In this article, I reconceptualise the League of Nations as an Imperial Assemblage that embeds and is embedded by coloniality. Relying on the return to the League’s historisisation by Third World Approaches to International Law, I argue that we can understand the League as a governance body that works across scales of international, transnational and local actors, processes and structures to reiterate coloniality within the mandated territories. I utilise Deleuzian notions of assemblage alongside the concept of ‘coloniality’ within the literature of decolonial theory within International Relations and Sociology to show how the work of the League’s various actors, processes and structures across different scales made, actualised and evolved the laws on Forced Labour and Slavery from 1925 to 1932 in the inter-war era with a particular focus on Mandate Territories B and C.

In recent years, scholars of international legal history have demonstrated much newfound interest in C.H. Alexandrowicz, a Polish jurist renowned for his anti-Eurocentric revisionist account of Asian and African agency within the meta-narrative of international law. Building on efforts to link his Polish origins with his studies of the Afro-Asian world, especially on matters of imperialism and state personality, my purpose in this Article is to explore these connections through a materially grounded historical sociology of international legal thought. Centering the issue of whether sovereignty is divisible, I situate the historic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—extinguished by a series of Partitions in 1772, 1793, and 1795—as a unique divided sovereignty-based polity that provided a basis for Alexandrowicz’s study of the juridical status of non-European sovereigns. This analogy united his overarching critique of nineteenth-century international legal positivism as an unjustifiable denial of both Polish and Afro-Asian sovereignty. In deciphering the materiality of Alexandrowicz’s imagination against this presumption, I build a narrative of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the evolution of its distinct approach to sovereign divisibility. Through analysis of the interplay between internal and external factors, I account for the Commonwealth’s medieval origins, its development in opposition to the consolidating indivisible sovereignty of its absolutist neighbors, its attempts to maintain independence in the face of Partition, and the continued assertions of its variegated legacies following its destruction. This, I argue, provides a novel means of assessing Alexandrowicz’s theory, and the materiality of international law more generally.

While many international lawyers are familiar with Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546), very few have even heard of Paulus Vladimiri (1370–1435) – a Polish priest and jurist who made striking similar arguments to Vitoria on legal universality and the rights of non-Christians a full century before Vitoria. This divergence of consciousness, I argue, provides a unique opportunity to explore questions of canon, reception, and the role of ‘founding fathers’ within international legal thought. Centring Vladimiri as an ‘Eastern European’ figure, I argue that his non-reception is largely the result of how Eastern Europe implicitly functions as a distinctly liminal space within international legal thought that makes any possible ‘founding father’ from this region immensely difficult to imagine. I examine this dynamic through the differing postwar efforts of the Polish jurists Kazimierz Grzybowski and C. H. Alexandrowicz to include Vladimiri within the international legal canon. In examining the background structures of twentieth-century international law, I conclude that, in a manner directly connected to the liminality of Eastern Europe, neither Soviet nor Third World nor Western imaginations could easily receive Vladimiri within their fundamentally political narratives of normative order that shaped their international legal approaches. However, despite this historic non-reception, I argue that Vladimiri, and the question of Eastern Europe more generally, holds great promise in our current global moment. Particularly, engaging Eastern Europe’s liminal character offers a more sociologically grounded alternative to the reductionist Schmittian view of international law as a product of inescapable conflict in a world of exclusionary ‘greater spaces’.

As part of the Cambridge Law Journal's centenary celebrations, this article reads two essays from the journal's 50th anniversary issue. The essays, by Cambridge professors Robert Jennings and Derek Bowett offer resources for the history of international law and its historiography. They shine a light on key debates on the law of the sea at a crucial moment of its development. A close reading of these essays also reveals starting points for new scrutiny of an “English” tradition of international law, including the place of the academy within the tradition, its blueprints for the future of international law and international legal order, and its relation to empire and capitalism.

Through a literary-theatrical reading of international legality, this Article challenges the “settled script” produced by international legal scholars to frame and assess the legality of two historical events—the Grenada Revolution (1979–1983) and the U.S. Invasion of Grenada (1983). It does so by reading the Cold War as a sensibility performed by these scholars, one that recognized the operation of rival international legal orders and one that crafted a different script—Cold War Customary Law (“CWCL”)—to decide questions of international legality in a Cold War context. In addition to offering a new way to read the Cold War and international legality, this Article argues first that it is important to uncover this parallel and competing script of international legality operating at the time, and not dismiss it as unrelated political or ideological discourse, as it clearly influenced the interpretive logic and reasoning practices international lawyers deployed to frame what constituted legality in international law. Second, it argues that this Cold War sensibility in international legal scholarship on intervention and revolution predated the events in Grenada, and that if a different theatrical mise en scène is adopted—one which eschews “the short durée” or “evental history” of the settled script—this sensibility can be understood as being both continuous and discontinuous with rival imperial forms of international law operating in the Caribbean across time and place, where its discontinuities open up space to recover revolutionary Caribbean subjects of international law and a sensibility of shame in the present.

Scholars of the history of international law have recently begun to wonder whether their work is predominantly about law or history. The questions we ask – about materials, contexts and movements – all raise intractable problems of historiography. Yet, few scholars have turned to historical theory to think through how we might go about addressing them.

This article works towards remedying that gap by exploring why and how we might engage with historiography more deeply.

Section 2 shows how the last three decades of the ‘turn to history’ can be usefully read as a move from ambivalence to anxiety. The major works of the 2000s thoroughly removed the pre-1990s ambivalence to history, offering brief considerations about method. Recent efforts building on those works have led to the present era of anxiety about both history and method, raising questions around materials, contexts and movements. But far from a negative state, this moment of anxiety is both appropriate and potentially creative: it prompts us to rethink our mode of engaging with historiography.

Section 3 explores how this engagement might proceed. It reconstructs the principles and debates within conceptual history around the anxieties of materials, contexts and movements. It then explores how these might be adapted to histories of international law, both generally and within one concrete project: a conceptual history of recognition in the writings of British jurists.

Section 4 concludes by considering the advances achieved by this kind of engagement, and reflects on new directions for international law and its histories.

Martti Koskenniemi's From Apology to Utopia is (rightly) considered a classic in international legal theory. The study tracks the oscillation of international legal argument over hundreds of years to reconcile seeming incongruencies: legal reasoning does not provide determinacy, but it brings weighted direction to political conflict; legal categories are amorphous, yet also an autonomous field of study. Though not commonly engaged, the methodological and theoretical posture of the book is significantly informed by a theory of history. This article focuses on this historical element within the text as a means to analyze some of its central claims and situate it within a broader sociology of knowledge production particular to late twentieth century legal academia.

This contribution to the Symposium celebrating the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of Martti Koskenniemi's From Apology to Utopia explores the relevance of the book for contemporary theorists of the international world. In doing so, the article puts Koskenniemi's classic in a contest with John Yoo's recent book, Point of Attack. The purpose in doing so is three-fold. First, it is to illustrate the contemporary use of Koskenniemi's structuralist method. Second, it is to show how the use of the method, with its attendant reliance on modes of legal thought, might give pause to international thinkers seeking to reinvigorate particular structures of argument from the nineteenth century. Third, the two books are put into conversation in order to highlight what I believe to be the very productive results of the structuralist method that have, for the most part, been dormant for a generation.