In the 1986 Nicaragua case, the International Court of Justice famously took the view that two additional criteria exist in customary international law for the exercise of collective self-defence, alongside the criteria that it shares with individual self-defence. These purported additional criteria have been commonly repeated in scholarship since. First, it is said that the state that has been attacked must ‘declare’ that it has been so attacked. Second, it must ‘request’ aid in its defence. This chapter sets out the manner in which the Court identified these requirements and whether it considered them to be legally determinative or merely evidentiary. It then goes on to examine state practice/opinio juris, to test whether the requirements indeed can be identified as rules of customary international law. It is argued that the first of those asserted requirements and declaration, in fact, has no legal basis. In contrast, it is argued that the issuance of a request is, as the Court indicated, a binding requirement for the exercise of collective self-defence.

The word ‘rescission’ is ambiguous, and its various meanings must be carefully distinguished. Here, we will be discussing rescission in the sense of the process for setting aside a voidable contract and restoring the parties to their pre-contractual position. This is distinct from rescission (sometimes known as ‘repudiation’) for breach of contract, where the innocent party to a breach of contract exercises her right to terminate the contract and sue for damages or restitution of benefits conferred under the contract. The principal difference between rescission of a voidable contract and rescission for breach of a valid contract is that the former operates retrospectively, restoring both parties to their pre-contractual position, whereas rescission for breach operates prospectively, entitling both parties to enforce their accrued rights under the contract but removing any obligation to carry out the terms of the contract in the future.

The Introduction situates the book within the theoretical parameters of Cultural Memory Studies, Print Culture Studies and British Studies. It provides a short history of Memory Studies, focusing on Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) as well as Aleida Assmann’s, Astrid Erll’s and Ann Rigney’s focus on media and memory. It surveys the complex media ecology of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, arguing that the role that printed texts played in articulating sites of memory changed between 1688 and 1745 as the meaning of print itself changed in relation to oral and manuscript cultures. It compares the media environments of the beginning and end of this period by focusing on the creation and circulation of two documents – the Declaration of William of Orange (1688) and the Particulars of the Victory regarding the Battle of Culloden (1746). The Introduction concludes by suggesting that Michael Rothberg’s concept of noeuds de mémoire (knots of memory) provides a useful model for examining printed works of British national memory in the mid-eighteenth century.

Chapter 1 begins by comparing Gilbert Burnet’s focus on the song “Liliburlero” as the media event of the 1688 Revolution with what contemporary scholars have written about the importance of printed works at the time. It asserts the importance of adopting a multi-media perspective on the 1688 Revolution. It analyzes James II/VII’s shifting use of media in the context of challenges to his throne by the Duke of Monmouth and the Earl of Argyll in 1685 and William of Orange in 1688. It assesses William’s Declaration outlining “the Reasons Inducing him, to Appear in Armes in the Kingdome of England” and suggests that the document gained its authority as a printed text by being represented in oral and manuscript forms. It concludes by suggesting that the initial mediation of the 1688 Revolution impacted its later re-inscription as a site of “Glorious” cultural memory when William’s Declaration was reprinted in early eighteenth-century histories of recent events such as those by Edmund Bohun and Abel Boyer.