This editorial aims to foster debate on the possible roles of implicit social cognition in international law. The editorial is in part inspired by a book entitled Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, written by Banaji and Greenwald, researchers of social psychology. According to them, a large set of implicit biases reside in our minds, which may influence our behaviour towards ourselves and others. It is safe to argue that international judges, arbitrators, diplomats, domestic officials who apply international law, and international legal scholars are not immune from implicit bias. Within international legal scholarship, some relevant experiments have already been conducted in unveiling decision makers’ intuitive and automatic thinking. While implicit bias is hard to identify and remedy, this editorial encourages international legal practitioners and scholars to diversify their own experiences and engage in the imagination of counter-stereotypes.

On 6 September 2017, Professor Emeritus Frits Kalshoven passed away at the age of 93. I learned about his passing the day afterwards, and although in some ways it should not have come as a complete surprise given his age, it had a very deep emotional impact on me. This was not only from the perspective of an international humanitarian lawyer, since in this moment we lost one of the most respected scholars of the field, someone whose expertise as an academic as well as whose impact as a practitioner can only be described in the highest praise. The great Jean Pictet wrote in his foreword to the Liber Amicorum for Frits Kalshoven that he stands in the long tradition of Dutch legal scholars ‘who, since Grotius, have greatly added to the fame of their country throughout the world’. But an even more important reason for this great feeling of loss was that we had to say good-bye not only to a great scholar, but also to a wonderful human being, a role model, a true humanitarian, a man who despite his numerous achievements remained humble and kind until the end, someone who inspired generations of colleagues, experienced lawyers and young students, in their way to apply, research and disseminate International Humanitarian Law.

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.

Why all this interest in the history of international law today? A partial explanation can surely be found from the end of the 20-year period of liberal-internationalist ascendancy (1989–2008) and the perplexity that has followed its demise. Mark Zuckerberg put it succinctly in a manifesto on Building Global Community in Facebook in February 2017. When his company started, he noted, it was to ‘bring . . . us closer together and build . . . a global community’. ‘[T]his idea’, he suggested, ‘was not controversial’. But suddenly there has emerged a ‘movement for withdrawing from global connection’. Nor have international law scholars rested silent. Eric Posner has termed the present moment – with glee – as the ‘backlash’ against ‘liberal cosmopolitanism’. More soberly, perhaps, Philip Alston has noted the rise of ‘challenges [to] the human rights movement’ that are ‘fundamentally different from much of what has gone before’ while James Crawford has warned against ‘large-scale retreat into nativism and unilateralism’. What used to be a clear and broadly shared objective – building of a global community – is no longer so clearly visible. So, the temptation might be to look backwards instead and ask, ‘how did we get here?’.

This article is part of the ongoing efforts to write a critical history of international arbitration in commercial and investment matters. It examines the ways in which the Spanish crown and its concessionaries set up a mechanism to settle legal disputes pertaining to the transatlantic slave trade. The transformation of asientos de negros from limited royal contracts to large-scale monopolies awarded to foreign chartered companies during the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was accompanied by the creation of an international commercial arbitration system. Why was this system set up, how did it work, and what was its faith? The overall aim of the article is to invite international lawyers to rethink the history of international arbitration and pay closer attention to the ‘private’ dimensions of formal and informal imperialism. It also attempts to bridge the historical investigation and contemporary commentary. In the conclusion, I argue that this study allows us, in a mirroring effect, to question the idea that today's dispute settlement mechanism was conceived as a means to ‘depoliticize’ international investment law. What the introduction of arbitration achieves is to place some fundamental questions out of sight. Today, as in the past, arbitrators work from within the system; their work rests on a series of unspoken – and yet highly political – premises about the organization of economic life and the distribution of values.

This article explores the structure of the legal protection of refugees in Europe today. To this end, it will contrast historical arrangements providing protection to refugees, namely church asylum in the late Middle Ages and refuge for religious minorities, with the current European refugee regime, that is the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), in particular the Dublin system. The central claim of this article is that a basic condition for the legal protection of refugees is the existence of multiple jurisdictions, which in turn caters for competition for jurisdiction. The official logic of the CEAS, however, endorses harmonization, unity and the hierarchy of jurisdictions rather than a competition between jurisdictions. This partially explains the difficulties under the CEAS in organizing the protection of refugees through law. In policy terms, this article supports calls for reconsidering the Dublin Regulation, since through the ‘single jurisdiction’ approach Dublin hampers the legal protection of refugees.

A wave of interdisciplinary scholarship in the last two decades has managed to place empires at the center of the history of international law. This article surveys key insights resulting from this move and assesses remaining challenges. In explaining how the study of law in particular imperial locations can illuminate global legal transformations, the article identifies cross-cutting themes of articles in this special volume.

This article provides a framework for systematically analyzing the practice, function, and consequences of human rights references in investment arbitration. In recent years, investment arbitration witnessed an enormous increase of references to external sources. References to human rights are especially interesting as they defy the alleged inherent conflict of investment and human rights, as well as the presumed fragmentation of international law. By applying both quantitative and qualitative approaches, I analyze how and why human rights references are employed in investor-state arbitration and, ultimately, whether they are able to remedy the legitimacy crisis of investment arbitration.

The empirical analysis is based on 46 awards, which include explicit references to human rights instruments. In the first part, this article examines which human rights instruments are referenced in investment arbitration and how the disputing parties as well as the tribunal engage in human rights referencing. In the second step, the article identifies two strategic functions of referencing human rights: guidance in the determination of substantive provisions and argumentative practice. This article further argues that, from a comparative law perspective, references may help to overcome the indetermination of investment treaties, provide for the balancing of investment and non-investment concerns, and ensure cross-regime consistency. In the third step, this article elaborates on whether those presumed benefits of referencing human rights can be confirmed on the basis of empirical results. It remains to be seen whether the ‘pick and choose’ approach of human rights references is capable of uncovering this legitimating potential.

An increasing number of international law scholars over the last few years have started to turn their attention to the study of political economy. To what extent can this trend be considered an indication of an underlying ‘disciplinary turn’? How should one understand the phenomenon of disciplinary turns? The answer we propose to this question in this article proceeds from the assumption that not all disciplinary shifts follow the same logic. Unlike the linguistic or the historical turn, the turn to political economy in contemporary international law does not represent an exercise in inter-disciplinary exploration. The concept of political economy used in international law has very little to do with the actual discipline of political economy. It is much more diffuse and unfocused in theoretical terms. What gives it its essential sense of identity is not any form of distinct methodological orientation, but rather its basic usefulness as a potential marker of critical self-distancing vis-à-vis the mainstream international law tradition and its ideological function as a mediating device for the expression of a deep-seated concern about the structural injustices of modern capitalism.

In the last two decades, the concept of plurinationalism has appeared in discussions about nationalism, statehood and multilevel governance, being formulated as a new state model that accommodates cultural diversity within the liberal state with the aim of solving nationalistic conflicts in countries marked by profound ethnic grievances, mainly in Europe. However, these discussions have paid less attention to the meaning of plurinationalism in ex-colonial contexts, particularly in recent experiences of state transformation in Bolivia and Ecuador, where the role of indigenous peoples in the plurinational project has been crucial. To fill this gap, this article explores the legal and political foundations, challenges and local and international dynamics in the building of the plurinational model in both countries. Under a critical engagement with Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), this article argues that plurinationality from indigenous perspectives departs from multicultural liberal models associated with current European plurinational views, and addresses two challenges: a global political economy of resource extraction, and a racialized state structure working as a barrier to actual plurinational implementation. These limitations explain an intrinsic tension in the Bolivian and Ecuadorian experience: on the one hand, plurinational governments try to unify the people around the ‘national interest’ of developing extractive industries; and on the other hand, they attempt to recognize ethno-political differences that often challenge the transnational exploitation of local resources.

This article explores the conditions under which it is possible to bring claims based on non-international investment agreement (IIA) norms of international law in investment treaty arbitration. For that purpose, it analyzes in the first instance broad dispute settlement clauses incorporated in IIAs that make reference to the settlement of ‘any investment dispute’. Such clauses grant jurisdiction to investment treaty tribunals to hear non-IIA claims. However, at least two additional conditions need to be satisfied for the investor to bring a self-standing claim based on a non-IIA norm of international law. First, the non-IIA instrument (a contract or another international treaty) may include a dispute settlement clause envisaging exclusive jurisdiction in favour of another forum. Second, the investor's standing to bring a claim based on a non-IIA norm of international law depends on whether this norm attributes any legal entitlement in the benefit of the investor.

Hunger and food insecurity are viewed as global problems, requiring global responses. Even though there is no distinct field of ‘international food law’, many areas of international law in some way deal with issues related to global hunger and food insecurity. Hunger and food insecurity are immensely complex problems that cannot possibly be understood and addressed through an inherently limited disciplinary perspective. This article argues that food regime theory – an analytical tool developed and used mostly in the field of sociology – can provide a useful means through which to better lay bare the role of international law in constituting global food relations. If international lawyers are serious about contributing to reducing global hunger and realizing food security, it is imperative to situate international law and its specialized fields within the broader political economy of food.

In this article, I examine the attempt to apply proportionality balancing (PB) to the co-ordination of the relations between governance regimes, which I call ‘inter-scalar PB’, from the perspective of competing institutional arrangements of global governance. Observing inter-scalar PB becoming a legal technique of management, I argue that it be reconceived as a narrative framework within which the fundamental values and principles of individual governance regimes can be politically contested without antagonism. I first discuss the role PB has played in the interaction between the law of state immunity and international investment law and then take a closer look at the features of inter-scalar PB as intimated in those instances: simplism, normativism, institutionalism and legalism. I suggest that the complex fundamental issues concerning the relationship between governance regimes are left out in the proportionality analysis-mediated resolution of regime-induced conflicts, disclosing the depoliticization tendency in inter-scalar PB. Juxtaposing it with the indicator project in international human rights advocacy, I conclude that both are jurispathic and reflect the rationalist propensity in the legal administration of global governance. PB, reconceived as a language in which values, conflicts, and interests of each governance regime can be argued and narrated as part of the politics of reconstructing global governance, will help to recast global governance in more jurisgenerative terms.

The occupation of Iraq in 2003 involved a wide-ranging set of interventions in the domestic legal, political and economic structures of the state, interventions that provoked a debate about whether the law of occupation should recognize a category of ‘transformative’ occupation.

While the occupation itself has often been decried as an imperial venture, its administration involved a diffusion of power among international institutions as well as ratification by the Security Council through Resolution 1483. This article pursues the intuition that the transformation of norms and practices elsewhere in the international order underwrote the idea that it was the law of occupation that was problematic, at the same time facilitating the transmutation and preservation of practices that might be identified as imperial. Two developments are key: The first is the pervasive normalization of intervention in the domestic policy and legal orders of states; the second is the dissemination of norms about domestic regulation within the international order, those that touch on economic governance in particular. The orders of the occupying were infused in both form and substance with ideas of ‘normal governance’ traceable to myriad projects, policies and practices of other international institutions: development agencies, financial institutions, trade organizations. Iraq then might be a revealing case with which to consider the character and locations of contemporary imperialism, as well as the role of international law and international institutions in its unfolding.

The late critical geographer Brian Harley forewarned that modern cartography had come to control and even ‘imprison’ spatial understandings of the earth. Where does this leave international lawyers when they encounter a quintessential ‘World Map’? Quite bluntly: tied to an inscriptive institution that has embodied the modern legibility and visualization of earth space. When speaking about the global arrangements of economic and political power constituted through law, what emerges, therefore, is the need for an expanded spatial literacy among international lawyers that critically engages the graphic legacy and influence of the geometric map. To enhance that literacy, I reach beyond the doctrinal field to engage a powerful spatial critique that has thus far encompassed scholarship across geography, international relations (IR) and sociology. A critique that took impetus over 20 years ago with John Agnew's assertion that modern social science had become captured by a ‘territorial trap’. The article attempts to enrich that critique with Mark Salter's insight on material power, Marshall McLuhan's emphasis on the medium of communication, and Bruno Latour's critique of cartographic naturalism. Specifically, I introduce the concept of cartogenesis as a way of underlining the deeper legacy and consequence of modern cartography, and specifically how the map medium should be grasped as a historical actant that has inscribed a particular ‘ground map’ of international authority. Lastly, the article looks at how geometric mapping now confronts new inscriptive ordering in the forms of transnational lists and contracts, which assert a growing scale of authority over earth space to an extent not seen since the Mercator Projection was recognized as an overriding geographic model.

With the rise of a new generation of investment policies, upgrading existing bilateral investment treaties (BITs) is of significant interest to states. China has upgraded 28 per cent of its investment treaties in various ways. Two investment arbitration tribunals and one highest court at the seat of arbitration have recently rendered decisions favouring the application of old Chinese BITs over the upgraded ones. China's experience with upgrading BITs may provide general policy discourse and direction for other countries planning to upgrade their BITs. Using China's experience, this article categorizes different methods of upgrading BITs into the Coexistence Model (parties to an old BIT join existing or new free trade agreements or a regional investment agreement), the Replacement Model (replace an old BIT with a new one), the Amendment Model (amend an old BIT by a protocol) and the Joint Interpretation Model (make a diplomatic announcement to interpret a BIT). This article also discusses the benefits and challenges of each model and concludes with directions for future BIT upgrading.

What would happen to our understanding of international law and its relationship with violence if we collapsed the distinction between our supposedly post-colonial ‘present’ and its colonial ‘past’; between the sovereign spaces of the twenty-first century global order, and the integrated, hierarchical space of fascist imperialism? I respond to this question through an investigation into the physical contours of a precise ‘imperial location’: 30°31′00″N, 18°34′00″E. These co-ordinates refer to a point on the sea-edge of the Sirtica that is occupied today by the Ra's Lanuf oil refinery, one of Libya's three most important such facilities. In the late 1930s, however, during Libya's period of fascist colonial rule, this was the point at which a state-of-the-art motorway, the Via litoranea libica, was crossed by a giant triumphal arch, the Arco dei Fileni. Through a chronotopic reading of the temporal, spatial and interpellative aspects of this point, its architecture and its history, I suggest that fascist lawyers, officials and intellectuals accepted a horrifying truth about the relationship between international law and violence – a relationship that twenty-first century doctrinal international law is loath to confront, concerning the inherently expansionist logic of the sovereign state, and the inevitably hierarchical ordering of the ‘international community’ which stems from it.