On the surface, the two books under review seem to have little in common. The Bonnitcha/Poulsen/Waibel (BPW) book, written by two legal academics and a political scientist, provides a balanced, fact-grounded account of international investment agreements (IIAs) and investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). This is the “international treaty regime” in that book's title which the authors argue needs to be distinguished from the broader “international regime complex” that their book explicitly does not address, namely the number of other international instruments that at least incidentally also protect foreign investments (including, for example, political risk insurance, tax treaties, certain World Trade Organization agreements, and certain human rights treaties like the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)) (p. 7 and Figure 1.2). As one of the encomiums on its back cover page suggests, the BPW book seeks to answer the fraught competing contentions of defenders and critics of the regime that all too frequently generate “more heat than light.” Their book dispassionately synthesizes the available legal, economic, and political literature relevant to understanding the investment treaty regime's oft-proclaimed “legitimacy crisis.” It seeks to supply lawyers needing political context and political scientists needing legal knowledge with the unfiltered facts required to assess whether such a “crisis” exists and, if so, what the ways forward might be.

As international criminal lawyers and diplomats discuss the Draft Treaty on Crimes Against Humanity on the one hand, and the potential of adding a fifth crime, ecocide, to the Rome Statute on the other, Janet Lord, William Pons, and Michael Stein issue a well-timed and compelling call to demonstrate our understanding that people with disabilities (PWD) are a part of humanity. The authors map the many crimes and various situations in which PWD have been and continue to be specifically targeted, and persuasively argue that it is past time for the system of international criminal law to embrace prosecutions of crimes against PWD. In so doing, the authors make a series of important recommendations for international criminal law: for example, that international criminal processes must be made fully accessible to PWD. This essay offers three reflections on the authors’ call to use international criminal prosecutions, specifically at the International Criminal Court (ICC), to elevate the rights of PWD, centering around the following questions: (1) do the people of the world believe that disabled lives matter; (2) if they do not, might international criminal law help shape domestic laws and overcome ableism; and, relatedly, (3) can the ICC create the necessary change? Or put another way, how capacious can and should the category of “crimes against humanity” be since institutional credibility and longevity are concerns?

Claims to security are everywhere. They are used by states to justify invading other nations1 and to derogate from international law obligations.2 They are invoked by governments as reasons to exclude foreign nationals from their territory;3 surveil their citizens;4 and kill citizens and foreigners alike by remote control.5 Some experts use security claims to underscore the seriousness of global threats, like COVID-19.6 Security claims are also used by communities to defend their rights and well-being from those threatening them, including the state itself.7 Still others criticize the use of security discourse—in at least some circumstances—describing it as undermining the rule of law.8 Embedded within these claims is a view about whose security matters most—something that is also implicitly reflected in J. Benton Heath's four-part typology of security claims described in his recent article, “Making Sense of Security.”9 This essay explores the importance of whose security matters to Heath's framework. It does so by examining one political movement currently challenging the U.S. national security state. This movement is led by members of groups targeted and disadvantaged by U.S. national security policies—namely, Muslim, African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian communities. In that movement's recently released policy agenda, Abolishing the War on Terror & Building Communities of Care: A Grassroots Policy Agenda for the Biden-Harris Administration and 117th Congress (Abolishing the War on Terror), 10 its leaders call for abolishing the national security state and the War on Terror that it birthed.11

International legal scholars have long been concerned with the transnational lawmaking process, including the development, interpretation, and implementation of international norms. Yet there has been insufficient attention devoted to the micro-level details by which international law operates. Anthropologists can shed unique insights to this process by uncovering power dynamics, disaggregating institutions and actors, and revealing local practices on the ground. In this essay, I will analyze global supply chain governance through an ethnographic lens in order to examine the role of corporate actors as translators of international law. I argue that an anthropological approach can illuminate how corporations shape international law in practice by uncovering technologies of governance, relations of power, and chains of translation in the transnational lawmaking process.

This essay draws upon the perspectives, concepts, and tools developed in the literature on global constitutionalism as support for “normalizing” foreign relations law—that is, presumptively subjecting foreign relations actions to the constitutional and other legal standards that apply to domestic actions.

Devika Hovell raises deeply significant questions about the role of due process in the legitimacy of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Hovell gives us a fine-grained analysis of what exactly makes due process so compelling; in her approach, the reasons why it is compelling will vary in different contexts, depending upon the particular value and function it serves. In particular, she discusses three ways of articulating the values underlying due process, and the models of due process that would follow from each. She then discusses how her analysis would play out in two situations: The Council’s use of asset freezes, and the role of the UN in the cholera epidemic in Haiti. In her case studies, she looks at situations where due process has been insufficient, and discusses some of the UN’s attempts to remedy this, and the organizational difficulties in doing so.

International law is going through a period of change and, potentially, expansion. At a point in history during the past millennium, the main sources of inter-State law were custom and general principles of law recognized by civilized nations. This came to an end with the Westphalian era when an international order slowly began to establish and a treaty system was developed. Thus, such international law sources as custom and general principles of law gave way to an era of treaties: carefully designed instruments at the international level that codified every single aspect of agreements and transactions between nations. This phenomenon was not exclusive to the universal level; it also took place at a regional scale during the twentieth century, which saw the emergence of regional organizations and agreements that would enable the development of a reasonably stable international or regional society.

This essay addresses the challenges of the digital economy in the context of cybersecurity threats that have growing implications for national security. It analyzes cybersecurity-related exceptions to international trade rules to explore whether and how these exceptions protect the state's digital policy space. The essay argues that the pre-digital era exceptions to trade rules are too narrowly framed to address cybersecurity concerns. This is in contrast to trends in the new generation of international trade agreements that create expansive security exceptions that are designed to reset the balance between international trade and national security. These new approaches must, however, be carefully guarded against potential abuses.