Synopsis
How does international law change? How does it adapt to new contexts and meet new challenges? The typical answer to these questions makes international law appear rather static, due to high hurdles for change and formal rules that require widespread agreement among states. In reality, however, change is far more common: new legal norms and understandings are generated constantly through the practices of legal actors.
This book explores these actual, often gradual processes of international legal change. Combining qualitative analysis and statistical examination of data derived from twenty-five cases across eight subfields, the book offers the most systematic study to date of international legal change in practice beyond treaty-making. It approaches international law as a discursive process characterized by distinctive, socially constructed communities and authorities, and identifies five distinct paths through which legal change occurs.
These paths shape who can act, how change is framed, and whether and under what conditions it gains traction, and they - and their relative weight - vary heavily across the different areas of international law. On these paths, change comes about in ways which defy common expectations of a state-centric international law: the analysis presented in the book shows that the success of change attempts depends less on broad state support or even the support of major powers, but to a greater extent on support from authorities and institutions in the respective fields. The result is an international law that may not be dynamic enough to cope with the speed of change in today's accelerated world, but one that is significantly more dynamic than is usually assumed.
About the Author
Nico Krisch, Professor of International Law, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Dr Ezgi Yildiz, Assistant Professor of Government and Research Associate, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, and Global Governance Center, Geneva Graduate Institute, Pedro Martínez Esponda, Professor, Universidad Iberoamericana CDMX
Nico Krisch is a Professor of International Law and Head of the International Law Department at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. Previously, he has been an ICREA research professor at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals and held faculty positions at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin and the Law Department of the London School of Economics. He was also a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and Columbia Law School. He has been the recipient of a Certificate of Merit of the American Society of International Law, a European Research Council Advanced Grant, as well as the inaugural Max Planck-Cambridge Prize for International Law.
Ezgi Yildiz is an Assistant Professor of Government at Bowdoin College and a Research Associate at the Global Governance Center of the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland. She serves as a section co-chair of the European Society of International Law's Interest Group on Social Sciences and International Law, where she helps promote interdisciplinary research connecting international law and social sciences. Her book Between Forbearance and Audacity won the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association's Human Rights Section and the International Studies Association's International Law section. It also received an Honorable Mention for the Chadwick F. Alger Prize from the International Studies Association's International Organization Section.
Pedro Martínez Esponda is a full-time professor at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Until December 2022, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, working for the ERC-funded project 'The Paths of International Law'. He holds a PhD and a Master in International Law from the Graduate Institute. He was a guest researcher at the Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe - The International Rule of Law - Rise or Decline? in Berlin from 2019 to 2021. He is a qualified lawyer in Mexico. Outside of academia, he has worked for UNHCR and OHCHR both in Mexico and in Geneva.
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