At the conclusion of World War II, the Western victors found that the defeated peoples of Germany and Japan ready for a return to the comparative liberalism of the 1920s. In the meantime, there was an emerging conflict—the Cold War—with another victor: the Soviet Union. Soviet support of a military invasion of South Korea by the Communist North in 1950 provoked unwarranted fears of an imminent World War, and these were taken to require the assemblage of a vast arsenal of weapons designed to deter a war that neither side had any intention of starting. The Cold War also came furnished with a set of alarming crises. In the most famous, the Soviets sought in Cuba to solve two problems that essentially didn’t exist: a potential US invasion and a strategic “imbalance” that was irrelevant because neither side had any intention of initiating a nuclear exchange whatever the disparity of the arsenal. But leaders on both sides were successful at keeping the crisis from escalating. Even if the missiles had been installed in Cuba, however, the only consequence would be that, like other nuclear forces, they would have spent the next decades gathering dust.

This chapter shows that different ICJ judges seem to assign different weight to teachings. The judges vary greatly in how often they cite teachings (if they cite them at all), and in how they use teachings when citing them. The chapter places the judges in three categories: those who frequently cite teachings and assign them considerable weight, those who occasionally cite teachings and assign them less weight, and those who never cite teachings. The chapter also suggests factors that can explain the variations, with the best one being the judges’ personal philosophies and styles. Judges who are former academics cite more teachings than others, and non-Western judges cite more teachings than their Western counterparts. These correlations may also contribute to explaining the variations between the judges.

The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolution1 welcoming the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ)2 and its recommendation that the UK address the issues raised by the incomplete decolonisation of Mauritius, with particular reference to the Chagos Archipelago, raises a number of issues, including the current and future status of the marine protected area (MPA) that the UK declared around the islands in 2010, which is the focus of this chapter. Following an introductory section on the context of the MPA as a conservation measure, and in particular the MPA around Chagos, this chapter considers, firstly, the proposition that the ICJ Opinion marks a change in the relationship between former colonial powers and those countries which were colonies or remain overseas territories, and often fall into the category of less or least developed states. While the Opinion might be seen as a progressive step in the context of marine protection, it is suggested not only that there is still an inequality of arms and that overseas territories and former colonies may be vulnerable players in the race to establish ‘blue’ credentials but also that the new world order is marked by the increasing influence and power of non-state entities, particularly environmental lobby groups, who may be less accountable than states. Secondly, and linked to the first, the chapter considers that the right to self-determination being upheld in the Opinion may not be all that it seems. This is particularly so in respect of the oceans and the resources therein, where the absoluteness of state sovereignty is being increasingly diminished as a result of international obligations to protect the global commons and the biodiversity of the oceans. Thirdly, and again linked to the previous two, while the Opinion was largely concerned with past events, the future international legal order is changing as a result of proposals to manage areas ‘beyond national jurisdiction’: a proposal which seeks to extend international regulation aimed at protecting the marine environment in new directions, possibly with even greater use of MPAs. The chapter concludes with speculation as to the future significance of the Chagos MPA as regards the various interested parties and, closely related to this, the lives of Chagossians wanting to return to the archipelago.

The Chagos Advisory Opinion is in many ways a bold judgment. For one, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) agreed to give advice to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) against the wishes of three permanent members of the UN Security Council, in circumstances in which it could have dodged the bullet with a reasonable degree of plausibility.1 It declined the invitation to characterise the request as one concerning a bilateral territorial dispute between Mauritius and the UK, and sided, instead, with the several states who viewed decolonisation as a multilateral issue in which the UN retains a legitimate interest. The Opinion, moreover, comprises a scrupulous retelling of the political process leading to the excision of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in the 1960s, and provides a cutting answer to the UNGA’s questions: the process of decolonisation of Mauritius has not yet been completed, and the UK is under an obligation to bring its administration of Chagos to an end.

When negotiating states introduced the notion of peremptory norms or ius cogens norms into the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT), they foresaw a specific mechanism for settling disputes that referred to an alleged breach of a peremptory norm of general international law (ius cogens norm) as grounds for voiding or terminating a treaty, circumstances specifically provided for in Articles 53 and 64 of the Convention. Indeed, paragraph (a) of Article 66 provides that such disputes should be submitted to arbitration or to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).1 It was considered appropriate, therefore, that when settling such disputes, courts should address the question of how the effects of peremptory norms of general international law specifically apply to treaties.2

Before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued its Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965,1 an arbitral tribunal constituted under Annex VII of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) had already ruled on closely related questions.2 Even though the UNCLOS tribunal had declined jurisdiction over the ‘sovereignty dispute’, the tribunal made several determinations of potential relevance to the proceedings before the ICJ, notably on the international legal status of the 1965 agreement between Mauritius and the UK.

American military policy during the current century has been an abject, and highly destructive, failure. Misguided and failed wars instituted in the aftermath of the spectacular terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, have cost trillions of dollars and killed well over 200.000 people, including more than twice as many Americans as perished on 9/11. Much-exaggerated alarm after 9/11 made politically possible an armed invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, spilling over into Pakistan, to depose an unpleasant regime that, despite some appearances, had essentially nothing to do with 9/11. And in 2003, the American military was sent to Iraq to remove the fully-containable and fully-deterrable regime of Saddam Hussein. Initially successful at first, the two ventures ultimately inspired lengthy insurgencies against the occupiers. In Iraq, Iran and Syria, concerned they might be next, worked successfully with friendly Iraqis to make the American tenure in Iraq as miserable as possible. Insofar as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were motivated by a romantic notion that the forceful intervention would instil blissful democracy on grateful peoples, impelling other countries to follow suit and in time to love the United States and Israel, the ventures have been a fiasco of monumental proportions.

It really seems time to take into account the consequences of the fact that countries, particularly leading or developed ones, reversing the course of several millennia, no longer envision international war as a sensible method for resolving their disputes. Indeed, the aversion to international war or the rise of something of a culture or society of international peace that has substantially enveloped the world should be seen as a causative or facilitating independent variable. International war seems to be in pronounced decline because of the way attitudes toward it have changed, roughly following the pattern by which the institution of formal slavery became discredited and then obsolete. Under the circumstances, there is potential virtue in the traditionally maligned diplomatic techniques of complacency and appeasement for dealing with international problems. The phenomenon asuggests that there is little justification for the continuing and popular tendency to inflate threats and dangers in the international arena—even to the point of deeming some of them to be “existential.” In addition, although problems certainly continue to exist, none of these are substantial enough to require the United States (or pretty much anybody) to maintain a large standing military force for dealing with them.

This chapter analyses the ICJ Statute Article 38(1), interpreting each its component terms, with a particular emphasis on ‘teachings’. One overall conclusion is that the wording of Article 38(1) gives at best limited on guidance on the application of teachings, which supports the utility of the examination made in the rest of the book. When interpreting ‘teachings’ specifically, it is particularly difficult to classify works produced by the International Law Commission. They are not seen as ‘teachings’ in the book.