International norms, principles, and legal doctrines are always present in all histories of international law. Without them, the histories being narrated would arguably appear to be instead histories of something else. However, the extent to which these juridical identifiers are the central focus of the narrative, or recede instead into the background to different degrees until they occasionally become a silent frame of reference for the historical narrative, varies greatly across different approaches. The category of normative approaches to the history of international law belongs to the history of concepts within the general categorization of the ‘modes or forms in which history’ and, by extension, the history of international law ‘may be written’. As a form of conceptual history, normative approaches are commonly recognized as the prototypical illustration of what passes as international jurists´ history. This, according to Valentina Vadi, is a form of history written by international ‘lawyers [who] tend to be interested in the past for the light it throws on the present and consider it as “a self-contained universe”, tracing the genealogy of given concepts with little if any attention to the context’. This approach is generally distinguished from that of historians whose enquiries are oriented to casting light on the past for its own sake and not for what it allegedly ‘brought about’. Being less generally informed by a juridical form of functional presentism, their scholarly work is more receptive to historical professional methods and to the reconstruction of the particular historical context, intellectual, sociological, and otherwise, relevant to their object of historical research, with acute attention, as was seen in Chapter 2, to avoiding the pitfalls of anachronism and other related historical fallacies.

Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, founder and president of the Peace Movement of Ethiopia (PME) in Chicago, was a working-class black intellectual who advocated Afro-Asian solidarity during the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on a long tradition of black internationalism, she pursued an alliance with Japan in the years leading up to World War II. Her political vision, however, contradicted the ideas of mainstream black leaders of the period. Although Gordon had limited formal education she developed inventive strategies to communicate with her mostly working-class audience. Black nationalist women such as Gordon were the most ardent supporters of recruiting Japan as an ally, even if they disagreed on the concrete political projects that should underpin Afro-Asian solidarity. Gordon opposed black migration to Japan’s conquered territory of Manchuria, preferring a ‘return to Africa.’ In Gordon, readers encounter an organic intellectual with a distinct class position, who searched for practical ways for people of color to bring white empire to an end.

Natural law, in the Augustinian and Thomist sense, reflects not merely man’s nature as it is, but as it should be, accounting for the moral aspirations and moral instincts they believed were natural to man’s being. Natural law requires us to live justly: to live well in society, with love towards one another. What does it mean to love our neighbors politically? It means to live and govern in accordance with the “tranquility of order.” Responsibility for upholding this kind of peace is what “sovereignty” meant in the Augustinian era. Peace is not merely the absence of violence, but the presence of the conditions that enable flourishing. Just war is war that accords with justice: it is authorized political violence required to uphold love-directed justice. War is an instrument for defending and sustaining the tranquility of order, understood as an act of love for our neighbors and our enemies alike. With this framework, Augustinian thinkers generally favored humanitarian and state building interventions: military operations to protect the innocent, stop war crimes or crimes against humanity, punish tyrants and war criminals, and foster conditions of lasting peace and stability.

Earlier accounts of Eslanda Robeson have tended to focus on her stage-managing her husband’s career, minimizing her decision to go to Africa as an outcome of the breakdown of their marriage. Yet after the 1945 publication of African Journey Robeson became a household name among African American intellectuals, famous for her shrewd analyses of race and empire in the emerging Cold War. Building on recent work on the history of black international thought, this essay foregrounds Robeson’s journalism and involvement in internationalist and Pan-African networks. Robeson was an activist-intellectual whose international thought centered on the struggle for women’s participation and the significance of the so-called Third World. She astutely observed the limits of action imposed by international organizations. Committed to promoting women as political actors, Robeson nonetheless remained wedded to maternalist thinking. Yet, her widely read writings offered new representations of global politics to her readership, highlighting Robeson’s pedagogical commitment.

This essay charts the co-implication of the personal and the intellectual in the work of international legal thinker Krystyna Marek, a Polish exile who wrote in the context of the dissolution of empire in Eastern Europe. Marek’s 1954 book The Identity and Continuity of States in Public International Law reflected a fundamental shift in international legal reasoning on the birth and death of states. How and through what means might a state’s legal identity survive revolution, imperial administration, or belligerent occupation? How would observers know if a state’s international personality was extinguished? To offer a legal answer to these questions, Marek argued, one must think ‘from outside states,’ as states themselves were unable to think their own non-existence. She contributed the first systematic presentation of international law as a vantage point (or legal fiction) that existed both before and after states, and was thus capable of governing their creation and extinction.

In this chapter I apply the Augustinian Liberal just war framework to contemporary cases of war and conflict: Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorism, Syria, North Korea, and selected cases of cyberwar and autonomous weapons. I discuss Iraq because it is the largest recent war and has animated a huge amount of commentary from just war scholars. I contrast my approach with that of several other thinkers to show the original insights of my approach. Second, I discuss Afghanistan and the War on Terror because the wars illustrate some features of the moral reality of contemporary war that I hope shape our understanding of just war in the future. Third, I use Syria to discuss humanitarian crises, the use of weapons of mass destruction, and the costs of nonintervention. Fourth, I use North Korea to discuss nuclear war, nuclear deterrence, and preemptive and preventive war – issues that have been with us since the dawn of the Cold War and are still with us. Fifth, I discuss cyberwar and autonomous weapons as novel forms of conflict whose moral dimensions are still coming into focus.

This chapter analyses four women intellectuals and activists in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). In the 1930s, Emily Greene Balch, Helena Swanwick, Vera Brittain and Mary Agnes Hamilton were public intellectuals, with a stake in the concrete policy debates of their time, which revolved around the questions of collective security and appeasement. Balch and Swanwick opposed collective security and embraced a pacifist position, while Hamilton and Brittain supported it. They all strategically invoked their gender, based on the intellectual traditions of suffragism and feminist pacifism that countered masculinist IR discourses. Though there was certainly no unanimity among them, they ‘turned an earlier misogynistic tradition on its head,’ by making a claim on representing ‘women’s perspectives’ on international politics. Their contribution to the academic debate on collective security was vital in its time. Yet, in the end, it was written out of IR’s intellectual history.