We live in a normative universe: a world of rules. Those rules can be legal rules, moral rules, sports rules, rules of the game. They can be formal or informal. On the road, we are subject to traffic rules. At home, we are embedded in frameworks set by rules concerning marriage, childcare, education. And when we tell our children how to behave, we tend to refer to rules. In Peter French’s pithy formulation: “We teach rules, not lives.”

State formation in East Asia developed a thousand years before it did in Europe, and it occurred for reasons of emulation, not competition. China, Japan, Vietnam, and Korea emerged as states beginning in the second century BCE, and existed for centuries thereafter with centralized bureaucratic control defined over territory and administrative capacity to tax their populations, field large militaries, and provide extensive public goods. They created these institutions not to wage war. Rather, these countries developed states through emulation of China. State formation in historical East Asia occurred under a hegemonic system in which war was relatively rare, not under a balance of power system with regular existential threats. Rather, domestic elites copied Chinese civilization for reasons of prestige and domestic legitimacy. Our research challenges the universality of the bellicentric thesis of state formation. The willingness to acknowledge the Eurocentric origins of much of IR theory is not new; what is new in this book is the empirical evidence we bring that shows this explicitly, and a positive theoretical contribution about the causes of state formation.

Realist and (liberal) institutionalist thinkers in international relations have long used rational choice assumptions to explain states’ behavior, but they only more recently entered into legal intricacies or specific legal questions, especially in the United States. By now, this has become a joint enterprise by international lawyers, economists, and rational-choice political scientists. Ever more empirical research is generated, informing also about the empirical validity hypotheses held by rationalist scholars. The research mostly stands on two pillars: the rational choice assumption and, following the traditional international law assumptions in the aftermath of the Westphalian peace, the treatment of the nation-state as a unitary actor, or what has been described as a “black box” state. Rational choice analysis has been used to conceptualize or reframe international law generally, including its sources.

Did colonialism end with decolonization? This chapter identifies threads of discursive continuity between historic colonialism and the contemporary regime for the protection of foreign investment. Those threads concern a single-minded focus on profitability and privilege, the claim that domination produces economic improvement, a prevailing distrust of local self-rule and the construction of enclaves that preserve legal entitlements for privileged classes of foreigners. Each of these features, found in colonial forms of argumentation documented by Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon, among others, are inscribed in the discourse and practices of investment treaty law and arbitration.

This chapter resurrects notions of empire, associated with colonial and neo-colonial relations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with international investment law. Affinities with imperial legal forms are highlighted, drawing upon Mohammad Bedjaoui’s book-length intervention in support of the New International Economic Order. The chapter invokes the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ empire and postulates that contemporary investment law exhibits affinities with informal empire but also reveals aspects of formal empire. The chapter highlights how contemporary legal rule constrains political capacity in the periphery as did imperial rule via formal and informal means. By interrogating investment law through the lens of empire, this chapter aims to reconnect law to politics in an age when imperial forms continue to proliferate.

This chapter offers a plausibility probe of IST in the case of China and the contemporary liberal international order. The LIO – a multifaceted set of institutions covering a range of security and non-security issues – has contributed immensely to China’s economic growth, diplomatic influence, and national security. China, nonetheless, opposes some and embraces other parts of the international order. The chapter shows that existing theories of revisionism struggle to explain this pattern of cooperation and discord in China’s approach. It then traces China’s status aspirations in the post-Cold War period and applies IST’s predictions to China’s stances in various prominent international institutions. The chapter concludes that IST can broadly apply in this case across institutions and issue areas, though further research is required to decisively demonstrate this claim.

From its inception, international law has been closely linked to philosophy and political theory, and over time competing theoretical approaches have emerged to explain international law’s nature, form, and efficacy. Even today, we associate the most authoritative names in the discipline – whether founders such as Grotius and Vattel or more modern figures ranging from Kelsen and Lauterpacht to contemporary writers such as Chimni, Chinkin, and Koskenniemi – with specific theoretical perspectives that engage foundational questions about international law’s purpose and content.

Every generation of scholars and practitioners reshapes international legal theory as it rethinks international law and its role in international affairs. Two decades ago, the American Journal of International Law (AJIL) published a “Symposium on Methods in International Law.”  The AJIL Symposium took place toward the end of the 1990s, during heady times for international law.

This chapter takes stock of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals within countries. It explores the various initiatives taken by national governments, sub-national authorities, the corporate sector and civil society, and assesses their strategies and approaches to implement the Sustainable Development Goals in their spheres. The chapter finds that the steering effects of the global goals are so far mainly present in political discourse. While we also witness the emergence of new types of institutions, relationships and partnerships, they apparently reproduce existing structures and priorities of key players, indicating selective goal implementation. What we observe the least are steering effects on the (re-)allocation of resources. Thus, the chapter suggests that the Sustainable Development Goals are not (yet) leading to fundamental change and the voluntary nature of the 2030 Agenda makes it fairly easy for actors to implement the global goals in a way that benefits their self-interests.

Gentili sought to develop a set of rules to help regulate warfare. However, given his positions on absolutism and the value of the reason of state tradition, it is hard to see what resources he had available for encouraging sovereigns to actually play by those rules. In this chapter, I argue that Gentili squared the circle through a dichotomy at the heart of his legal framework: the distinction between violence carried out by a “public” entity and all other forms of violence. In Gentili’s framework, those carrying out the latter would immediately be discredited as “pirates” or “enemies of mankind.” The key, of course, was what Gentili meant by “public.”

By way of conclusion, the question is posed whether the investment treaty regime is capable of being liberated from its discredited ancestry in justifications that supported colonialism, imperialism, civilization, debt and orthodox development. Powerful discourses, such as ones underpinning the investment law regime, succeed and endure to the extent that they inhibit alternative accounts. Why should those proffering alternative readings be ignored or silenced when, cumulatively, the effects of this regime are everyday being made material? These discursive strategies are successful only in so far as citizens and states of the Global North insist on continuing to write the rules of the game, facilitating silence of the subjugated and refusing to acknowledge that the marginalized deserve a hearing via a genuine exchange that can form, per Quijano, the ‘basis of another rationality which may legitimately pretend to some universality’. Such a hearing must take place far away from the rarefied confines of conference rooms where investment claims are pursued or the corridors of power where international diplomacy exerts its force.

The criticism of the scholar sheltered in her ivory tower and ignoring the real world is tenacious. Thus, she is often accused of holding herself aloof from the problems of society, making her work irrelevant and socially insignificant. Is this true for academics in international law? Is it not the case that, unlike “the preacher and the philosopher [who] defend postulates which are beyond realization in practice … the international jurist must not walk in the clouds; he must remain on the ground of what is realizable and tangible”?

The first traces of this division between “the men of thought” and “the men of action” can be found in Ancient Greece, where vita contemplativa was opposed to vita activa. Vita contemplativa represented a quest for happiness based on the renunciation of the vanities of human affairs such as wealth or honor. It necessarily involved a withdrawal from human activities. Vita activa, for its part, was a diametrically opposed model of existence, whose happiness was based on the pursuit of pleasure and honor.