As international criminal lawyers and diplomats discuss the Draft Treaty on Crimes Against Humanity on the one hand, and the potential of adding a fifth crime, ecocide, to the Rome Statute on the other, Janet Lord, William Pons, and Michael Stein issue a well-timed and compelling call to demonstrate our understanding that people with disabilities (PWD) are a part of humanity. The authors map the many crimes and various situations in which PWD have been and continue to be specifically targeted, and persuasively argue that it is past time for the system of international criminal law to embrace prosecutions of crimes against PWD. In so doing, the authors make a series of important recommendations for international criminal law: for example, that international criminal processes must be made fully accessible to PWD. This essay offers three reflections on the authors’ call to use international criminal prosecutions, specifically at the International Criminal Court (ICC), to elevate the rights of PWD, centering around the following questions: (1) do the people of the world believe that disabled lives matter; (2) if they do not, might international criminal law help shape domestic laws and overcome ableism; and, relatedly, (3) can the ICC create the necessary change? Or put another way, how capacious can and should the category of “crimes against humanity” be since institutional credibility and longevity are concerns?

This essay takes up Karen Knop's challenge to reconstruct the oft-made distinction between private and public law by engaging private international law (PrIL) as a “lost side of international law.”1 To do so we interrogate the changing fortunes (literally) of women's private property rights in the long nineteenth century—a period characterized by the divestment and reinstatement of gendered rights in national law—focusing on the Nordics, Europe more broadly, and the Colonial world. Following Knop and other feminist legal scholars, and by engaging with questions of what Mariana Valverde calls “scale,”2 we bring women's property rights in conversation with international law. In doing so, we point to sites of engagement where the politico-economic structures of international law are lived, negotiated, reconfigured, and made real.3 We use scale to frame and inform our analysis bringing attention to how the “small” (micro) economics and politics of everyday life, women's labor, and gendered legal concerns, underpin and are an intrinsic part of the “large-scale” structures of international law. “All scales shifts,” Mariana Valverde notes, meaning that such “processes . . . br[ing] certain phenomena into focus that had previously been blurred or pushed to the background.”4 Recovering matters of women's history and everyday life, which, as Knop has argued are often “hiding in plain sight,” with a focus on women's property rights, brings to the fore the critical relationship between family/household, market, and the state, and the fundamental role international law has played in implementing a specific economic vision through the organization of gendered power relations.

Scholars have argued that Senate-approved treaties are becoming increasingly irrelevant in the United States, because their role can be fulfilled by their close but less politically costly cousin, the congressional-executive agreement. This study demonstrates that treaties are more durable than congressional-executive agreements, supporting the view that there are qualitative differences between the two instruments. Abandoning the treaty may therefore lead to unintended consequences by decreasing the tools that the executive has available to design optimal agreements.

On February 29, 2020, the United States signed an “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan” with the Taliban. The agreement provides that the United States and its allies will withdraw all forces from Afghanistan in stages over a fourteen-month period and that the Taliban will not allow actors within its controlled territory to attack the United States and its allies. The agreement contains additional provisions with respect to prisoner exchanges, sanctions relief, and future negotiations regarding a permanent ceasefire and broader political settlement that the Taliban will pursue with the government of Afghanistan. On the same day, the United States and Afghanistan issued a Joint Declaration reflecting some, though not all, of the terms of the U.S. agreement with the Taliban. Over the three months following the signing of the U.S. agreement with the Taliban, the parties have implemented some aspects of its terms. But others remain unfulfilled, despite the passage of deadlines.

International legal scholars have long been concerned with the transnational lawmaking process, including the development, interpretation, and implementation of international norms. Yet there has been insufficient attention devoted to the micro-level details by which international law operates. Anthropologists can shed unique insights to this process by uncovering power dynamics, disaggregating institutions and actors, and revealing local practices on the ground. In this essay, I will analyze global supply chain governance through an ethnographic lens in order to examine the role of corporate actors as translators of international law. I argue that an anthropological approach can illuminate how corporations shape international law in practice by uncovering technologies of governance, relations of power, and chains of translation in the transnational lawmaking process.

There is no corpus of law that is global in nature. Rather, “global” migration law is a collection of legal instruments situated at levels ascending from the subnational to the international levels. International law instruments contribute to the global governance of international migration at the international and regional levels. Two issues arise with respect to the effectiveness of these instruments: voluntary state accession and subsequent enforcement, even when states are parties to them. Domestic law regulates issues of international migration at the national and subnational levels. Enforcement is assumed to be more effective here. But this effectiveness varies according to the power of states, their levels of development and their capacities.

Claims to security are everywhere. They are used by states to justify invading other nations1 and to derogate from international law obligations.2 They are invoked by governments as reasons to exclude foreign nationals from their territory;3 surveil their citizens;4 and kill citizens and foreigners alike by remote control.5 Some experts use security claims to underscore the seriousness of global threats, like COVID-19.6 Security claims are also used by communities to defend their rights and well-being from those threatening them, including the state itself.7 Still others criticize the use of security discourse—in at least some circumstances—describing it as undermining the rule of law.8 Embedded within these claims is a view about whose security matters most—something that is also implicitly reflected in J. Benton Heath's four-part typology of security claims described in his recent article, “Making Sense of Security.”9 This essay explores the importance of whose security matters to Heath's framework. It does so by examining one political movement currently challenging the U.S. national security state. This movement is led by members of groups targeted and disadvantaged by U.S. national security policies—namely, Muslim, African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian communities. In that movement's recently released policy agenda, Abolishing the War on Terror & Building Communities of Care: A Grassroots Policy Agenda for the Biden-Harris Administration and 117th Congress (Abolishing the War on Terror), 10 its leaders call for abolishing the national security state and the War on Terror that it birthed.11

International organizations (IOs) provide space for the exchange of ideas. Particularly since the Cold War ended, many expected that this exchange would inevitably lead to more democratization and liberalization around the globe. Instead, some of the largest non-democratic actors on the global stage have functioned within these organizations for decades without liberalizing, while others joined as full or newly transitioned democracies just to see those qualities slowly erode. As Tom Ginsburg's recent article concludes, today's autocrats might instead use international law—including the legal apparatus of IOs—to further their own authoritarian agendas. This essay engages with Ginsburg's thoughtful piece by suggesting that IOs both enable and resist the emergence of “Authoritarian International Law” (AIL). Creating or joining IOs is a costly but attractive strategy for revisionist states since members equally influence IO evolution. Fortunately for democracy's advocates, IOs are usually status quo entities, and liberalism is deeply embedded in many existing today. Cross-temporal observations of changes in IO membership, members’ regime types, and IO features beyond the founding documents are needed to fully understand how organizations simultaneously perform these paradoxical functions.

After Russia targeted the 2016 presidential election, U.S. government authorities repeatedly warned about the prospects of foreign interference in and influence on the 2020 election. Throughout the fall of 2020, government officials and private companies took a number of actions to address threats to the election, including issuing public warnings, imposing sanctions, and taking down foreign government-linked accounts. In a declassified report released in March 2021, the intelligence community concluded that although Russia and Iran carried out influence operations to affect the election, there are “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.” In December 2020, however, U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye disclosed that it suffered a breach by a nation-state sponsored actor, and numerous U.S. government agencies soon revealed that they too had been breached in intrusions widely attributed to Russia.

The limited use of dispute settlement mechanisms under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement explains the recent upsurge in requests for advisory opinions on issues specific to climate change to international courts, namely the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. However, it is still unclear how these courts will answer the questions posed, and in particular whether they will coordinate or compete with each other. As the requesting states and bodies are well aware of this uncertainty, requesting an advisory opinion from three courts simultaneously was an ingenious (not ingenuous) strategy to clarify states’ obligations to mitigate or adapt to climate change through the international judiciary. This essay assesses how the parallel jurisdiction of courts in these cases presents an opportunity to enhance states’ obligations concerning climate change through requesting concurrent views on the same rules and obligations. It considers the potential for contradictory views between courts on the same obligations. Finally, the essay analyzes the extent to which these courts may compete or cooperate in their approach to the resolution of these issues.

On April 4, 2019, the United States revoked the visa of Fatou Bensouda, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). This action occurred less than a month after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that, except to the extent otherwise required by the UN Headquarters Agreement, the United States would impose visa restrictions on “those individuals directly responsible for any ICC investigation of U.S. personnel.” In her preliminary investigation into the situation in Afghanistan, Bensouda had specifically listed war crimes by U.S. military and intelligence agencies as one of several categories of crimes that her office found reason to believe had occurred. Approximately one week after Bensouda's visa revocation, the ICC's Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC) denied her request to move forward with an investigation of the situation in Afghanistan.