Imagining the Future: Risk and the Regulation of Uncertainty in International Law

Increasingly, international legal arrangements imagine future worlds or create space for experts to articulate how the future can be conceptualized and managed. With the increased specialization of international law, a series of functional regimes and sub-regimes has emerged, each with their own imageries, vocabularies, expert-knowledge, and rules to translate our hopes and fears for the future into action in the present. At issue in the development of these regimes are not just competing predictions of the future based on what we know about what has happened in the past and what we know is happening in the present. Rather, these regimes seek to deal with futures about which we know very little or nothing at all; futures that are inherently uncertain and even potentially catastrophic; futures for which we need to find ways to identify, conceptualise, manage, and regulate risks the existence of which we can possibly only speculate about.

This book explores how the future is imagined, articulated, and managed across the various fields of international law, including the use of force, maritime security, international economic and environmental law, and human rights. It investigates how the future is construed in these various areas; how the costs of risk, risk regulation, risk assessment, and risk management are distributed in international law; the effect of uncertain futures on the subjects of international law; and the way in which international law operates when faced with catastrophic or existential risk.

Monika Ambrus, Senior Researcher, Institute of Legal Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences,Rosemary Rayfuse, Professor, UNSW Australia; Conjoint Professor, Lund University,Wouter Werner, Professor, VU University, Amsterdam

Monika Ambrus is senior researcher at the Institute of Legal Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She was previously an Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen and Lecturer at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, where she obtained her PhD in 2010 focusing on European anti-discrimination law. Her current research interests cover the concept of equality across various fields of law, (the legitimacy of) international adjudication based on judicial discourse, and legal designs in international water law at different levels of water governance. Until 5 May 2016 she was the Managing Editor of the Netherlands Yearbook of International Law.


Rosemary Rayfuse is a Professor of public international law at UNSW Australia, Conjoint Professor at Lund University, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg. Her main fields of interest are law of the sea and international environmental law, in particular as they relate to questions of oceans governance, high seas fisheries, protection of the marine environment in areas beyond national jurisdiction, and the normative effects of climate change on international law. She serves on the editorial or advisory boards of a number of internationally renowned journals and is a member of the IUCN Commission on Environmental Law and a member of the International Law Association Committee on Sea Level Rise and International Law.


Wouter Werner is a Professor of public international law at the VU University, Amsterdam His main fields of interest are international legal theory, the interplay between international law and international politics, the international legal regime on the use of force, and visual representations of international criminal law. He is chair of the Advisory Committee on Issues of Public International Law, an independent advisory organ for the Dutch government and parliament, and co-founder of the Centre for the Politics of Transnational Law, an academic research institute for multidisciplinary research on the dynamic relationship between law and politics in a globalizing world. He is editor of the Netherlands Yearbook of International Law, The Leiden Journal of International Law and the Hague Justice Portal and advisor to the editorial board of the Amsterdam Law Forum. He is also a board member of the CAVV and the Public International Law and Policy Group.