Discussions of international law often focus on questions of constraint and prohibition. This year's Annual Meeting considered the role of international law as an instrument. Actors on the international stage use a variety of tools to address their concerns, from climate change to economic development; from humanitarian crises to cross-border disputes; from commercial regulation to global trade. Governments and international organizations employ diplomacy and coercion, corporations use negotiation and persuasion, and non-governmental organizations engage in fact-finding and advocacy. And all of these actors affect and are affected by international law and use the international legal system to effectuate change and solve problems.

“In this context the proposition that tools are prolongations of human organs can be inverted to state that the organs are also prolongations of the tools.”

Peacekeeping, human rights, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have flourished in complementary contrast with each other. Their relationship has reflected the constraints and opportunities provided by three geopolitical eras since World War II. The first (the first Cold War) began in about 1948 and lasted until 1988; the second (the Post-Cold War Liberal Primacy) ran from 1989 to around 2012; finally, since 2012 the world has been threatened with the emergence of a second Cold War.

This year's Annual Meeting theme, “International Law as an Instrument,” invites us to reflect on, among other things, the ways in which actors use international law to resolve their disputes. Are obligations to negotiate a tool that states have at their disposal to help them resolve disputes? Does the claim by one state of a legal obligation to negotiate bring other states to the negotiating table? Or does it have the opposite effect?

This is a panel on agricultural trade; but it is not just a trade law panel. As has been clearly recognized in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are “integrated and indivisible.” Lawyers, too, are called upon to look at these complex issues through an integrated lens. Accordingly, although this panel will examine SDG #2 through the lens of trade, we will attempt to do so using an integrated and holistic perspective. After providing the contextual background, the panel will consider first, the role of export subsidies and the importance of their elimination and secondly, the broader implications of trade for food security and the actualization of SDG #2.

My name is Adrien Wing. I am Associate Dean of International and Comparative Law Programs at the University of Iowa College of Law where I have been teaching for thirty-two years. I am also pleased to be with you today because I have been a member of ASIL for thirty-seven years. When I joined, we did not have any topics like today's subject. We certainly did not have the demographic diversity that is represented in this room. We have come a long way in some respects, and so at least for programming, it is wonderful that we have this topic “Diverse Perspectives on the Impact of Colonialism on International Law.” Three of the speakers will emphasize Africa. One person will focus on Latin America. The MILIG Interest Group, the minority interest group, is sponsoring this session. We are fortunate to have the co-chairs of the Interest Group here: Rafael Porrata-Doria and Christina Beharry.

The impact of the colonial legacy and the decolonization process on the rule of law in sub-Saharan Africa encompasses virtually every component of the rule of law—governance, accountability, transparency, corruption, human rights, gender rights, access to justice, and the assurance of clear, publicized, stable, and just laws. These remarks are intended to provide an overview of some of the consequences of that legacy on the slow and delicate march toward a future where states and their leaders across the region embrace and abide by the rule of law.

Disruptive and other technologies have spread throughout Africa in recent years. Many see the digital economy as a potential new path that might enable leapfrogging that narrows economic and technological gaps between Africa and the rest of the world. Today, more than half a century after the end of colonialism, far too many remain poor in Africa. High rates of economic growth in the early years of the new millennium have decreased, while the population in many African countries is set to double between now and 2050. Unemployment and underemployment are pervasive in many African countries today.

FREEDOM … AFRICA FREE OF DECOLONIZATION … that was the dream of our founding fathers from Nyerere, Nasser, Nkrumah, Haile Selassie, to Lumumba, and many others. The call for freedom laid the basis for the African unity, so it came as no surprise that we, at the African Union, had the support of an entire continent, with its fifty-five member states, to defend the Mauritian Cause to free Chagos.

Contemporary Latin American approaches to international law, development, and regional integration were forged in the shadow of two imperial systems. The Spanish colonial system produced a cultural and structural narrative of vertically arranged and centrally planned organization. The American commercial system embedded a strong ideology of markets and privatization of control bound together by regulatory effects of markets and organized according to relative market power. In their contemporary and embedded forms, Latin American states oscillate between Western liberalism, indigeneity, and variations of Caribbean Marxism. They swing between rigid hierarchies of centrally planned control and technocratic managerialism of markets.

I am pleased and honored to be chairing this panel this morning. Regrettably, Fatsah Ouguergouz of the African Court of Human and Peoples' Rights had a death in the family and had to travel to Algeria and could not be with us today.

Following the International Law Commission Report on Fragmentation in International Law (IL), scholars have started to question whether such fragmentation could also have affected its subbranches, and, especially, international human rights law (IHRL). Due to the proliferation of both IHRL norms and institutions, especially at the regional level, this appeared to be a real possibility.

I will try to cover three different examples on issues in which the Inter-American and the European Courts have had different approaches, some substantive, some methodological, regarding the following issues:

1. 1. A substantive and radical difference in the approach of the right to appeal a criminal conviction;

2. 2. A substantive but slight difference in the approach of cases of involuntary or forced sterilization;

3. 3. An example of evolution from divergence to convergence in the subject of access to information; and

4. 4. A radical difference in the approach with respect to reparations.

In 1945, world leaders gathered in San Francisco to sign the United Nations Charter, which laid the blueprint for today's international system. The institutional architecture that was built around the United Nations, including its specialized agencies (such as the World Bank and World Health Organization) and funds and programs (such as the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)), survived the Cold War and seemed to have hit its stride in the immediate post-Cold War era. Yet the global distribution of power has changed, states are no longer the sole actors in international affairs, and the very idea of global governance is being called into question. Not surprisingly, there is much questioning of whether the institutional architecture that was built almost seventy-five years ago is still fit for purpose. Policymakers are rightly focused on reform of that architecture. Rather than tinkering at the margins, this panel was conceived with a more radical agenda. If the UN did not exist today, would we create it? If so, what would it look like?

Imagining an alternative institutional and normative architecture for global governance must proceed on the bases of an identification and understanding of the principal challenges facing the international system. In my view, the gravest challenge facing the international system, and perhaps the greatest political drama of the twenty-first century, is the ongoing shift in the global balance of power. As we move from a U.S.-led unipolar system to a world in which non-Western powers, particularly China, exercise greater influence in international affairs, the foremost priority for global governance is to ensure that this transition proceeds peacefully and to minimize the potential for Great Power conflict, especially between the United States and China.

In our increasingly globalized world, civilians feel most acutely the impact of conflicts and failures of interstate regulation. Modern conflict has been characterized by states and nonstate actors targeting civilians. One need only look to the offenses committed in Syria and South Sudan to understand the immense toll those conflicts have taken on civilian lives. In addition, failures in interstate regulation, particularly around business practices and climate change, disproportionately affect the world's most poor and vulnerable, as political and economic interests take precedence over the rights of civilians.

I am honored to be here, in San Francisco, representing a small developing country.

Right from the conception of my state, Small Developing Country X, following decolonization in the 1960s, we have engaged with this whole global project on the premise that there is an ever-increasing economic pie. We have acted on the assumption of the nation-state leading a process of expanding economic and social well-being of its citizens through international cooperation and solidarity. But as we all know, this assumption is under threat today. World economic expansion is under threat. The real wealth of the world, not just the economic wealth, may be shrinking. And, the well-being of our vulnerable populations is becoming further impaired.