This article argues that international law and the literature of civil war, specifically the narratives from the Philippine communist insurgency, present two visions of the child. On the one hand, international law constructs a child that is individual and vulnerable, a victim of violence trapped between the contending parties. Hence, the child is a person who needs to be insulated from the brutality of the civil war. On the other hand, the article reads Filipino writer Kris Montañez’s stories as revolutionary tales that present a rational child, a literary resolution of the dilemmas of a minor’s participation in the world’s longest-running communist insurgency. Indeed, the short narratives collected in Kabanbanuagan (Youth) reveal a tension between a minor’s right to resist in the context of the people’s war and the juridical right to be insulated from the violence. As their youthful bodies are thrown into the world of the state of exception, violence forces children to make the choice of active participation in the hostilities by symbolically and literally assuming the roles played by their elders in the narrative. The article concludes that while this narrative resolution appears to offer a realistic representation and closure, what it proffers is actually a utopian vision that is in tension with international law’s own utopian vision of children. Thus, international law and the stories of youth in Kabanbanuagan provide a powerful critique of each other’s utopian visions.

The concept of jurisdiction is a relatively undertheorized category of international law. Mainstream international law scholarship advances an ahistorical and asocial account of the rules of jurisdiction in international law. The present article contends that any serious understanding of the categories and rules of jurisdiction, in particular that of extraterritorial jurisdiction, calls for deep appreciation of the evolving material structures over time. It argues that the key factors that have influenced the evolution and development of the doctrine, rules, and practices of jurisdiction are the emergence of the modern state, capitalism, and imperialism. In order to appreciate this contention there is a need to undertake on the one hand a genealogical analysis of modern state and capitalism and on the other hand problematize the categories ‘territory’ and ‘extraterritorial’. The internal relationship between capitalism and imperialism has meant that, despite the territorial organization of the international system, a process of harmonization of legal rules has taken place across geographical spaces in both colonial and postcolonial eras. The outcome is a critical loss of policy and legal space for nations of the Global South. In the colonial era the outcome was achieved through legislation in the instance of colonized nations and through capitulation regimes in the case of semi-colonies. The strategy of advanced capitalist states in the postcolonial era for achieving harmonization of laws has been multi-layered and multi-dimensional. The article concludes by touching on two models of reform of the rules and practices of jurisdiction viz., liberal and subaltern internationalism.

This article engages with the history of international investment law in the first half of the twentieth century. It traces how international lawyers inscribed their vision of an international legal order protecting private property of Western companies against attempts at nationalization in the wake of socialist revolutions and the decolonization of large parts of the world. The article focuses on the role of ‘general principles of law as recognized by civilized nations’ as building blocks for an international legal order today called international investment law. Rather than describing a direct line between contemporary standards of protection and the invocation of general principles, the article develops conditions of possibility for the emergent field of international investment law. These conditions are located both in arbitral practice, as well as in international legal scholarship of the early twentieth century. Based on the analysis of such arbitrations over disputes resulting from concession agreements and scholarly writings in the interwar period, the contribution draws out the modes of authorization upon which the legal claims advanced by international lawyers rested. At the heart of the vision were ideas of ‘modernity’, ‘civilization’, ‘equity’, and ‘justice’ that enabled a hierarchization of difference, locating Western claims to legality above rivalling claims of socialist and ‘newly independent’ states. These ideas ultimately constituted the paradox of a ‘modern law of nature’ that claimed timeless universality while authorizing the ordering of foreign property in line with Western conceptions of modernity.

Individuals have long occupied a precarious position within international law. Historically, conceived as the relation between states, international law rarely saw a need to consider individual claims; it was, instead, the role of states to bring claims on behalf of their nationals. As international law has become increasingly fragmented, however, globalization has thrust the individual onto the international legal plane.

Within this landscape, we briefly consider individuals’ claims across three separate international regimes: (i) the International Court of Justice, (ii) investment treaties, and (iii) the World Trade Organization. We find that barriers for individuals’ recognition as rights holders persist across each. First, jurisdictional barriers remain fundamentally problematic for recognizing individuals’ claims. Second, the longstanding focus on treaty interpretation techniques has yielded little, if any, demonstrable impact on recognizing individuals’ rights. Third, mere reliance on reflecting human rights values, rather than specific and concrete structural reforms, has proven incompatible with realizing individuals’ rights within these three systems.

Individuals qua rights holders have, rather acutely, recently experienced deeply troubling human rights violations on several fronts. Fundamentally, international law must protect human rights. This moment invites us to consider the systems on the international legal plane for individuals to seek such remedy and what barriers must be addressed to further such efforts.

In 2014 Japan’s Cabinet Order No. 302 declared the outer limits of its continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles (OL) to the west and north of Oki-no-Tori Shima (Area 302). Oki-no-Tori Shima consists of two small, barren, and uninhabitable rocks in the West Pacific. The northern part of Area 302 is broader than what the 2012 recommendations of the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS) specify. A question arises whether Order No. 302 violates Article 76(8) of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which provides that the OL established by a coastal state ‘on the basis of’ the CLCS recommendations shall be final and binding. Another question is the role played by the CLCS in ‘assisting’ the coastal states to delimit their national jurisdiction so as to know where the Area (i.e., the Common Heritage of Mankind under UNCLOS Articles 1(1)(1) and 136) begins. The essential questions arising from Area 302 concern how well the UNCLOS mechanism can perform to safeguard the Common Heritage of Mankind through preventing encroachment thereupon by individual coastal states. This article looks at the context and explores the obligations implied by Article 76(8) for coastal states to ‘follow’ the recommendations in establishing the OL, with special reference to the northern part of Area 302. The article also examines legal consequences arising from a breach of these obligations.

Argentina’s 1980s transition to democracy is globally admired for pioneering a state-led process addressing the 1976–1983 dictatorship’s state-violence. The role of international law in the transition is well documented, especially through human rights and crimes against humanity. Yet, the extent to which Argentina’s transition was intertwined with international law and subject to its jurisdictional force deserves greater attention. This article analyses how the Argentinian truth commission (TC) accounts for the dictatorship’s state-violence, and how international law is implicated in the making of this account. It argues that the TC’s account draws on the authority of international law to establish the unlawfulness of the dictatorship’s state-violence. In turn, the TC subjects the meaning and interpretation of the dictatorship’s state-violence to a Eurocentric/Anglo-American lawfulness embedded in, and mobilized by, international law in the late-Cold War. To examine this, the article re-reads the Prologue to the TC’s Report as a literary text that does international legal work, harnessing the authority of international law in a way that has enabled the TC to deploy an authoritative, internationally acceptable, account of the unlawfulness of the dictatorship’s state-violence. This reading is based on original archival research, on scholarship in the fields of ‘law and literature’ and the history and theory of international law.

The article examines the theoretical concept of interregionalism in the context of the evolving framework between the European Union (EU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). As the EU’s first free trade agreement (FTA) with an ASEAN country, the EU-Singapore FTA is a pathfinder agreement that signifies a new phase of interregionalism and the EU’s new Asia strategy after the Treaty of Lisbon. The article argues that the innovative designs of the EU-Singapore FTA will shape the normative development of EU-ASEAN relations in the post-pandemic era. It also cautions that a comparative analysis of EU and US agreements reveals deficiencies in the FTA that require remedies. To buttress the contention, key provisions on ASEAN cumulative rules of origin, banking and legal services and non-tariff barriers are analysed in light of contemporary Asian agreements. The research further provides insight into the effectiveness of new-generation rules on geographical indications, competition, and investor-state arbitration and mediation. Hence, the findings contribute to the understanding of interregionalism and the EU’s Asia-Pacific trade and investment agreements from global and interdisciplinary perspectives.

Bilateral relations between states which are parties to a multilateral treaty may not be governed by that treaty. This may depend on an agreement between the two states concerned, which could subject their bilateral relations to a different regime that is considered to suit their specific needs better. The exclusion of bilateral relations under the multilateral treaty may also be the consequence of a unilateral expression of the will of one of these states, for instance in view of its non-recognition of the other state. The present article seeks to examine the conditions under which bilateral relations may be excluded on the basis of the unilateral determination of one of the states concerned.

The International Court of Justice recognized the legitimacy of ‘non-party intervention’ under Article 62 of the Statute in its 1990 landmark decision on Nicaragua’s intervention in the Land, Island and Maritime Frontier Dispute (El Salvador v. Honduras). Such form of intervention ‘is not intended to enable a third State to tack on a new case, to become a new party, and so have its own claims adjudicated by the Court’. Its purpose is ‘protecting a State’s “interest of a legal nature” that might be affected by a decision in an existing case’. Whereas non-party intervention under Article 62 now forms part of the law in action within the Court’s system, its precise features and regime remain uncertain. Doubts concern the identification of its precise objects and the potential binding effects for a non-party intervener of the judgment issued between the original parties. The present article explores these issues in the light of the Court’s case law and state practice. It demonstrates that non-party intervention can have various potential objects, depending on how the intervener intends to influence the future judgment between the original parties. Building on the identification of these objects, it then questions the traditional construction denying any binding effect of the decision for a non-party intervener and argues that a judgment issued following intervention is binding as between the original parties and the intervener in so far as this judgment, whether expressly or by implication, decides issues related to the object of intervention.

This article analyses the growing resistance to judgments of the International Court of Justice arising out of domestic law in Latin America, through a study of challenges to the authority of the Court’s judgments regarding territorial and maritime delimitation in the region. These challenges are based upon the ‘territory clauses’ found in many Latin American constitutions, which were used to set national boundaries following colonial independence. Territory clauses that once developed international law doctrines such as uti possidetis iuris are now being used against prevailing international law rules, in a process described in this article as ‘constitutional resistance’.

This article explains the nature of ‘territory clauses’ in Latin America, i.e., clauses that constitutionally define the national territory in reference to international law. It then describes the process of ‘constitutional resistance’, by which local authorities have used these clauses to oppose ICJ judgments, leading to various results, such as non-appearance in further proceedings, constitutionalizing exclusively favourable judgments, deferring the implementation of a judgment to the Constitutional Court or implementing only certain ICJ judgments, while creating legal barriers to the implementation of judgments that, in the State’s view, negatively affect their territory.

These challenges based on territory clauses are studied through prominent ICJ cases involving Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Colombia. The article also explores how the lack of a strong territory clause eased the implementation of the Peru v. Chile judgment, and how the recent non-appearance of Venezuela in its current ICJ proceedings with Guyana, is partly based on constitutional justifications.