There are important doctrinal and institutional obstacles in the way of proper treatment of collective legal responsibility of several States for global environmental harm, but no serious theoretical obstacles. Difficult theoretical issues do arise at the level of justification, however. The chapter investigates how legal and moral responsibility of individuals, States, and collectives of both all fit together as a normative matter, using global environmental harm as its case study. It argues that shared moral responsibility – the responsibility an individual has when acting together with others – is a very important moral phenomenon. By contrast we have no need for the idea of a collective (such as a State) itself being morally responsible. Ideally, the shared ex ante moral responsibilities of individuals together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would be discharged by domestic law under the guidance of international law. Where non-complying States face sanctions, the burden of those sanctions will be imposed on individuals who are not responsible for their State’s failure. Yet citizens have political obligations to improve their States, including in the matter of compliance with international law. If the sanctions can be seen as doing citizens’ work for them, the burdens imposed do not seem objectionable.

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 10, Reduced Inequalities, addresses one of the fundamental building blocks for the realization of all SDGs in a very unequal world. It emphasizes both interstate and intrastate inequality and, in so doing, goes much beyond what the 2000 Millennium Development Goals offered. SDG 10 is a central goal because inequality conditions the realization of many other SDGs, some of which also directly address inequality. In the context of international law, SDG 10 reflects in part existing equity measures, such as preferential and differential treatment. It may be seen as strengthening the equity context in economic law but does not go beyond what sustainable development law already provides. Its main contribution is to link different types of inequalities and provide a framework for linking sustainable development law, economic law, and human rights.

This chapter recalls the distinction between responsibility and liability as it emerged in the work of the International Law Commission and its inherent difficulties, before turning to its relevance in relation to the interplay between the obligation to prevent harm and the prohibition to cause harm, the question of cessation and the procedural treatment at the International Court of Justice of the issues of injury, causality and reparation owed. The chapter questions the received wisdom according to which ‘responsibility’ and ‘liability’ would be two different legal genres and argues that the dichotomy between them is porous.

This chapter theorizes that sovereignty is the interplay of two contrasting modalities. In Idealized Sovereignty, sovereign authority is represented exclusively in “the state” per the doctrine of indivisibility developed by early modern theorists and reified in IR theory. In Lived Sovereignty, achieving sovereign competence involves divisible practices of state and nonstate actors in a variety of social relations. We would do a disservice to sovereignty’s complexity if only one of the two modes persevered in analyses of sovereignty. Instead, the chapter intervenes in major IR debates to argue that sovereignty should be hybridized. This overarching framework guides the ideal-types of public/private hybridity developed in the next chapter and the empirical analyses in the remainder of this book, where hybrid sovereignty is necessary to build a global empire, go to war, regulate global markets, and protect rights.

This chapter starts by observing that public responsibility is still understood in very different ways throughout the world, depending largely on the political, social and cultural background of each State. The Chinese, Middle Eastern, African and Central European examples presented bear witness to this reality, and in particular to the close link between the development of public responsibility and the emancipation of the individual from the State and the collectivity. The great diversity of national and supranational practices on a world-wide scale – in a context marked by global challenges and by the still essential role of the Nation-State framework – makes a comparative legal approach essential, not only to prevent unwarranted standardization, but also to bridge differences and ‘further compatibility’.

This chapter raises the question whether attribution of wrongful acts to the State is based on ‘objective’ causal chains or ‘subjective’ mental states. It argues that attribution of conduct to the State is not primarily causal or fault-based. First, it shows that several of the Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts cannot be understood in terms of causation or fault. Second, it argues that causal and fault-based theories of attribution are either circular or incomplete. Instead, the chapter claims, the logic of attribution is primarily functional. The rules of attribution converge around the central principle that an act of State is an act performed in the service of a State function, such as defence or detention. Functional attribution is best understood as ‘intersubjective’: it is determined not by objective causal chains or by subjective mental states, but by shared ideas about the functions of the State and what it means to perform them. The functional character of the rules of attribution allows them to adapt to economic and technological changes, such as the growth of corporations and the development of autonomous weapons.

This chapter illustrates the forms and dynamics of contractual hybridity in American wars using the case of Blackwater. Blackwater’s contractual hybridity was visible in its formal contracts with public funding. Contractual relations created power payoffs by deploying a contractor force for American wars and raised Weberian legitimacy dilemmas from limited contractor oversight and distributed accountability. Security contractors also disturb civilmilitary relations by posing as “civilian combatants” or “unlawful combatants,” depending on the preferred definition under international law. The chapter also follows bureaucratic debates on defining "inherently governmental functions" given contracting, which reveal the effort it takes to balance Idealized and Lived Sovereignty. By being attentive to formalized and publicized hybrid relations, the chapter thus wrestles with unique problems in sovereign governance that challenge the legitimacy of a sovereign authority that contracts itself.

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12, Responsible Consumption and Production, operates in a context shaped by contrasts between thriving consumers and exploited workers and rampant unsustainable practices. This contribution critically discusses the areas of international law that are relevant for SDG 12, with a focus on international trade and investment regimes. It argues that the environmental and human rights agreements currently in force are much weaker than the powerful regimes of international economic law, whose main preoccupation is the liberalization of trade and investment and not the material footprints and redistributive consequences of sustainable production and consumption. With its focus on voluntarism and the lack of reference to key human rights instruments, SDG 12 is likely to reproduce the structural conditions that have generated enormous social and environmental damages rather than providing orientation for much needed transformative change.

International responsibility law today is in great need of theorizing or, at least, that is the present volume’s argument. This introduction sets the stage for that argument. It unfolds in four steps: first, it clarifies the reasons that led to putting this collection of essays together and explains what it hopes to achieve; second, it introduces the main theoretical challenges addressed in the volume; third, it provides some information about how the book is organized; and, finally, it sketches out the content of its successive chapters and their articulation.

This chapter examines the relationship between Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, Zero Hunger, and international law. It argues that SDG 2 is supported by international human rights law. However, international economic law (trade, investment, finance) impedes the achievement of SDG 2 by undermining the livelihoods of small farmers and restricting the ability of states to regulate in the public interest. When these bodies of law conflict, international economic law generally prevails as a consequence of the powerful mechanisms through which it is enforced, including the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement system, investor-state arbitration under international investment agreements, and the loan conditionalities imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

This chapter explores the complex and challenging relationship between Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14, Life below Water, and the relevant international legal frameworks. It shows that the effective implementation of SDG 14 may be compromised by the structural limitations of international law in general as well as by the idiosyncrasies of the law of the sea. Yet the SDG 14 targets may serve to strengthen existing regimes, operate as interstitial norms connecting distinct regimes, or identify gaps in ocean governance and inspire new regulation. However, where the SDG 14 target is expressed in weaker or more general terms than existing obligations or goals, SDG 14 may undermine existing instruments. In the absence of an overarching ‘Ocean Council’, the regime complex that is in place provides as many opportunities for duplication of, or contradictory, efforts as it does for the development of mutually supportive measures. It is also posited that SDG 14 fails to provide the necessary conceptual framework for the law of the sea in the Anthropocene.

This chapter argues that Amnesty International’s chief sovereign accomplishment in Lived Sovereignty is organizing a global human rights polity from disparate transnational publics. However, shadow relations between Amnesty and governments related to funding, country access, and negotiating reforms in its first two decades threatened to derail the moral purity that undergirds the protection of human rights in Idealized Sovereignty. Successfully navigating shadow hybridity has thus been a central yet understudied feature of Amnesty. The historical analysis contextualizes the difficult choices Amnesty made to become the world’s leading INGO. Amnesty thus helps us see that hybrid relations endure even when the stakes are very high, exemplifying the pervasiveness of hybrid sovereignty in global politics.

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 9, Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure, aims to further economic advancement through investment in infrastructure, industrialization, and innovation. Implementing SDG 9, however, requires the realization of complex synergies and careful management of its potential disconnects. Positions about the role of international law in such matters differ significantly and depend on how SDG 9 and international law are conceptualized. Some, for instance, view international law’s trade and investment treaties, complemented by the ‘soft law’ standards developed by international institutions, as instrumental in realizing SDG 9’s synergies. Others view international law’s environmental and human rights treaties, and the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards developed by international institutions, as paramount to manage the disconnects of SDG 9. The emergence of an ‘ESG normative space’ – involving state and non-state actors in norm creation, application, enforcement, and development – might provide an opportunity for unpacking and reconciling competing interests and conceptions.

When considering ways for preventing Member States from hiding behind the institutional veil of the organization, two distinct approaches can be identified. The first focuses on the position of the Member State as a subject endowed with its own distinct personality and holder of its own rights and obligations. According to this approach, when the State acts as a member within or on behalf of the organization, it continues to be bound by its obligations and may be held individually responsible for their breach. The second approach focuses on the position of the State qua member of the organization. It relies on the institutional link binding together the organization and its members to affirm that, under certain circumstances, all members should be called upon to bear the consequences of the wrongful acts of the organization in a collective way. While much of the debate on the risk of abuse of the organization’s institutional veil tends to focus on the question of collective responsibility of members, the chapter argues that in practice it is through different forms of individual responsibility that the organization’s institutional veil has been pierced or circumvented.

This chapter develops the analytical dynamics of public/private hybridity in Lived Sovereignty. It first situates public/private hybridity in the global governance literature and then introduces three ideal-types. Contractual hybridity features formal and publicized performances where sovereign power is negotiated in public/private contractual exchanges. Institutional hybridity features informal and partly publicized performances where sovereign power is negotiated through public/private institutional linkages. Shadow hybridity features nonformalized and nonpublicized performances where sovereign power is negotiated in public/private shadowy bargains. Finally, the chapter presents a Weberian-inspired research design to show off the three ideal-types in the empirics that follow.