This chapter provides an overview of the multi-faceted landscape of methods used to study the steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals. After a discussion of the political use of science and the complex relations between science and politics, the chapter showcases a selection of different methods that are employed to trace the steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals. Selecting the most suitable method for a particular research question requires understanding their main characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. The chapter highlights that all methods and tools need to be combined to comprehensively assess the political impact of the goals, the progress towards their achievement, and their overall transformative potential. As data gaps and unequal geographical coverage still hamper a broader understanding of the political impact of the globalgoals, we need to build bridges across language communities, disciplines and methodological camps, which still work very much in isolation.

One particular twentieth-century scholar stands out in how influential he was in ensuring Gentili’s position as a key protagonist in the history of international law: Carl Schmitt. This chapter argues that Schmitt’s influential emphasis on Gentili is not simply an inheritance of nineteenth-century narratives. Rather, Schmitt places Gentili at the heart of his history of the development of international law and the evolution of the concept of war in a move that should be understood as part of his broader attempt to defend authoritarian rule. In particular, I argue that placing so much emphasis on Gentili provided Schmitt with a way to make absolutist forms of rule seem normatively desirable. Schmitt came to associate absolutism with the humanization and the rationalization of warfare, not through an analysis of historical facts (which would have made the endeavor difficult) but through a partial interpretation of the works of some “great” thinkers, most importantly Gentili’s treatise on war.

This chapter traces India’s status concerns from independence in 1947 leading up to the advent of the NPT in the late 1960s. It examines India’s approach to nuclear weapons during this period and derives expectations for how India would react to an international treaty such as the NPT from two competing perspectives: material interests and IST. It tests these hypotheses through a detailed account, based on primary sources, of India’s approach to nuclear proliferation and positions taken in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) negotiations of 1954–1956 and in the Eighteen-Nation Committee on Disarmament from1962 to 1969. It finds that although India faced a major nuclear threat from China, India supported nonproliferation and universal nuclear disarmament, so long as the international nuclear negotiations allowed symbolic equality with the great powers and the door to joining the nuclear club remained open. When the superpowers drafted an NPT that effectively froze the number of recognized nuclear powers for the next 25 years, Indian perceptions of the openness and fairness of the international order changed, leading India to reject the NPT and undertake the very costly and risky step of testing a nuclear weapon.

Sociological analysis of international law begins from the premise that international legal rules and institutions are deeply embedded in the particular sociocultural features of certain communities. Sociological factors and processes thus form an inseparable dimension of international law, and international law is both affected by and influences such factors and processes. Sociologists of law have long emphasized that law is rooted in communities, and laws are considered by these scholars as expressive of types of those communities. Since international law emerges from and operates within diverse social groups, Emile Durkheim’s famous statement is significant also for international law scholars: society is more than the individuals who compose it; society has a life of its own that stretches beyond our personal experience. Consequently, the fundamental idea that reverberates in countless sociological studies is that the social whole of a group is greater than the sum of its parts, and knowledge about social relations cannot be derived solely from knowledge about the individuals who comprise the group.

During his extraordinary career, Georges Abi-Saab served on the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, as a member of the WTO’s Appellate Body, as a judge ad hoc at the International Court of Justice, as an arbitrator, and as an advocate. Remarkably, he has been equally influential as a scholar and as a teacher, publishing numerous eloquent and significant books and articles, and teaching at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and at other leading universities around the globe. In this interview with Jeffrey Dunoff, Professor Abi-Saab reflected on his career, and on the complex relations between international legal theory and practice.

Jeffrey Dunoff: Perhaps we can start our discussion of the relationships between theory and practice by inviting you to reflect on the term “theory.” The volume has chapters organized by schools of thought, but this is not the only way to understand “theory.”

TWAIL scholars seek to retell, rewrite and reconfigure international law by decentering some of its central myths such as its Westphalian origins. In addition to rewriting and writing international law from third world perspectives, TWAIL scholars critically appraise international law’s doctrines, operative logics and normative commitments and assumptions. From this perspective, the third world for TWAIL is not merely a geographical space. Rather, it is a locus of enunciation of international law from third world perspectives. TWAIL’s vantage point is critical of the universalizing mission and occidental authority of Eurocentric international legal scholarship and practice. TWAIL in particular rejects Eurocentric accounts of international law that fail to account for the history of subordinated groups within it and its current consequences such as those related to climate change, poverty and other forms of violence. TWAIL is therefore an oppositional and transformative set of commitments and ideas for rethinking the international legal order.

This chapter tells the remarkable story of how, in the late nineteenth century, Gentili was revived and presented as a challenger to Grotius for the broad title of “true founder of international law.” While in the end he did not become as famous as Grotius – and later Vitoria – across the literature on the history of international law, he was pushed to center stage by a group of prominent individuals who claimed he was potentially the true founder of international law, and on this basis, he eventually came to occupy a newly important place in the history of international law, particularly within histories of the laws of war.

To write of critical international legal theory (CILT) is to hunt a snark. As in Lewis Carroll’s famous poem, there is something important to be captured, but there lingers a very real possibility that its distinctive charms and potency might “vanish … away” in the telling. For like many of the bodies of work by which it has been informed, CILT does not denote any single movement, school or approach. Those identified with CILT are quite likely to reject such a label, or to opt for some alternative (“New Approaches to International Law” (NAIL), for instance, flourished during the 1990s). Those so identified often disagree about what it is that they may be up to in the international legal field, and what it is that they should aspire to achieve, even as they often collaborate with and support others so identified. As a consequence, it is far from clear that CILT exists in any consistently recognizable form.

The principal argument of this chapter is that the legal security provided to foreign investors by investment law exhibits features characteristic of the legal hegemony achieved by colonial settlers over Indigenous peoples. If colonial power authorized settlers to displace Indigenous communities, contemporary legal relations appear to reinscribe a similar disregard for Indigenous rights and title. Not only does investment law exhibit indifference but investment arbitration reveals complicity in violating rights. This is exhibited by investment tribunal disinterest in penalizing investors for the exacerbation of, and responsibility for, inter-societal conflict that leads to dispossession, violence and even death. A sampling of cases reveals that tribunals prefer not to reject investor claims, or reduce damage awards, in circumstances where investors have been implicated in this maltreatment and subjugation of Indigenous peoples. What is revealed is that international protections for metropolitan-based entrepreneurs consolidate victories secured by the internal colonialism of Indigenous peoples in the Americas.

This chapter traces the United States’ status concerns from the early nineteenth century leading up to the 1856 Declaration of Paris. It examines the US approach to the maritime laws of war during this period and derives expectations for how the United States would react to an international agreement such as the Declaration of Paris from two competing perspectives: material interests and IST. It tests these hypotheses through a detailed account of the US approach to the international maritime order from the 1820s, when the United States began rising, to 1856, when the Declaration of Paris became the first universal instrument of international law; as well as in the opening stages of the Civil War when the Union government strongly considered signing the Declaration. It finds that contrary to the commercial interests and status aspirations that influenced initial US support for the maritime laws of war, the country’s leaders rejected the Declaration of Paris and sought to undermine it through an alternative (failed) treaty, because the United States was excluded from the deliberations leading to the Declaration and US leaders viewed the Declaration as relegating America to the status of a second-rate power.

What I seek to do in this chapter is to build on the existing methodological reflections put forward by historians in order to put forward an alternative form of “serial contextualism,” focused on the reception of an author rather than of a concept, and anchored in that author’s original context of writing. In doing so, I am also building on existing studies of actual reception processes in IR, history, and international law, but my aim is to give a more systematic account of how one might go about studying the reception of a famous author and what this type of inquiry can contribute.

This chapter examines to what extent and under what conditions the Sustainable Development Goals have fostered a better inclusion and support of poor and vulnerable communities within countries, and of the least developed countries internationally. We start with a conceptualization of inclusiveness as a matter of recognition, representation, and distribution. We then review the role of the Sustainable Development Goals in steering any normative, institutional or discursive changes in favour of inclusiveness within and between countries, drawing on both a Scopus search of all articles published between 2015 and 2020 in the social sciences subject area related to inclusiveness and grey literature. Although research evidence is strikingly limited, our review indicates that rhetoric and action do not match when it comes to the impacts of the Sustainable Development Goals on inclusiveness within and between countries. While vulnerable people and countries are often discursively prioritized in the implementation of the goals, such discursive prioritization has so far not resulted in creating or reshuffling norms and institutions towards inclusiveness.

This chapter imagines how proposals, aimed at facilitating the divestiture and exit of foreign investors, might have offered an alternative to problems that purport to be solved by international investment law. There is not much talk of alternatives as they have been banished by the discursive and material power of investment law. Displaced are fifty-year-old proposals aimed at facilitating the divestiture and exit of foreign investors that were introduced by Argentinian economist Raul Prebisch and elaborated upon by US-based economist Albert Hirschman. The chapter begins with a discussion of what is labelled constitutional dispossession, before turning to a discussion of the Prebisch–Hirschman proposal. An examination of this past yields fruitful insights into how we can generate substitutes for investment law, particularly as investment law’s foundations are being tested, even weakened, in some locales. The advantages of the divestment proposal are then identified and applied to the award in Bear Creek v. Peru, a dispute prompted by the revocation of a mining licence granted to a Canadian investor to which Aymara Indigenous communities in Peru were vociferously opposed. The object is to reimagine the status quo and reflect upon the prospects of far-reaching change.