This chapter aims at shedding light on the curious roles performed by the idea of international legal positivism in international legal thought. This chapter first elaborates on some of the common representations of international legal positivism that have allegedly led to its demise and motivated international lawyers to refrain from declaring any affinity with international legal positivism. This is the claim that international legal positivism is dead. In substantiating that claim, this section provides a sketch of five of the main features of international legal positivism as it is commonly understood in the literature (Section 3.2). This chapter then argues that most of the supposed features of international legal positivism are not specific to this supposed tradition of thought, or are simply imaginary. This is the claim that international legal positivism is empty (Section 3.3). In a third part, the chapter goes on to discuss the extent to which international legal positivism continues to be presented as a dominant approach despite few international lawyers declaring themselves positivists.

Global legal pluralism, unlike many of the theoretical approaches explored in this volume, takes into view not just international law as such but inquires into the broader universe in which traditional international law, understood primarily as inter-state law, is embedded. It starts from the observation that in today’s global order multiple normativities – domestic, regional and international, formal and informal, private and public – interact and that this interaction is important for understanding the shape of the overall order. Global legal pluralism thus seeks to theorize the ways in which interactions between different normativities take place and their implications for a more general account of the structure of the global legal order. Some pluralists writing in this vein take a more analytical, others a more normative approach, but they all seek to capture situations in which law consists not of one, unitary legal order, but of a multiplicity of suborders with potentially competing claims to authority.

The purpose of this chapter is to clarify some of the disagreements that have arisen regarding Gentili’s ideas by closely examining Gentili’s use of sources in De iure belli (DIB). More specifically, through this focus on sources, the chapter seeks to resituate Gentili’s DIB beyond the immediate legal debates that have conventionally framed its analysis, and to place the text within the broader political thought of the period. Gentili’s text, the chapter claims, is particularly noteworthy in its attempt to straddle the legal and political debates of its epoch, looking beyond legal sources and turning to various contemporary political writers in what was quite a remarkable move at the time.

This chapter assesses the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals on global governance. We start by discussing the range of expectations for global governance arrangements, considering the stated objectives of the goals. We then assess the early performance of governance arrangements in terms of shifts in policy and practice against these expectations. Our research shows the impact of the Sustainable Development Goals is largely discursive, with limited transformative outcomes on governance practices. The High-level Political Forum, created to assess global progress towards the implementation of the goals, has failed to provide political leadership and promote coherence across the United Nations system. Our research also shows that the Sustainable Development Goals initiated peer-learning among governments and other actors, yet with limited evidence that this has led to structural transformation towards sustainability. As certain ambitions of the Global Goals have been part of ongoing debates in global governance, our review finally highlights that observable changes often reflect long-term reform trajectories that are not causally linked to the launch of the goals.

The introduction outlines the conventional narrative that this book seeks to question: The idea that the allocation of the legal right to wage war only to sovereign states, penned by a humanitarianly minded Gentili and implemented in practice through the seventeenth century, became one of the core stabilizing factors of the new states-system in the aftermath of the cataclysmic Wars of Religion. It then lays out the book’s core argument along with its stakes for contemporary debates about the regulation of warfare in the international order.

Although the term Global Administrative Law (GAL) first appeared in the twenty-first century, administrative law has existed at international level since at least the late nineteenth century.

It is the nature of all law books, and edited books in particular where authors are constrained in the space available to them, that oftentimes readers, if they could, would love to put a question, seek a clarification, or even contest one or more propositions in what they read.

My role here is to be a “Consul of the Readers” and to put such questions to some of the contributors to this excellent volume. The book is interesting and timely: finding side by side an array of different theory approaches to international law. The authors did not have the benefit of seeing the whole when writing their specific contributions – and maybe only few readers will take the time to read the book cover to cover. My questions to the various authors are, however, informed not only by the specific contributions but by the perspective of seeing the individual trees and the forest as a whole.

The final chapter brings the insights of the book together under the overarching question of whether the Sustainable Development Goals have had any political impact after their adoption in 2015. The chapter draws the conclusion that the Sustainable Development Goals have so far had only limited effects in global, national and local governance. We mainly see discursive effects of the goals with some normative and institutional effects as well. The global goals have however not (yet) become a transformative force in and of themselves. Their effects are neither linear nor unidirectional. While the 2030 Agenda and the 17 goals with their 169 targets constitute a strong set of normative guidelines, their national implementation, translation to the local level, and dissemination across societal sectors remain a political process.

The capital-exporting states of the North Atlantic long insisted that the standards of civilised justice mandated that capital-importing states respect the property rights of their nationals engaged in commercial enterprise abroad. Only a single North Atlantic conception of civilisation qualified to provide content for this purported international standard, even as that content was contested by capital-importing states from the Global South. This chapter turns to a methodology that is dominant in investment law scholarship that operates to produce an outcome functionally equivalent to the standards of civilized justice. International investment lawyers and scholars, it is argued, deploy simplistic comparative methodologies that reproduce historic domination by powerful capital-exporting states. The choice of country models is highly selective and productively so. By preferring to conscript the easily retrievable law of the Global North into general principles of international law, scholars reinforce extant power relations rather than realigning them in new directions.