This brief epilogue closes the circle. If the story opened with a solemn view of the Great Hall of Justice, it ends in the quiet of a living room on the other side of The Hague. Sophie and Norma get a final chance to chat about the events of the past three years. What was Sophie thinking when she joined the international judiciary? Where is the vision that was promised to her when she graduated from university? Norma does her best to cheer up her girlfriend. A 19th century novel, an orchestral piece by Ennio Morricone, and a glass of red wine do the trick.

It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.

The story opens in the solemn setting of the Great Hall of Justice, where the President of the ICJ is about to deliver the Court’s judgment on a long and difficult dispute. Among the attendees is Sophie Richter, a clerk to ICJ judge Jürgen Lehmann. Sophie ponders about the many steps it took to get to this day: all the actors, visible and invisible, who contributed to the judicial process; all the interactions that occurred at every turn; and all the possible realities that were discarded along the way. The issuance of today’s judgment is, in fact, the end of a long and strenuous journey, which will be chronicled through successive flashbacks in the following chapters. Having set the stage for the narrative, the chapter introduces the central themes of the book. First, it reviews existing literature on international adjudication, including formalist treatises, critical accounts, and legitimacy-oriented analyses. Second, it invites the reader to consider the importance of everyday socio-professional practices in the definition of international judicial outcomes.

In this chapter, a number of key concepts from complexity science are introduced in order to provide the tools, method and philosophy of science necessary for later chapters. Focus is given to concepts needed in a complexity and network theory of money, finance, innovation and macroeconomics. In particular, the notions of emergence, interactions, non-linearity and path-dependence are explored, and their relationship with equilibrium, non-ergodicity, stability and chaos, and the theory of evolution. A simple classification of complex systems is given. The particular case of self-organised criticality is explored as it becomes later used as a basis to explain complex dynamics and fluctuations in innovation networks and the financial system.

Law must not be confused with liturgy. It is not enough to enact and reiterate the law: to be meaningful, norms must be adhered to in reality. The nature of LOIAC is such that Belligerent Parties tend constantly to trade mutual accusations of breaches and worse. Absent effective modalities of supervision and dispute settlement, there is no way to guarantee a thorough implementation of LOIAC in violent clashes between States. No enforcement mechanism established thus far has been crowned with signal success. There is a growing acknowledgement of the need to prosecute and punish war criminals for serious breaches of LOIAC, especially since the establishment of the ICC. Yet, it is by no means certain that war crimes trials by themselves can put an end to LOIAC infractions. Debates about forging novel mechanisms, with a view to securing a more efficacious performance of LOIAC undertakings, are not likely to fade away in the foreseeable future.

This chapter describes how judicial bureaucrats characterize the state conduct or measure that gave rise to the proceedings. That characterization is a value-laden exercise whereby discrete aspects of reality are captured into the gravitational fields of the various courts and tribunals. In its normal course, state action is irreducibly pluralistic and does not lend itself to univocal labels: no domestic measure is ever only about ‘borders’, ‘investment’, or ‘human rights’. Yet, labels are necessary to attract the measure to the jurisdiction of this or that institution. The choice of the terms by which one describes state conduct determines the normative prism through which one looks at it, and reflects a struggle for appropriation among competing fora.

The story finally gets to the interpretation and application of legal norms to the facts of the case. This chapter deals with the first interpretive step, called law-ascertainment, where the interpreter identifies the rules that are relevant to the case at hand. Donning the hat of an explorer, the interpreter maps the body of norms precedents in concentric circles – starting with the sources closest to the centre of gravity of their judicial regime and gradually venturing into more peripheral territory. The results of these practices explains the degree of cohesion or fragmentation in international law. As the legal system grows more complex, interpreters no longer have time and resources to master it all, and prove increasingly partial and selective in their legal readings. The emergence of self-contained regimes is largely due to epistemic constraints which, in turn, reflect the social structures of the international judicial community.

This chapter concludes the book by offering a vision of the next problems of environmental governance to solve as the world undertakes a low-carbon transition. The first key point is that the sustainability transition is already underway. The second is that it will not lead to lower economic growth, but rather, faster economic growth with a weakening of economic, financial and political stability globally. These important findings should underpin a radically different policy conversation than has happened up to now, looking to understand risks and opportunities rather than estimating costs and benefits. It is quite clear that the low-carbon transition will leave some people behind through structural change in the economy, creating new inequalities or reinforcing existing ones. Economic agents are classified here into two overarching supergroups, the ‘optimists’, forward-looking agents who operate in the new economic paradigm with rising expectations, and the ‘sceptics’, who look towards the past and are becoming trapped in the old technological paradigm, with depressed expectations. Institutions of governance and policy advocates will have to move on from persuading the world to adopt climate policy and go towards developing effective and equitable governance modes for the sustainability transition that has been put in motion.

The present book deals with the conduct of hostilities governed by the law of international armed conflict (LOIAC). The threshold of an international armed conflict (IAC) is crossed automatically once two or more States wage hostilities against each other, irrespective of the intensity or the length of the fighting.1 As the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) pronounced in the Tadić case, ‘an armed conflict exists whenever there is resort to armed force between States’.2 Depending on their scale, IAC hostilities may make the grade of a full-fledged war or they may amount to a ‘short of war’ clash of arms (namely, constitute a mere incident), but either way the military engagement between two or more States invites the application of LOIAC.

This chapter starts to analyse the institutional frameworks of different international courts and tribunals in comparative perspective. More importantly, it introduces the invisible army of legal bureaucrats (clerks, registry and secretariat officials, and arbitral secretaries) who assist international adjudicators in their daily duties. The story focuses on their backgrounds, their modes of recruitment and promotion, their relationship with the judges and arbitrators they are called to serve, and the ambiguities inherent in that relationship. From here onwards, the role of bureaucrats in the judicial process will come into sharper relief. Their duties typically include: summarizing the parties’ arguments for the benefit of the adjudicators, conducting legal and factual research on the disputed issues, circulating internal memoranda that suggest options on how to solve the case, assisting in the preparation of oral questions for hearings, attending deliberations, and drafting the final judgments or awards.