This article reconceptualizes norm conflict in international law by uncovering the experiential dimension of its definition and the intentional dimension of its resolution that has been missing from traditional accounts. The article locates the basis of recognizing norm conflict in the experienced sense of incompatibility between norms in view of their contexts rather than in the predesignated constellation of norms with contrary or contradictory functions according to their texts. Concomitantly, it argues that the justification for using certain legal techniques to resolve norm conflicts lies in the intended relationship deducible only between those norms that share the same regulatory purpose rather than between norms merely applying to the same factual situation. This reconceptualization generates a new typology of norm conflicts in light of the norms’ end goals and the means they provide to achieve them: “Ends Conflict”, “Means Conflict”, and “Unexperienced Conflict”, and suggests apposite ways to tackle them.

This research explores AI-generated originality's impact on copyright regulations. It meticulously examines legal frameworks such as the Berne Convention, EU Copyright Law, and national legislation. Rigorously analyzing cases, including Infopaq International A/S v Danske Dagblades Forening and Levola Hengelo BV v Smilde Foods BV, illuminates evolving originality and human involvement in AI creativity. The study also contemplates global perspectives, drawing from esteemed organizations such as the World Intellectual Property Organization and the European Court of Justice and exploring diverse approaches adopted by individual nations. The paper emphasizes the imperative need for legislative updates to address the challenges and opportunities of AI-generated works. It highlights the pivotal role of international collaboration and public awareness in shaping copyright policies for the AI-driven creativity era. It also offers insights and recommendations for policymakers and researchers navigating this complex terrain.

The global impacts of COVID-19 have been calamitous, unleashing widespread human suffering and exacerbating health crises, all while worsening pre-existing inequalities and transgressing fundamental human rights. Despite earnest pleas from the United Nations and developing nations for an equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, these appeals were largely unheeded. Instead, major pharmaceutical manufacturers and high-income countries (HICs) had maintained a stranglehold on vaccine technology through the safeguarding of intellectual property rights (IPRs), leading to exorbitant pricing and preferential distribution to affluent regions. This vaccine hoarding has left low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with delayed and insufficient supplies, endangering the lives of the most vulnerable. The stringent enforcement of IPRs mechanisms, rather than aligning with international human rights obligations, has further marginalised the right to life, health, and access to vaccines and medicines, particularly in LMICs. This study ardently advocates for a policy shift that promotes the decolonisation of human rights in the context of IPRs and global health law.

This paper presents a genealogy of the passport in international law. For the most part, the origins of our contemporary mobility order are narrated from the vantage point of the grand principles of sovereignty, hospitality, and liberty. The nuts and bolts through which people access mobility – passports and visas – are generally understood to be the natural, inevitable, and fair by-products of these principles. This paper contributes to existing debates on the coloniality of international migration law by examining the universalization of the passport under the League of Nations. I argue that the universalization of the passport meant abandoning the old idea that the rights of free movement belonged to everyone and, instead, instituted a system that ranks human mobility based on national origins. Theoretically, it is proposed that attention to these “lowly” practices of mobility governance allows us to track the afterlives of race in the international order.

This article explores the terms “BRI dispute” and “BRI jurisprudence”. It undertakes a practical and theoretical analysis that considers whether “BRI disputes” have distinct and visible characteristics and are capable of being identified in a legal sense. This is important since practitioners – arbitration centres and law firms – use the term broadly and without specific criteria. By exploring the customary usage and the approach of legal scholars to the term, presenting examples of “BRI disputes” and examining their unique features, and constructing a theoretical approach (utilizing the concepts of ratione materiae, ratione loci, ratione temporis, and ratione personae; and considering the jurisprudence of the ICSID), this article moves from a broad to a narrow analysis to develop both a definition and a system of registration of “BRI disputes” for use by academics, practitioners, and policymakers.

Much scholarship on customary international law has examined the merits of induction, deduction, and assertion as approaches to custom identification. Save for where international tribunals identify custom by assertion, writers have viewed custom identification that does not rely on evidence of State practice and opinio juris as an example of deductive reasoning. However, writers have stated that, at best, deduction is reasoning from the general to the particular. This article draws on legal philosophy to define the contours of deductive reasoning and argues that pure deduction, namely deduction not combined with other forms of reasoning, is an unsound approach to custom identification. This argument is tested by reference to cases of custom identification by the International Court of Justice, categorised according to three types of deduction: normative, functional, and analogical. This article also explores the authority and utility of custom identification by pure deduction and its impact on content determination.

After protracted conflicts, Afghanistan and Iran agreed on a treaty in 1973 to share the waters of the Helmand River. However, this legal arrangement became a source of controversy over its equitable and reasonable utilization principle. The 1973 Helmand River Water Treaty reflects a history of legal and political controversy and strongly contrasting views, with some labelling it the “worst” treaty and others the “best”. This paper scrutinizes the history of legal arrangements of the Helmand River within its underlying political context to search for evidence of the aforementioned equitable and reasonable utilization principle. The findings indicate that the 1973 Treaty provides a grey space for legality and illegality, being a greatly restricted instrument to uphold the principle of equity. Examination of the principle of equity in the 1973 Treaty contributes to developing constructive controversy over the Helmand River and offers valuable lessons for other international watercourses facing similar challenges.

Infrastructure has been the focus of geopolitically significant regional strategies, including the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Highway. Mega-infrastructure projects are thought to offer crucial stimulus to support economic recovery and “infrastructure diplomacy” efforts. Transportation projects, like roads, are material objects that offer complex questions for international law, most obviously when projects or their impacts cross borders. They are long-term and long-distance, with varying impacts upon closer and further populations and environments across the construction and life of the asset. This article draws on insights from new materialism to analyse what infrastructure's entanglements might suggest about international law. The relationship between international law and transportation infrastructure is contingent. However, there is a pattern to this contingency that foregrounds funding “gaps”, investment protections, and risk assessments, which minimizes intersecting impacts and human/non-human relationships.

In a 2020 anti-subsidy investigation concerning glass fibre fabric (GFF) products from Egypt, the European Commission (EC) attributed the Chinese government's conduct to the government of Egypt in a way that raised a systemic question about the boundary between trade and investment. This article argues that despite some overlap between the boundaries of these legal disciplines, the notions of trade and investment remain conceptually distinct. Customary rules of interpretation dictate that World Trade Organization (WTO) covered agreements are construed as facilitating trade relations and no further. Hence, an extension of WTO subsidy rules to cover outward investment promotion measures using the principles of state responsibility is untenable. Such a unilateral approach disproportionately affects the interests of developing countries, harming their efforts to draw green investments. This article recommends that new, balanced rules be designed to promote outward investments while limiting adverse trade impacts.

Cross-border data flow is essential to contemporary international trade. However, transitioning from paper to digital in international trade has benefits and concerns. Concerns have led to an upsurge in data regulation as nations and regions impose restrictions on data flows and storage. This paper argues that, with increasing concerns about data sovereignty, the reconciliation of differing positions will be necessary to ensure that the benefits of digitization can be realized equally. At present, the objective of “data free flow with trust” is aspirational at best, with emerging trade barriers that unfairly threaten opportunities for small to medium enterprises and development within the Global South. This paper supports new knowledge and demonstrates that discriminatory regulation of data flow and disproportionately prioritizing national interests will be a trade barrier that impacts private entities and consumers in all nations. To avoid unintended externalities, cooperation is needed at a global level.

The developed and developing members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are deeply divided on the concept, scope, and beneficiaries of the special and differential treatment (SDT) provisions. The division was revealed in the Committee on Trade and Development meetings, where developed members rejected the Group of 90's proposals to strengthen and operationalize SDT provisions in WTO agreements. This article focuses on the SDT provisions in the Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU), positing that the provisions are ineffective in upholding the WTO's development objectives. It analyses the extent to which the needs and circumstances of low-income developing countries and least-developed countries have been considered by the WTO adjudicating bodies through the application and interpretation of SDT provisions in the DSU. The article seeks to reimagine SDT provisions’ role in the DSU through secondary lawmaking and progressive treaty interpretation to ensure development is integrated into the WTO's Dispute Settlement Mechanism.

This article argues that the dovetailing economic, geopolitical, and security interests that underpin the Belt and Road Initiative demands a dispute resolution mechanism that focuses on broader interests and legal rights. Using the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) as a case study, it identifies the conditions in which Chinese investors could have initiated an investment arbitration but did not. This can be explained by the rights-based orientation of investment treaties failing to reflect the interests of multi-project initiatives. Instead, alternative methods of home state intervention, such as state-funded political risk insurance, are used to protect investors. In other words, the political economy of CPEC investments refuses to utilize hard law mechanisms. Given this context, mediation may be a viable alternative. These circumstances accelerate the trend towards “de-legalization”, which is often cited as an inevitable consequence of the emerging “geoeconomic order” but suggests that reasons other than national security are the cause.

Pan-Asianism as a concept is conventionally associated with Japan's imperialism during the Second World War. This paper, in contrast, argues that far from being merely a language of hegemony, Pan-Asianism had a far more complex role to play in the early twentieth century. As an anti-imperial ideology, Pan-Asianism advanced a normative argument for the emancipation of Asia from Western imperialism and provided an alternative vision of civilization. As an anti-imperial strategy, Pan-Asianism offered Indian nationalist leaders in exile a necessary language to gain international support in favour of their nationalist movement. The paper explains how the ideological and strategic aspects of Pan-Asianism then affected and informed the development of contemporary international law with specific reference to the law of neutrality, the right to self-determination, racial equality, and the Monroe Doctrine. By doing so, it sheds light on an important yet ignored episode of the historical development of international law.

To foreign investors, data, either collected and processed before or after market entry in the host state, can be regarded as a part of the investment and subject to the protection of the applicable international investment agreements (IIAs). China has been developing rigorous and stringent data governance such as data localization requirements and mandatory business-to-government data sharing, and has also concluded the world's second largest IIA regime that provides sweeping investment protection. There is a risk of incompatibility between China's national data policies and its IIA obligations. Foreign investors may challenge China's national laws and practices on data governance, for alleged breaches of investor's protection obligations in Chinese IIAs, or breaches of the data residency provisions in Chinese trade and investment agreements. As a result, potential exists for such claims to be brought against China in investor-state arbitration.

South Asia, as a region, consists of several stateless groups as well as groups at the risk of statelessness. However, none of the South Asian states are parties to the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, thus these states do not have specific obligations arising from this Convention to avoid, reduce, or prevent statelessness in the region. In this context, this article ascertains that despite the prevalence of statelessness, there exists state practice and opinio juris in South Asia that point to an emerging customary international law obligation to avoid, reduce, or prevent statelessness.

This paper opens a scholarly discourse about Chinese scholars’ engagement with TWAIL (Third World Approach to International Law). This paper shows that Chinese international law scholars and TWAIL align in their resistance to Eurocentrism in international law, while they differ in their attitude towards whether to refrain from “national allegories” and criticize international law as a state-centric invention. A state-centric approach means that mainstream Chinese international lawyers tend to adopt a pragmatic attitude towards international law, employing it as a strategic weapon. During the course of this inquiry, this paper also observes a critical strand in Chinese academics – mostly outside of the international law discipline, and within the disciplines of history and philosophy – that is dedicated to redeeming China's subjectivity and history, which may be useful to understand Chinese critical spirit.

International legal discourses clash in violent ways within the state. For example, the international discourse on human rights identifies some individuals who oppose state-sanctioned projects as Indigenous peoples while the international discourse about terrorism may identify them as terrorists. These clashes are occurring throughout the world, particularly surrounding extractive resource projects, but this article considers one example from the Philippines where some B'laan individuals and communities oppose the Tampakan Copper-Gold Mine, and examines how various actors identify those individuals and communities. It explores how some identify them as Indigenous peoples while others identify them as terrorists. In highlighting the violent effects of international law, it investigates how discourse inhibits appreciation of violent erasures and the continuing coloniality of extractive resource development.

This article proposes a new theory, “premise theory”, to account for recent international criminal courts’ practice on finding general principles of law. After analysing the traditional theory of transposition from national to international legal settings, and the modification/choice model, this article demonstrates that the focus should be shifted from arbitrariness to the determinants of results of recognizing general principles of law. Premise theory explains a mechanism that judges modify a common legal principle or choose the most appropriate national legal principle to apply to the issue at hand to reflect the premises of the legal field, the court, and, sometimes, even the individual case. This article concludes with a proposal for utilizing premise theory as an explanatory tool and as a guide for legal reasoning to increase judicial transparency and predictability. Lastly, it advocates for the application of premise theory to other areas of international law.

This paper historicizes the current challenges brought about by digitization to the Third World by revisiting a movement launched by the Non-Aligned Movement countries during the 1970s and early 1980s. Also known as the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), the movement contested the dominant liberal notion of freedom of information and spotlighted the critically material inequality and power asymmetry often concealed by the liberal vision of the free flow of information. Not only did NWICO present a counter-model to the liberal notion of freedom of information, it also provides a vital case for understanding the interrelations between information and domination and the role of international law therein. This paper retells the story of NWICO, its normative ambition as well as its internal contentions and practical limitations, and reflects on its legacy for TWAIL scholarship and the current politics of digitization.