Crafting the International Order: Practitioners and Practices of International Law since c.1800

This volume sheds light on how lawyers have made sense of, engaged in, and shaped international politics over the past three hundred years. Chapters show how politicians and administrators, diplomats and military men, have considered their tasks in legal terms, and how the field of international relations has been filled with the distinctly legal vocabulary of laws, regulations, treaties, agreements, and conventions.

Leading experts in the field provide insights into what it means when concrete decisions are taken, negotiations led, or controversies articulated and resolved by legal professionals. They also inquire into how the often-criticised gaps between juristic standards and everyday realities can be explained by looking at the very medium of law. Rather than sorting people and problems into binary categories such as 'law' and 'politics' or 'theory' and 'practice', the case studies in this volume reflect on these dichotomies and dissolve them into the messy realities of conflicts and interactions which take place in historically contingent situations, and in which international lawyers assume varying personas.

Marcus M. Payk, Professor of Modern History, Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg,Kim Christian Priemel, Professor of Contemporary European History, University of Oslo

Marcus M. Payk is professor of modern history at Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg, Germany. He has a special interest in international history, legal history, German and European history, and has published widely in these fields. His research has been supported by various grants and scholarships both in Europe and the United States.

Kim Christian Priemel is professor of contemporary European history at the University of Oslo. He specializes in legal history, social and economic history, and media history. He has authored and edited several books and has published in the Journal of Modern History, the Journal of Contemporary History, and Central European History.