Contingency in International Law: On the Possibility of Different Legal Histories

This book poses a question that is deceptive in its simplicity: could international law have been otherwise? Today, there is hardly a serious account left that would consider the path of international law to be necessary, and that would refute the possibility of a different law altogether. But behind every possibility of the past stands a reason why the law developed as it did. Only with a keen sense of why things turned out the way they did is it possible to argue about how the law could plausibly have turned out differently.

The search for contingency in international law is often motivated, as it is in this volume, by a refusal to resign to the present state of affairs. By recovering past possibilities, this volume aims to inform projects of transformative legal change for the future. The book situates that search for contingency theoretically and carries it into practice across many fields, with chapters discussing human rights and armed conflict, migrants and refugees, the sea and natural resources, foreign investments and trade. In doing so, it shows how politically charged questions about contingency have always been.

Ingo Venzke is Professor of International Law and Social Justice at the University of Amsterdam, and Director of the Amsterdam Centre for International Law. He has held visiting positions at various universities including the National University of Singapore and Jindal Global Law School. He was a Hauser Research Scholar at New York University as well as a visiting scholar at the Cegla Center for the Interdisciplinary Research of the Law (Tel Aviv University) and the Center for the Study of Law and Society (UC Berkeley). He received his PhD in Law from the Goethe University in Frankfurt while working as research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for International Law in Heidelberg. Since 2015, Ingo has been the Editor-in-Chief of the Leiden Journal of International Law (together with Eric de Brabandere).

Kevin Jon Heller is Professor of International Law and Security at the University of Copenhagen and Professor of Law at the Australian National University. He has previously held positions at the University of Amsterdam, SOAS, the University of Melbourne, the University of Auckland, and the University of Georgia. He received his PhD in Law from Leiden University and holds a JD with distinction from Stanford University. He is the author of The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law, and the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law and the Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials, all published by Oxford University Press.