This chapter examines the foundations of Sarah Wambaugh’s political thought and attempts to reconstruct her world view. Wambaugh’s avid support for the League of Nations was premised on her understanding of it as a new scientific way of conducting international politics. Key to her faith in political science, and later forming a key part of her prescriptions for the plebiscite, was her belief in the importance of neutrality, a concept of international law then in flux. Alongside neutrality, the concept of public opinion was also in flux, with debates as to its relationship to democracy and expertise. The chapter points to the way in which public opinion and perceptions were also integral to her later normative prescriptions for the plebiscite, and ends with an examination of Wambaugh’s own public relations campaign for American entry to into the League of Nations.

Sarah Wambaugh was technical advisor to the Peruvian delegation during the 1925-26 Tacna-Arica plebiscite, contested between Chile and Peru. Although the United States was to lead the plebiscite as a neutral arbiter, the fact that the territory was under the control of Chile, which had seized the region several generations earlier, would ultimately lead to the plebiscite being abandoned. Wambaugh would witness first-hand the violence and futility of the attempted plebiscite, made more galling because women were not allowed to vote, all of which fired her with determination to ensure that future plebiscites would not suffer the same results. Consequently, it was in Tacna-Arica that she began to systematically analyse the post-war plebiscites and distil normative conclusions for their future use. These normative prescriptions would be honed by her in the coming years, culminating in a list of eighteen points contained in her important 1933 work on the post-war plebiscites.

Solidarity is generally emphasized as a social good, particularly by international lawyers keen to stress its integrative function for the international community. This chapter will explore the possibility that solidarity might, on the contrary, occasionally be unwelcome, understood as both objectively and subjectively undesirable. Solidarity constructs certain social bonds through “imaginaries of solidarity” (who one imagines oneself to be in solidarity with) in ways that may be problematic. The chapter will examine different sites of international solidarity, including the inter-state and the transnational. It will distinguish between solidarity that is unwelcome on account of its effects (when solidarity actually makes things worse), on account of who it is offered by (the “intuitu personae” of solidarity), and on account of the burden of gratitude it creates (as part of an economy of gift and counter-gift). Overall, the chapter will refocus attention away from obligations to provide solidarity in favor of a more nuanced appreciation that not all solidarity is equally opportune. It also hopes to be a contribution to understanding what might be welcome solidarity based on a renewed understanding of its non-welcome variant.

This chapter explores the relevance of the Christian tradition to contemporary debates on solidarity in international law and human rights. It positions the genealogy of solidarity within early Christian writings in which the western theological concepts of suffering, love, and salvation are detailed. Linking the Pauline doctrine and writings of early theologians to the processes of modernity – of which notions such as the West, the Global South, good neighborliness, and human rights are a part – the concept of solidarity is traced to a particularly Christian dynamic. As such, the promise of solidarity in international legal discourse, human rights discourse, and refugee discourse is considered as analogous to the way in which forms of messianism manifest themselves through a Christian logic of love, sacrifice, and debt.

One of the core arguments we have made in this monograph is that for regional trade agreements to effectively realise their prosperity agendas, greater attention must be paid to the institutions that can ensure the implementation of the newly created regional project. In this regard, this chapter explores such institutions and their necessity in regional trade agreements in the Global South. In the absence of a centralised authority to enforce international agreements, it is common for states to either rely on peer pressure to encourage enforcement of the agreements or delegate the authority to interpret and rule on compliance to a third-party adjudicating body. While the former might generally have a low success rate in terms of ensuring compliance, the latter might only be successful in ensuring a high rate of compliance if the third-party adjudicating body is sufficiently robust. Therefore, this chapter explores the promise that dispute settlement mechanisms hold for the effective implementation of various trade agreements in the Global South.

This chapter examines how international relations (IR) scholarship has approached two central questions concerning international law and legalisation: why do states create international law, and what makes a particular norm ‘legal’ in nature? It then outlines the concept of legalisation as described in Abbott et al.’s well-known article of the same name. Under the classic legalisation framework, legalisation has three components: obligation, precision and delegation. The chapter argues that the classic OPD framework cannot fully capture the expanding role of non-state actors or conceptualise law as a process. It therefore proposes an adapted model for the transnational legal system that incorporates a crucial omitted dimension – implementation. Implementation refers to the concrete actions taken by agents to translate legal or law-like principles into practical, workable instructions for courts, governments, companies, and other non-state actors.

Abstract: This chapter explores the dynamics of international law within a horizontal legal order, characterised by the absence of a central enforcement mechanism and the layered system of compliance that emerges. It conceptualises international law as a normative framework shaped by interactions rather than hierarchy, examining how states are induced to comply with legal norms despite the lack of centralised coercive sanctions. The chapter develops a five-layer model of compliance control, ranging from voluntary internal compliance to institutionally authorised sanctions, highlighting the interplay between internal state mechanisms, bilateral enforcement, collective responses, and institutional determinations. It examines how a horizontal normative order can operate under realist and rationalist assumptions about state behaviour, while showing that insights from behavioural theory, two-level analysis of state conduct, and constructivism enhance the understanding of state compliance with norms. International law operates by facilitating interaction, shaping expectations, and leveraging decentralised enforcement mechanisms to influence state behaviour.

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s key findings, methodology and structure. It also introduces the principal questions the book seeks to address. How have agents, operating at national, international and transnational levels, attempted to institutionalise the norm of corporate accountability for human rights violations linked to transnational corporate activity? What do these initiatives reveal about the nature of transnational legalisation, and how legalisation should be framed or conceptualised in the twenty-first century? Finally, could a revised framework of legalisation help explain when transnational litigation and soft law initiatives are more likely to succeed in the future?

Abstract: Drawing on the findings and examples from the various chapters, this conclusion argues that there is significant untapped potential for a greater role for international adjudication in the international society. In particular, developments in the law of state immunity may give rise to judicially legitimised seizing by states of assets of other states and even arrests of their state officials. In particular fields, legal mechanisms are being developed that mobilise the coercive apparatus of states to apply measures of constraint against other states, their assets, and their leaders. Though these mechanisms remain rare, they provide a glimpse into the possible operation of an international order characterised by judicially guided, coercively enforceable international law.

Abstract: This chapter explores the role and limitations of judicial authority within the horizontal structure of international law. Unlike domestic courts within hierarchical systems, international courts (ICs) are not connected to centralised enforcement apparatuses and thus lack coercive power (‘potestas’). ICs rely instead on auctoritas – their ability to shape interpretations – to mobilise the pro-compliance forces in the international order. Authoritative communications reduce interpretative uncertainty, establish normative focal points, and act as a catalyst for sanctioning mechanisms. ICs may legitimise or mobilise sanctions across multiple layers of international law enforcement, including bilateral responses, third-party enforcement, and sanctions applied or authorised by international institutions. Through its expressive component, adjudicative authority not only impacts actors who willingly accept an adjudicator’s legitimacy; it also changes the strategic normative environment in which all actors operate.

Abstract: This chapter considers three key types of international judicial remedies, exploring their content, availability, and behavioural influence. Through Mere Adjudication, an adjudicator establishes the existence, applicability, and content of legal rules. Through a Declaration of Breach, a court declares that a party’s conduct violates legal obligations. Where a violation is found, international courts often establish Consequential Duties, determining how a wrongdoer must act to bring an end to its violation and provide reparation for injury. Overall, international judicial remedies seek to prevent states’ adoption of unilateral remedies, grounded on their own understanding of the law and facts. International courts are unable to determine the application of coercive measures against states. Thus, every remedy is a communication regarding either the interpretation of the law or the application of this law to conduct. Judicial pronouncements have remedial value if they are able to mobilise pro-compliance forces, internal and external to states, by which the international normative framework guides state conduct.

Chapter 1 starts by illustrating the puzzle of American antagonism to the ICC. It then introduces the book’s three main questions: Why does the US fear the ICC? When, exactly, does the US oppose the ICC? And does the ICC’s track record justify American hostility? The rest of the chapter previews the book’s arguments, explains why the US–ICC relationship is of crucial importance for policymakers, and discusses how the book provides new insights into some of the big questions in international relations.

Abstract: This chapter introduces the theme of international adjudication and considers the ability of international courts (ICs) to influence state behaviour through judicial remedies. ICs hold delegated authority to interpret and apply elements of the normative framework that structures inter-state relations and establishes permissible and prohibited conduct, but are unable to determine the deployment of political and economic resources to coerce recalcitrant states. Their influence over state behaviour thus depends on ICs’ ability to mobilise, through mere authoritative communications, the forces that lead international law to influence state conduct in the first place. For this, ICs have at their disposal a variety of communicative instruments: their judicial remedies. The chapter presents a fourfold typology of judicial remedies – Mere Adjudication, Declaration of Breach, Consequential Duties, and Permissible Responses – that ICs use to calibrate the exercise of their adjudicative authority. Though all judicial remedies concern the interpretation and application of norms, their varied focuses allow ICs to selectively mobilise the different internal and external forces that shape state behaviour.

This chapter surveys the international legal framework governing transnational corporations (TNCs) and human rights. It begins with a brief history of the corporation, traces the rise of transnational corporate power since the 1970s, and offers a definition of the TNC. It then outlines the various ways in which corporate activities can adversely affect human rights, drawing on some of the most notorious incidents of recent decades. The chapter highlights the persistent difficulty of regulating corporations at the international level and describes the current regime under which states bear primary responsibility for preventing and remedying human rights abuses within their territories, including those committed by businesses. Since 2010, several states have introduced modern slavery legislation requiring companies to conduct due diligence on their operations and supply chains.

The key question posed by this volume’s Introduction is: What happens when Western law is no longer the default referent for legal modernity? This question has implications for such fields as comparative law, international law, and law and technology. “Inter-Asian Law” points to an emerging field of comparative and international law that explores the legal interactions – historical and contemporary – between and among Asian jurisdictions. These interactions – through diverse actors, intermediaries, processes, and methods – may lead to several important formations including legal transplantation, law and development, multilateralism and trade blocks, global value chains, transnational orders, judicial networks, legal educational exchange, and digital integration, to name a few. After providing definitions for core terms, the Introduction provides an analytical framework that guides the subsequent chapters including types and methods of interactions, actors and intermediaries, and effects, consequences, and conflicts. A description of the organization of the book follows.

Abstract: This chapter explores an underexamined category of international judicial remedies: pronouncements that a state’s breach of legal obligations renders specific actions by other actors – particularly other states – permissible or required. Traditionally, such responses are adopted unilaterally, based on a state’s self-assessment of a violation and its corresponding remedy. International courts (ICs) typically examine these measures retrospectively, determining their legality after adoption. In international trade law, however, a distinct approach has emerged, requiring that responses to wrongful conduct be adopted only after their permissibility is adjudicated. This chapter investigates the potential for extending this concept to other regimes, analysing the feasibility of ICs authorising permissible responses through ex ante judicial remedies. It addresses questions of justiciability, the admissibility of pre-emptive requests for declarations of legality, and the scope of IC jurisdiction over such responses. By introducing an element of centralisation to international law’s typically decentralised enforcement mechanisms, judicial determinations of permissible responses hold particular significance. This centralising effect is especially pronounced in regimes, such as international investment law and international criminal law, where IC rulings can trigger enforcement measures against the wrongdoer by the coercive apparatus of states.

This chapter situates the book in a broader literature on the social construction of nuclear technology. Existing examinations of technical contexts such as missile accuracy or nuclear war risk assessment reveal that sociopolitical meaning-making processes shape technical decision-making. The dual-use nature of nuclear technology requires even actors with technical authority, like the International Atomic Energy Agency, to delve into the realm of the political. This chapter also applies the broader international relations literature on status and recognition to nuclear politics. Nuclear status is an inherently technopolitical concept because it implicates not simply a material achievement but the social recognition of that achievement in a particular kind of discursive frame. This chapter also develops a theory of nuclear status focused around three drivers of status-seeking: legality, instrumentality, and identity. I argue that states contest their nuclear status when they are contesting the terms of the NPT, when they are attempting to accrue material or geopolitical benefits, and when there are underlying tensions between Self- and Other- understandings.

This chapter investigates the history and legal structure of the NPT, particularly the negotiations leading up to the codification of the treaty. I analyze the transcripts of the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee (ENDC), which met from 1962 to 1969 to investigate how states landed on the particular treaty structure of the NPT. In contrast to conventional great power politics accounts, I find that states used these meetings as a forum to bring meaning to a burgeoning nonaligned and postcolonial identity through the category of "non-nuclear weapon state.’ The discussion of the ENDC lays the groundwork for understanding India’s evolving nuclear status. India coined the term ‘nuclear apartheid’ in the midst of ENDC negotiations, and in its early nuclear history, Indian leadership was motivated to contest its nuclear status to resist the legal hierarchy of the NPT. But India’s 1998 nuclear tests along with the 2005 US—India Civil Nuclear Agreement signaled a change in strategy and motivations. India went from being a ‘pariah’ in the global nuclear regime to being accommodated and recognized by the United States as a ‘responsible state with advanced nuclear technology.’