Even before its hundredth year anniversary on 16 May 2016, the Sykes-Picot agreement had become a widely cited historical analogy both in the region itself and in Europe and the United States. In the Middle East, it is frequently deployed as an infamous example of European imperial betrayal and Western attempts more generally to keep the region divided, in conflict, and easy to dominate. In Europe and the United States, however, its role as a historical analogy is more complex—a shorthand for understanding the Middle East as irrevocably divided into mutually hostile sects and clans, destined to be mired in conflict until another external intervention imposes a new, more authentic, set of political units on the region to replace the postcolonial states left in the wake of WWI. What is notable about both these uses of the Sykes-Picot agreement is that they fundamentally misread, and thus overstate, its historical significance. The agreement reached by the British diplomat Mark Sykes and his French counterpart, François Georges-Picot, in May 1916, quickly became irrelevant as the realities on the ground in the Middle East, U.S. intervention into the war, a resurgent Turkey and the comparative weakness of the French and British states transformed international relations at the end of the First World War. Against this historical background, explaining the contemporary power of the narrative surrounding the use of the Sykes-Picot agreement becomes more intellectually interesting than its minor role in the history of European imperial interventions in the Middle East.

Jacqueline Peel and Jolene Lin's informative assessment of climate litigation in the Global South is a vital and timely contribution to the growing literature on the issue. It relies on a definition of climate litigation that allows the authors to draw on a much larger set of cases from the Global South by including cases in which climate concerns are “at the periphery.” This essay examines climate litigation in India. Although the term “global warming” started appearing in Indian environmental judgments in the 1990s, climate litigation in India is of relatively recent provenance, and with a few exceptions, climate concerns are peripheral to other, more mainstream environmental issues. Peel and Lin analyze five Indian cases as part of their Global South docket; I expand this set by including fourteen more cases that I believe fit their article's chosen definitional ambit. I classify these cases into four categories based on the use of climate language—reference to climate change, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, or the international negotiations—in the courts’ judgment. Drawing from case law analysis and Indian environmental litigation, I make observations about what we can interpret from the current set of climate cases, and I predict that while conditions are favorable for climate litigation in India to grow, in the near future climate claims are likely to remain peripheral issues.

This essay compares the national space legislation of China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea (ROK), outlining the reasons behind the legislation and then explaining what it authorizes, the jurisdiction it asserts, and the conditions it imposes on nongovernmental space activities. The essay also compares the compensation available to victims in case of damages and governmental indemnification payments to protect victims and the space launch industry in Japan and the ROK. Differences in industry policies and dates of enactment help to account for variations among these states. However, the comparative analysis suggests that the domestic legal conditions across Asia's three spacefaring nations are similar to those found worldwide.

When states withdraw from bilateral investment treaties or denounce multilateral treaties related to foreign investment, a range of intersecting questions arise in domestic and international law. Recent developments have demonstrated potential incongruities between domestic and international approaches to investment protection, including as regards the effectiveness of withdrawal and the implications for existing investments. This essay reflects on international and domestic disputes involving the withdrawal of the Russian Federation from participation in the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) to highlight these interactions. These issues have become particularly pertinent today because more than 1,500 international investment agreements (IIAs) are nearing expiry of their initial term, providing an opportunity for termination. Moreover, some states have begun to terminate or denounce investment treaties, while many more are engaging in a process of renegotiation and reform. The Russian case study also highlights the potentially far-reaching effects of a state simply signing a treaty, even many years after the state has expressed its decision to withdraw from it, and notwithstanding tensions with the domestic legal framework.

The United States’ enactment of the Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act of 2015 marked a significant turn in the evolutionary course of space lawmaking, although not for the reasons commonly cited. The Act is noteworthy not for its substance, but as a symptom of emerging structural change in how space law is made, and by whom. Using space resources as a case study, this essay charts this evolutionary shift in space lawmaking and assesses its implications for the international regime on which a growing and increasingly diverse range of space operators depend.

In her interesting study on “Achieving Sex Representative International Court Benches,” Nienke Grossman observes that international judgeships are often based on personal networks and social currency, or used to reward political loyalty or to advance political agendas, rather than to select the most qualified candidates. She illustrates how nomination procedures for international benches generally lack transparency, and horse-trading infects elections to the international courts. To ensure gender equity, Grossman advocates that states should take remedial steps to make nomination and selection procedures more open, transparent, and merit-based, at both the national and the international level.