This chapter examines the founding of Chosŏn Korea in 1392 in relation to Ming China, offering an understanding of how the tribute system worked at times of conflicting interests between China and its neighboring powers.

This chapter first identifies five entry points for science in environmental investment disputes. It continues with analysing framing techniques of both litigants and arbitrators that aim to strategically manage the science-intensity of the legal inquiry. The chapter discusses varied scientific fact-finding methods of investment tribunals. Despite that party-submitted evidence dominates investment arbitration, on rare occasions panels appoint independent experts. As to causal inquiry, the chapter discusses that open causal assessments remain a rarity in arbitral practice, though science-based causal nexus increasingly gains relevance in environmental disputes. As to the standard of review, arbitral tribunals are generally deferential towards the scientific claims of host states. Yet they design different standards to review the scientific basis of host states' risk regulatory measures, for instance, some focus on the transparency of the regulatory process, while others rely on regulatory trends of other states. This chapter concludes with analysing and comparing the various standards of review applied in science-intensive investment arbitral proceedings.

This chapter summarizes the main findings of the book and shows that the judicial function bestows a truly interdisciplinary task on judges, which confers epistemic responsibilities on legal adjudicators. It argues that judges deciding international environmental disputes should be more active and thorough in terms of reflecting on the scientific profile of disputes both in the judicial assessment and in their reasoning.

This introductory chapter lays out the method, theory and historical framework of the study. It focuses on the potential for historical materialism to help us better understand and critique international law uncovering its structural complicity with oppression, exploitation and dispossession. Along with offering a succinct summary of the capitalist mode of production in Marxist thought, the chapter also reflects on the benefits of combining textual deconstruction with materialist analysis in order to better comprehend law as a textual discipline that is at the same time profoundly entangled with extra-textual processes of capitalist accumulation. Drawing from epistemology and the Marxist philosopher, Luis Althusser, the author defends the importance of a symptomatic reading of international legal materials that centres a specifically juridical problematic.

This chapter places recent events in the context of the theoretic framework. In 2024, President Putin and his government face the same challenge that it faced in 2008. Constitutional term limits mandate that Putin leave office, prompting broad speculation about its effect on the 2021 parliamentary elections and the presidential race. Consistent with the formal model, the regime banned the opposition in Moscow’s 2019 municipal elections and the opposition unified to send a protest signal. Popular response kicked off some of the largest protests in recent years. In response, the Kremlin increased the use of repression against protesters, a move that provided new information about the regime type. Voters carried the protest into the voting booth and sent a strong signal in support of opposition candidates. In addition, the Kremlin moved to manage the next national election cycle by instituting signification constitutional reform and launching new social welfare programs. The final section of the chapter highlights the contributions of the study for comparative politics and Russia regional studies.

Modern international relations theory purports to be universally applicable, but was inspired largely by the interstate politics of the West. From antiquity to the late nineteenth century, the international system of East Asia differed from those of the West on the four variables that international relations theory deems to be most important in shaping interstate politics: the balance of power, the regime types of most states, the role of trade, and the prevailing international norms. We therefore test international relations theory's claim to universality against the history of East Asia "before the West." We assess the extent to which the predictions of international relations theory fit the interstate politics of East Asia, focusing on cooperation under hegemony, the enforcement of order, international norms, trade relations, changes in the balance of power, changes in polarity, and state formation. We find several shortcomings that suggest profitable new avenues for improving international relations theory.

This chapter examines the practice of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACtHRP) and that of the ECOWAS Court. The analysis centers on comparable cases from their jurisprudence, where human rights claims have been filed due to health injuries allegedly caused by toxic exposure. The chapter addresses inter alia the role of the precautionary principle as a framing technique, applicable causal inquiries, the evidentiary practice of these fora and their deferential standards of review. It extensively criticizes the causal inquiry of the ECtHR, where causal links between toxic emissions and health injuries are apparently assessed based on non-scientific, intuitive proxies. From IACtHR jurisprudence the Human Rights and the Environment Advisory Opinion will also be discussed with respect to the causality-based jurisdiction the court announced.

This chapter documents the relevance of the ‘standard of civilisation’ for contemporary international law, despite the marked decline of explicit invocations of the concept. It does so by documenting the continuing existence and purchase of arguments that oscillate between the ‘logic of improvement’ and the ‘logic of biology’. By focusing on two distinct legal fields that have been highly relevant to the war on terror, the laws of occupation and jus ad bellum, this chapter documents the importance of conforming with the imperatives of the neoliberal state in order to be recognised as a subject of international law. In the first part, the chapter offers a detailed examination of the neoliberal reforms imposed in occupied Iraq by the Coalition Provisional Authority. It details both the promises anchored to the adoption of neoliberal capitalism and the constant negation of such promises based on Orientalist stereotypes based on Iraqis’ purported incapacity to government themselves. In the second part, this chapter focuses on the controversial ‘unwilling or unable’ doctrine situating it within the political economy of the ‘war on terror’ and the demand that post-colonial states subscribe to its imperatives.