Johns on Dead Circuits and Non-Events @FleurEJ @UNSWLaw

Fleur Johns, University of New South Wales, Faculty of Law, is publishing On Dead Circuits and Non-Events in Contingency and the Course of International Law (Kevin Jon Heller and Ingo Venzke, eds., Oxford University Press) (forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

Many an international law scholar has traced a route for her readers from ignorance, via debunking, to contingency, and onwards to possibility. Carrying scholars along this route is a presumed connection between awareness and agency. If only people recalled (with guidance from sophisticated scholars of international law) how chancy and open-ended international legal history has been, they might have the wherewithal to take their presents and futures in another direction – or so it is often assumed. This chapter will consider some possible perils of work so oriented, both in the sense of the kinds of operations that it leaves untouched and the circuit of humanist expectation that it helps to maintain (specifically, the idea that political capacity is a likely by-product of insight). Amid the increasingly self-organising streams of digits and ‘stuff’ shaping global affairs, this circuit may be especially dangerous for the distractions and disassociations it engenders. What, this chapter will ask, if international legal scholars were to identify possibility with pattern and formula, storage and transmission, rather than irregularity and insight? Perhaps this may spawn a politics better attuned to the now.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Goldmann on The Entanglement of Sovereignty and Property in International Law @MattHGoldmann

Matthias Goldmann, Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law; Goethe University Frankfurt - Research Center SAFE; Goethe University Frankfurt - Cluster of Excellence Normative Orders; Goethe University Frankfurt, has published The Entanglement of Sovereignty and Property in International Law: From German Southwest Africa to the Great Land Grab? Here is the abstract.

This article argues that an intricate entanglement existed between sovereignty and property in German Southwest Africa. Germany’s control over Southwest Africa depended considerably on European settlements, which received logistical, financial, and military support by Germany. The result was a symbiotic relationship between the government and private economic actors, a form of state capitalism under which private settlements contributed to the establishment of territorial control, a prerequisite of sovereign power. Contractual relationships suggesting formally equal relationships, and during and after the genocide, a mix of arguments drawing on tort law and an idea of formal legality, provided crucial justification for the assumption of territorial control. This description contradicts standard accounts of sovereignty, which tend to turn a blind eye on private property. The article discusses the implications of these findings for today’s international law, including for state responsibility for transnational corporations and the so-called Great Land Grab, the acquisition of vast lands in Africa by foreign public and private agents.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.