Since 2006, the Leiden Journal of International Law (LJIL) has been dedicating a series of special issues of its Articles section to the theme ‘International Law and the Periphery’. This issue marks the fourth in this series.

This article explores the League of Nations' role in state formation in Third World or peripheral states and its legacy for contemporary understandings of Third World sovereignty. It examines Iraq under British Mandate, and UN and Coalition of the Willing interventions. This research was prompted by the international-law community's outrage when the Coalition invaded Iraq in March 2003. While the invasion was seen by many as an affront to international law, there was also something faintly familiar about the Coalition's reasoning for the invasion. This feeling of déjà vu escalated once regime change was followed by lengthy nation-building. The idea of recreating Iraq was not a new one. The British were tasked with something similar under the League of Nations Mandate System. UN interventions into failed states also attempt comparable transformations. Indeed, the more one contemplates international law's interventions in Iraq, the less shocking the Coalition's invasion becomes. It starts seeming foreseeable and even inevitable.

Supported by Athens and Ankara, and implemented largely by the League of Nations, the Greek–Turkish population exchange uprooted and resettled hundreds of thousands. The aim here was not to organize plebiscites, channel self-determination claims, or install protective mechanisms for minorities – all familiar features of the Allies’ management of imperial disintegration in Europe after 1919. Nor was it to restructure a given economy and society from top to bottom, generating an entirely new legal order in the process; this had often been the case with colonialism, and would characterize much of the Mandate System in the interbellum. Instead, the goal was to deploy a unique legal mechanism – not in conformity with European practice, but also distinct from most extra-European governance regimes – in order to resolve ethno-national conflict by redividing land, reshaping national identities, and unleashing new processes of capital accumulation.

The ‘Abyssinia Crisis’ of 1935–36 – in which one League of Nations member (imperial Ethiopia) was annexed by another (Fascist Italy) – presents one of the clearest twentieth-century illustrations of international law's ‘progress narrative’. International lawyers are encouraged to draw a salutary lesson from the crisis: namely that Ethiopia's sovereignty – and, indeed, the peace of the entire world – might have survived the 1930s if only international law had been properly enforced. Yet, the assumption upon which this lesson depends – to the effect that Ethiopia's only discursive contribution to the crisis was passively to regurgitate the relevant clauses of the Covenant – is profoundly ideological. For this assumption effects a double suppression: erasing Ethiopia's strategic construction of a hybrid, partially Abyssinian international law from the discipline's memory; and concealing from scholarly view the possibility that Ethiopia's annexation might have resulted from actions that were in accordance with, rather than in violation of, interwar international legal norms regarding sovereignty and the use of force.

Straddling both the centres of (European) power and the shifting dynamics of the post-Ottoman world in a quest to guarantee private rights through public international legal redress, the PCIJ Mavrommatis case provides a rich resource for interrogating the extent to which international law during the League period could speak for voices on the edge of empire. In this article, historical consideration of the regimes of empire and Mandate form the backdrop to an exploration into how international legal discourse (re)configured the relationship between the core and the periphery, especially for those peoples awaiting the promise of self-determination and sovereignty. The figure of a lone Greek investor and his dashed hopes in the newly created Palestine Mandate is the backdrop to this tail of ever-shifting interpretations of public and private rights, of speech as well as silence before and beyond the Peace Palace.

To many in the West, the League of Nations was to establish political peace between nations. To the Cuban sugar-producing elite of the 1920s and 1930s, however, the League was an important socioeconomic institution used to augment many of Cuba's first modern state institutions. This article explores how and why Cuban delegates were the principals behind the 1937 International Sugar Agreement – one of the League's few operational economic treaties. This treaty sheds light onto how actors from the so-called industrial core and agricultural periphery used international law, institutions, and practice to negotiate and renegotiate their relationship with each other.

Written from an outsider's perspective, this paper tries to capture the ethos, or, if you prefer, the Sittlichkeit, of international criminal law. It argues that international criminal law can profitably be seen as an ethos, rather than a body of law. In this telling, international criminal law, despite its name, emerges as an ethical–administrative enterprise rather than a legal one. If placed alongside global administrative law, for instance, international criminal law appears as alegal rather than illegal, so that to criticize international criminal law for violating, say, the ‘principle of legality’ would be like faulting apples for not producing orange juice, and oranges for not making apple pie.

The article presents an anthropological analysis of witness testimony about ritual murder, cannibalism, and secret societies in the trial against Charles Taylor in The Hague. In the first part, a comprehensive in-depth analysis of the testimony of one prosecution witness serves as a case study to illustrate the difficulties of assessing the veracity of witness statements on alleged atrocities linked to African religious and spiritual beliefs. The second part contextualizes the testimony heard in the trial against Charles Taylor by drawing on historical sources and the academic literature on West Africa. The analysis reveals striking parallels between the prosecution narrative and colonial representations of Africa as a mysterious and savage place.

Goldstone's recent retraction can leave the reader of the report that bears his name somewhat perplexed. Indeed, if the deliberate intent to target civilians could be discussed in some specific attacks listed, such a report nevertheless describes a pattern of behaviour that cannot be swept aside without disregarding the order of priorities set by the Israeli legal system itself. Through analysis of the new Israeli military code of ethics as well as the Israeli Supreme Court case law, this paper examines how civilians in Gaza were deliberately put at risk by a specific interpretation breaking down the flat rule of civilian immunity into a more complex construction opposing the Israeli soldiers’ right to life to the rights of an ‘enemy population’.

According to the agency paradigm enshrined by the 2001 ILC Articles on State Responsibility, private conducts are attributed to a state when they are carried out on the state's behalf or under its tight control. On closer look, this legal framework proves to be unable to deal with state involvement in human-rights violations perpetrated by powerful non-state actors, such as terrorist groups or transnational corporations. These wrongs, indeed, are often put in place with the fundamental contribution of – but not on behalf of (or under the control of) – a state, with the consequence that, under the traditional paradigm, they could not be attributed to the latter. Against this backdrop, the present paper argues that a new secondary norm has been developing that provides that private wrongs are to be imputed to a state if the latter knowingly facilitated (or otherwise co-operated in) their commission. Although international practice will be duly taken into account, the analysis will be focused mainly on US case law concerning corporate liability for international human-rights violations.

Since the early 1990s, the UN Security Council has used its enforcement measures under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to address different aspects of international refugee protection from the root causes of forced displacement to the search for durable solutions to the refugee problem. At the same time, however, the Security Council has been criticized for impelling trends towards state security concerns that have emerged in the refugee-protection regime over the past two decades. By establishing safe areas in Iraq, Bosnia, and Rwanda, or linking refugee status to terrorism, the Security Council has been accused of violating established refugee-protection standards. This paper seeks to use the prism of international refugee protection to draw a more nuanced picture of the normative effects of SC actions on the development of international law generally. Shifting the analytical focus from the much-discussed responsibility of the Security Council for wrongful acts, it is submitted that the practice of the Security Council has had a considerable influence on the development and even making of norms in the field of international refugee protection, thereby eroding established refugee-protection standards. This normative erosion through the inherently political actions of the Security Council will be assessed with regard to the principal measures by which the Security Council has addressed international refugee protection, namely peace operations and economic sanctions.

‘Fragmentation, verticalization, and constitutionalization form the holy trinity of international legal debate in the early 21st century’ – such is the opening phrase of Jan Klabbers's first chapter in his co-authored book, The Constitutionalization of International Law. Although Klabbers possibly did not intend it, by invoking the ‘holy trinity’, he is calling attention to an important aspect of the contemporary constitutionalist debate, namely what I would like to describe as the faith in constitutionalism as a secular religion. It is from this perspective – the complete and unquestioning belief in constitutionalism – that I will explore global constitutionalism and the three books that are the object of this review.