Overseas Pakistanis continue to grow in number, expanding the national community abroad. The three main challenges that exist for the Pakistani government in protecting its citizens abroad are interconnected and have to do with maintaining remittances, increasing educational opportunities, and potentially loosening visa restrictions that hamper the ability of Pakistanis to travel and interact with other countries economically. While the world has focused on security, mainly evaluating Pakistan from an Afghanistan-focused lens as US and NATO forces remained in the country till August 2021, Pakistanis have been busy seizing opportunities for themselves and their families, indicating a high level of agency. The Pakistani government is motivated by its diaspora’s agency and self-identity needs, and welcomes engagement. This movement has now resulted in remittances becoming Pakistan’s largest source of national foreign exchange. In order to maintain remittances, the Pakistani government’s activities are likely to intensify over time. As the Pakistani government engages with its citizens abroad, one of the most interesting revelations about this research is the lack of direct military involvement.

Through diplomatic protection, aliens could invest abroad with the expectation that if they were injured in an unstable country, international law would provide an additional framework of protection. The US practice ensured that the content and scope of international obligations would extend beyond ad hoc diplomacy to international arbitration, where professional lawyers began to articulate general principles of state responsibility. The most important of these principles was the minimum standard of care owed to aliens. If a state failed to meet international standards, its legal responsibility was engaged. Latin American lawyers, however, were unhappy with state responsibility being applied in this way. In response to what they viewed as legal imperialism, Latin Americans expanded the doctrine to apply to the US and Latin Americans alike and to the violation of any international obligation and not just alien protection. In this way, what began as a narrow practice in Latin America, grew into a general framework of international law enforcement.

The establishment of the League of Nations created institutional opportunities to codify state responsibility. Legal experts had two sources upon which to draw for codification purposes: the US practice of alien protection and German theories of international responsibility. Anglo-Americans expected to crystallize their arbitral gains through codification. Latin Americans sought to proceed with codification more systematically, based on German theory. Experts within world bodies were irreconcilably split over the relevance of international arbitration for decades. By the 1960s, the US approach became a minority view within world bodies. Latin American representatives had accumulated sufficient voting power to reject any attempt to entrench the US practice. This history ends in 1962, with the replacement of Special Rapporteur García-Amador with Roberto Ago. Under Ago’s leadership, the UN uncoupled its efforts from the intra–American arbitrations and codified state responsibility based on German theory instead.

In the first chapter, I introduce the concept of state responsibility, the set of norms that regulate how states are permitted to enforce their rights under international law. I describe it as an exceptional doctrine that is easy to oversimplify. I present my thesis on the recent origins of state responsibility, which was “born” sometime between 1870 and 1930. I discuss the problems with state responsibility that are unique to international law and how lawyers have coped with this differently depending on their standpoints. Accordingly, I structure the book to reflect three such perspectives: (1) American practitioners; (2) German philosophers; and (3) institutional publicists. Despite the UN’s successful codification of state responsibility in 2001, the book demonstrates the continuing importance of uncodified doctrines of state responsibility. Taken together, this expanded history highlights the complexity of state responsibility as well as the political contexts from which it emerged.

Chinese nationals working, studying, and living overseas have always been an important issue for Chinese policy-makers, who have adopted a variety of policies to protect, support, attract back, and monitor them. This first section of this chapter provides an overview of the presence of Chinese nationals overseas, where they are mostly located, and the factors that shape their presence. It then analyzes the main regulatory and diplomatic efforts made by the Chinese state to protect them. The policies adopted by the Chinese government to support and manage the Chinese diaspora, as well as lure back those highly educated nationals who are seen as an important source of innovation for the Chinese economy are discussed in the second half of the chapter. This discussion is followed by an analysis of the evolution of China’s military activities aimed at protecting Chinese citizens overseas. Overall, it emerges that the Chinese state has invested significant bureaucratic and diplomatic resources in these activities, preferring to keep a low profile in military terms.

The chapter explores how Germany engages with its nationals abroad, covering the diplomatic/consular, economic/social and military dimensions. As of 2020, around 2.9 million Germans permanently lived outside Germany, mostly in other European countries and North America, and approximately 24 million Germans went abroad for their main holidays in 2021. The chapter finds that Germany’s activities towards these German nationals residing or travelling abroad is relatively limited overall, with a focus on supporting and assisting German citizens. There is only little evidence for policies to co-opt Germans abroad, for example in the context of return schemes for highly-skilled German citizens, and no indication for repression at all, as befits a liberal democracy. While Germany’s engagement is typically of low domestic salience, Germany can mobilize significant resources to support its nationals abroad at times of crisis (e.g., natural disasters or hostage situations), in particular through its global diplomatic network. Germany has also used its armed forces for military evacuations from conflict zones, often in close coordination with its European and transatlantic partners. Germany can thus be described as a capable protector that is, however, reluctant to engage with its national communities abroad on a more comprehensive and proactive basis.

Indonesia has long been the country of origin for millions of migrant workers. Indonesian men and women have left their homes in search of work to provide a better life for themselves and their families. Most migrant workers are in semi-skilled or unskilled positions in fields such as agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and domestic work, which are mostly low-wage and difficult jobs. There are large numbers of Indonesians in Asia, such as in Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and in wealthy countries in the Persian Gulf, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Migrant workers leave Indonesia both through official, legal channels, as well as through illegal, unofficial channels. These workers are often referred to as “irregular” migrants. Migrants are often treated poorly and are found in dangerous, undesirable jobs. The Indonesian government is increasingly compelled to try and address abuses of their citizens. The Indonesian government is highly attuned to the treatment of its citizens abroad and has embarked on many measures to try and improve their safety overseas. Ultimately, the government has seen some successes at protecting compatriots, but continues to face significant challenges in doing so for a larger number of their workers overseas.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the role of judicial dialogue between international courts in the interpretation of customary international human rights law. Judicial dialogue refers to international courts’ spontaneous practice of referencing other international courts’ decisions or international instruments that are outside the international court’s own judicial system. International courts engage in this practice in order to both identify rules of customary international human rights law and reach common interpretations on the meaning and scope of norms protecting human rights. Through the analysis of international courts’ case law, this chapter discusses the impact of judicial dialogue consisting in cross-references to legal norms and judicialdecisions on the interpretation of rules protecting human rights, especially when judges use case law from other courts in support of their interpretation.

It is uncontested that the European Union (EU) – endowed with distinct international legal personality (pursuant to Article 47 of the Treaty on European Union) and being a subject of international law – is bound by relevant norms of customary international law (CIL). Rules of CIL form an integral part of the EU legal order, and the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) must use CIL at least as an interpretive tool. Still, the CJEU’s interpretations of CIL norms and the interpretative methods and techniques it employs have received little attention in legal scholarship. This chapter aims to map and understand the ways in which the CJEU interprets CIL rules and compares them to those that exist for the interpretation of treaties under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

This chapter employs a survey to ask whether the efforts of various climate networks as part of collaborative climate governance are perceived as effective. Sweden is known for being a corporatist state in which dialogue with stakeholders is a key feature of policy development. This can also be seen in the way that the Swedish government has developed its policies for decarbonization by establishing the multi-stakeholder initiative Fossil Free Sweden as a flagship. However, there are numerous other climate networks that are led by non-state and sub-state actors and operate independently of state action. This chapter outlines a set of multi-actor networks that work to contribute to achieve Sweden’s climate targets and assesses them in terms of perceived effectiveness. By studying the perceptions of key stakeholders, this chapter seeks to understand the contributions of various climate networks to Swedish decarbonization beyond measurable emission reductions, thereby paving the way for critical reflections about the role of collaborative climate action in broader governance arrangements.