressed nations, unrecognized states, secessionist movements, and Indigenous peoples, to say nothing of those struggling against ongoing neocolonialism, make it clear that colonialism has not come to an end – and that it certainly cannot be reduced to the formal processes of decolonization coordinated by states and international organizations. But the fact remains that over eighty states gained their independence within a single generation after the Second World War, with most colonial territories thereby reconstituted as states possessed of de jure sovereignty. Fewer than two million now live in the seventeen territories that continue to be designated as ‘non-self-governing’ on the United Nations’ admittedly incomplete and controversial list.4

The communitarian theory of WTO law outlined in previous chapters works reasonably well as a description of key features of WTO law. Its “fit” with the existing law raises the possibility of the theory serving wider applications. That possibility is likely to be canvassed most insistently in relation to international investment law, the body of law pertaining to the protection and treatment of foreign investment by host states. A communitarian theory would forecast international investment law to be preoccupied with corrective justice and to be heavily contractual, retrospective and inductive. The chapter demonstrates how all of these features are confirmed in the shape of contemporary international investment law, and how in light of considerable dissatisfaction with the current investment regime, an impulse is detected toward something more egalitarian, and therefore more obligatory, constitutive, prospective and presumptive.

Chapter 14 examines the relationship between the law governing the use of force (jus ad bellum) and the law of armed conflict (jus in bello), including the law of neutrality. It also looks at how these branches of the law also relate to international human rights law.

Chapter 7 examines the legality of humanitarian intervention and the extent to which certain interventions might qualify as being excused despite the lack of a legal basis.