Through diplomatic protection, aliens could invest abroad with the expectation that if they were injured in an unstable country, international law would provide an additional framework of protection. The US practice ensured that the content and scope of international obligations would extend beyond ad hoc diplomacy to international arbitration, where professional lawyers began to articulate general principles of state responsibility. The most important of these principles was the minimum standard of care owed to aliens. If a state failed to meet international standards, its legal responsibility was engaged. Latin American lawyers, however, were unhappy with state responsibility being applied in this way. In response to what they viewed as legal imperialism, Latin Americans expanded the doctrine to apply to the US and Latin Americans alike and to the violation of any international obligation and not just alien protection. In this way, what began as a narrow practice in Latin America, grew into a general framework of international law enforcement.

This chapter continues the exploration of the gap between legal theories on the conduct of war and enemy aliens on the one hand and the practice of states at war on the other. It focuses first of all on the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 that anticipated the mobilization of the nation-in-arms and examines, in particular, the expulsion of "Germans" from Paris and Strasbourg in the summer of 1870, the consequences of the expulsion and the lively debate among international lawyers it sparked. The chapter continues with an analysis of the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–1878, concentrating on the emergence of a humanitarian discourse in order to legitimize intervention. Then it moves east to take into consideration the treatment of enemy aliens and the accompanying discourses on civilization in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. This chapter also delves into the novelties that occurred in the field of international law and international relations with the signing of the Geneva Convention, the foundation of the Institute of International Law in Brussels, the two Conferences at The Hague in 1899 and 1907. The final part of the chapter concentrates on the Balkan conflicts of 1912–1913 and the atrocities against civilians.

International law makes a claim to universality; it is supposed to be the law that applies to the relations among all peoples. This chapter argues that international law, instead, serves as a mechanism of closure; it provides a restrictive articulation of the rules that define which actors have a capacity for international rights. The chapter offers a reading of two of the most influential figures in early international law, Grotius and Vattel, in terms of the closure thesis. It traces the principle mechanism of closure to a notion of property rights that invests the territorial state with the capacity for rights based on possession and ownership. It then details how the combination of property and natural rights as the basis for sovereignty would justify the equal treatment of some and the domination and exploitation of others. Rules of closure served to accelerate the formation of property monopolies, first in the form of colonial extraction and later in the form of market neoliberalization. The chapter considers the contemporary implications of the international-law-as-closure argument. At stake is whether universalism is understood as a project of homogenizing differences and protecting privileges, or of making space for pluralism and diversity.