In the vast field of international relationships, one of the intricate problems is that which has centered around the question of nationality. No uniform rules have been laid down either by conventional or by customary international law for the determination of nationality. Unfortunately the whole matter is regulated by municipal law, and in consequence of the diversity of regulations many conflicts have resulted. There are additional complications encountered in that phase of the problem which deals with the relation of state succession and nationality. When a state acquires new territory by gift, cession, conquest, or by whatever means, the political status of the inhabitants of the territory must be determined.

There is a general disposition to assume that four years of dreadful war have so altered men’s minds and characters and the underpinnings of organized society, that the world will be quite a different place from that which our observations and our studies have made familiar. This belief does not altogether carry conviction to my mind. The civilized world was threatened with an evil domination and combined to defend itself. This instinct and combination for defense are as old as the Greek Republics. For a generation to come the world will see less movement because of the war’s exhaustion; it will have less money to spend and must economize; it will have higher taxes and therefore higher costs of production; here and there it will experience such change of governmental forms as should insure larger self-government.

The personnel difficulties of the United Nations Secretariat, so much dramatized since 1952, have served to focus exceptional attention on the Secretary General and his employment policies, as well as on the constitutional position of the Secretariat, its staff and their relations to the General Assembly and to the Administrative Tribunal. Indeed a substantial literature examining these issues —issues arising, in part, out of the United States’ allegations of “subversive” personnel in the Secretariat—now must be added to the already imposing structure of scholarship dealing with international organizations and officials since their beginnings in the League system and into the United Nations period.

The order of the International Court of Justice, under date of July 5, 1951, in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company Case, has raised a number of interesting questions of law and procedure in respect to which there appears to be considerable controversy.

It would be difficult to find a better illustration of the dependence of politics upon law than in America’s Japanese problem. Our attitude toward the Oriental has been crystallized in legislation. And much of the popular prejudice against the Japanese arises out of a conflict of legal principles over which they as individuals have no control. This article does not propose to discuss the policy which should be followed in regard to Japanese immigration or to the treatment of Japanese residents already here. But it merely attempts to set forth the legal aspects of the problem which must be considered before it can really be solved.

The agreement between the United Kingdom and Egypt signed at Cairo on October 19, 1954, replaces the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of August 26, 1936, which is thereby terminated. The earlier treaty provided for the establishment of a complex of military installations and supporting facilities along the Suez Canal, and its garrisoning by British troops. The 1954 agreement provides for the gradual evacuation of this garrison from the Suez Canal base, as these installations generally are known, by June 18, 1956. During the twenty-month evacuation period (October 19, 1954–June 18, 1956) the Egyptian military forces will assume gradual control of the base, and custody of designated base installations.

On June 19, 2018, the United States withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council. Announcing this decision, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley characterized the Council as “a protector of human rights abusers and a cesspool of political bias.” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo observed that while “the United States has no opposition in principle to multilateral bodies working to protect human rights,” nonetheless “when organizations undermine our national interests and our allies, we will not be complicit.” The withdrawal occurred one day after the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights criticized the United States in a speech at the Human Rights Council for its “unconscionable” practice of forcibly separating undocumented families entering the United States. In August, U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton stated that in addition to withdrawing from the Council, the United States would also reduce its assessed contribution to the United Nations by the amount that would ordinarily flow to the Human Rights Council and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Since 2015 when migration across the Mediterranean was declared a “crisis” in Europe, the language of crisis and invasion has persisted, structuring conversations and political imaginations. This has led many to argue for the strict closure of borders and the deportation of migrants or “people on the move,”1 and to a deepening set of racisms within borders. But this “crisis” has also led to a less publicized, opposing struggle against borders, in the service of a more egalitarian world. I argue that in order to really understand how borders are being regulated or unregulated, we need to look not only at the international legal realm, but also at infrastructural politics.2 In this Essay, I will discuss two different terrains of infrastructural struggle over migration and borders: the first is about border walls, which are built to close off resources and partition the world into haves and have nots; the second is an infrastructure of collective living, where people-on-the-move are occupying abandoned spaces and working against borders and private property. I suggest that it is important to attend to the infrastructural dimensions of migration and border regimes, as they can produce and regularize exclusion and conceal it from the conventional field of political discussion and legal contestation. At the same time, new infrastructures can prefigure better, more equitable worlds.

The issue of conflicts of interests has for a long time only been mentioned in passing in relation to recusals of international judges or arbitrators. It now attracts increasing attention, which has two facets. The first one is of normalcy: the exponential growth of international adjudication over the last three decades has turned issues that were previously rather marginal—with few rules, mostly self-regulation, and little institutionalization—into systemic issues. The other dimension is pathological: the feeling that the issue is not properly addressed contributes to the climate of mistrust around international adjudication. More generally, the topic of conflicts of interests turns out to be constantly torn between opposite poles, such as integrity versus quality. These dialectic tensions, which challenge the concept of what makes a good judge or arbitrator, pervade the perception of conflicts of interests as well as their identification and management. Conflicts of interests are an inherently ambiguous issue and exist in a gray zone. The complexity of this phenomenon requires both fine-tuned and rigorous regulation through the use of an array of tools and reforms.