Framing the volume, this chapter introduces the notion of legal entanglements and lays out implications for our understanding of law and its dynamics. Entanglements – relations between norms from different origins that are neither integrated nor fully separated – are a core feature of the contemporary law beyond the state, and have been characteristic of law for much of its history, but they have long been neglected by legal scholars and theorists conceiving of the law through the prism of legal systems. This chapter traces the origins of the concept, manifestations and forms of entanglement, the dynamics behind them, as well as the consequences for the stability of political and social order. It also uses these engagements to introduce the different contributions to the volume and highlight the different ways in which they reconstruct and assess entanglement and its challenges.

This chapter engages with the contributions of Indigenous peoples in North America to a jurisprudence of entanglement, as expressed through historic treaties between colonists and Indigenous peoples. A prevalent contemporary view understands treaties as a form of negotiated co-existence in which, contract-like, different parties agree to exchange – or share – land, resources and jurisdiction. Treaties could thus be seen to provide interface norms for two legal orders, otherwise strangers to each other, which might now become entangled. However, a body of Indigenous scholarship on the resurgent treaty tradition shows up the liberal philosophical premises embedded in this understanding of legal pluralism and the entanglement of norms. Instead, from this perspective, treaties are a recognition that we are always and already in relationship. Further, the key tenets of that principle are that relationships themselves emerge from the more primal way our lifeworld is made up of symbiotic ecosystems. Entanglement in the context of treaties is thus a phenomenon of a different order than conventional legal pluralism: it is simply characteristic of an ontology of which law is a part. The larger implications of this for an ecologically grounded law are explored in conversation with occidental philosophies of entanglement.

Chapter 6 shifts the focus from explaining why aid officials differ in their aid delivery decisions across different political economies to investigating the extent to which these preferences may be driven by what donor publics want aid officials to do.On the basis of survey experimental evidence collected in Germany and the United States, I show that differences in aid delivery decisions between US and German aid officials are not consistent with differences between how the two donor publics think about foreign aid delivery.

Chapter 1 presents the motivation of the study, including empirical and theoretical puzzles about how foreign aid delivery varies markedly across donors and time. The chapter then reviews the relevant foreign aid literature. It outlines the approach to studying foreign aid delivery and briefly summarizes the theoretical argument as well as the empirical strategy used to test the theory. It describes the plan of the book.

Chapter 2 develops the principal claim of the book, which posits that foreign aid delivery is endogenous to national structures. The chapter begins with a brief historical account of how patterns of foreign aid delivery have evolved since the end of World War II. It then fleshes out three theoretical and empirically informed observations about aid decision-making: (1) that aid officials, as key decision-makers, seek to minimize risk in aid delivery, that (2) their response to risk is conditional on the rules and practices that make up the national aid organizations in which they operate, and (3) that these rules and practices have ideological origins that inform us about the substance of aid delivery: why it is that aid officials choose to bypass or engage with the recipient government.

This chapter focuses on legal entanglements between international, state and non-state law in postcolonial societies. While undoubtedly a very heterogeneous category that unavoidably escapes reductionist attempts at homogenisation, it argues that those places where colonial powers institutionalized plural legal orders as explicit strategies for the consolidation of their rule constitute a privileged site for the investigation of entangled legalities. This chapter analyses such entanglements by focusing on the dialectic dynamics of approximation and distancing, which unfold between different sets of norms. It identifies three ways in which these dynamics can play out: denial, deferral and translation. The empirical backdrop of this chapter are three vignettes, which illustrate different dynamics of entanglement between international, state and non-state law in contemporary Bangladesh: (1) the Supreme Court’s attempt to ban Islamic fatwas in 2001 (denial); (2) the violent protests this has triggered and the subsequent decision of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court to stay the verdict for over a decade (deferral); and (3) the work of local activists who, regardless of constitutional developments, seek to carve out emancipatory spaces for marginalized people by simultaneously drawing on multiple normative registers, including Islamic and international human rights norms (translation).

When the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) adopted sanctions against Iran and North Korea, it opted for ‘targeted sanctions’, supposed to be more effective and coherent with international norms than the devastating ‘comprehensive sanctions’ applied against Iraq in the 1990s. For most sanctions scholars, the shifts in UNSC sanctions practices from the 1990s to the 2000s reconciled them with UN norms, lowering the possibility of conflict. In contrast, this chapter claims that with the creation of a global ‘sanctions regime complex’, made of UNSC sanctions and unilateral sanctions, the UNSC’s institutional practice has blurred the boundary between targeted and comprehensive sanctions logics, weakening the normative clarity of UN norms. It also claims that the UNSC has not done so voluntarily, with various informal practices being responsible for this outcome. In particular, it claims that the coherence of UNSC targeted sanctions with other UN norms has been weakened through circulation of documents and experts from unilateral to multilateral bodies in charge of sanctions programs and implementation. Through a variety of processes, the authority of the UNSC over sanctions policy has diffused, and the authority of the UN system has been taken over by states imposing the harshest sanctions, in particular the USA.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a central part of China’s 13th five-year plan, an ambitious program of infrastructure project finance in sixty-five countries, to the tune of US$1 trillion over twenty years. Geopolitically, this might be the most important global governance initiative since the end of the first cold war. But what does it mean for law? Surely it exemplifies entangled legalities. It means different things to the investment protection lawyer at MOFCOM in Beijing, the public procurement regulator in Greece, the law firm partner in Kazakhstan, insurgents in Balochistan and judges in constitutional courts and the European Court of Human Rights. Focusing on actors as nodes of entanglement, this chapter argues that structures of practice as well as cognitive limitations and sociological factors keep law’s engagement with complexity enmeshed but separate, along the lines of (most obviously) national law, but more so along the lines of policy issues and the object-oriented nature of distinct legal fields. The chapter narrates – hypothetically – different views of actors engaging with the BRI to demonstrate the parallel phenomena of separateness and entangledness, and the inevitable interdependence of entangled legal strands, examining the Belgrade–Budapest rail project as a case study. In addition, it emphasizes the close connection between legal entanglement and non-hierarchical, imperial designs.

This chapter analyses normative pathways that guide the deliberative space involving UN human rights treaty-monitoring bodies and domestic courts. Judges vary in terms of their degree of engagement with treaty body findings. This chapter highlights that international law itself provides a set of justifications that sustain varied modes of judicial engagement. One such justification pertains to an obligation to consider the specific findings of treaty-monitoring bodies. Before domestic courts, explicit reference to such an obligation is rare. Yet normative variations of the obligation to consider have guided domestic courts’ engagement to treaty body findings. The duty to consider and its variations may not create robust normative paths. Nevertheless, they arguably pave the way for a sustainable and forward-looking deliberative space by creating the opportunities for learning and self-reflection for both the monitoring bodies and domestic courts.

This chapter aims to show that the work of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which is often identified as the institutional centre of the lex sportiva, can be understood as that of a seamstress weaving a plurality of legal inputs into authoritative awards. In other words, the CAS panels are assembling legal material to produce (almost) final decisions that, alongside the administrative practices of sports’ governing bodies, govern international sports. It is argued that, instead of purity and autonomy, the CAS’s judicial practice is best characterised by assemblage and hybridity. This argument is supported by an empirical study of the use of different legal materials, in particular pertaining to Swiss law, EU law and the European Convention on Human Rights, within the case law of the CAS. The chapter is a first attempt at looking at the hermeneutic practice of the CAS from the perspective of a transnational legal pluralism that goes beyond the identification of a plurality of autonomous orders to turn its sights towards the enmeshment and entanglement characterizing contemporary legal practice.