Agora 4: International Law 1989-2010: A Historical Perspective

Chaired by Professor Lauri Mälksoo

Constantly immersed as we are in current affairs, we have a propensity for ‘presentism’, emphasising the novelty of today’s challenges and threats. But how new has the period 1989- 2010 actually been in terms of the development of international law? In what respects does it differ from previous ‘epochs’ of international law?

The coercive turn in international law

PROFESSOR JACOB COGAN, Associate Professor of Law, University of Cincinnati

Abstract: Over the past sixty-five years there has been a human rights turn in international law, or what Theodor Meron has called the humanization of international law. Less appreciated or understood is a contemporary countertrend – the coercive turn in international law. Within the past two decades, states and international organizations at an unprecedented rate have entered into agreements, passed resolutions, enacted laws, and created institutions and networks, formal and informal, that impose and enforce direct and indirect duties upon individuals or that buttress and facilitate a state’s authorities respecting those under and even beyond its territorial jurisdiction. Like the human rights turn, the coercive turn includes both doctrinal and structural elements, instituting duties and establishing enforcement mechanisms. The effects, though, are the converse. Whereas the humanization of international law protects the individual against governmental coercion, these parallel processes do just the opposite – they facilitate the coercive authorities of government (both national and international) in relation to the individual. As with the human rights turn that preceded it, the coercive turn represents a fundamental challenge to the assumptions and dynamics of traditional international law. This paper describes the coercive turn, seeks to understand its causes, and considers its implications.

Biography: Jacob Katz Cogan is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati. He earned his J.D. from Yale and his Ph.D. in History from Princeton. Professor Cogan’s research focuses on the constitution of international organization and its history. He is particularly interested in the informal and operational dimensions of international decision processes and contemporary changes in and challenges to the character and organization of the international legal system. His most recent publications have appeared in the American Journal of International Law (for which he received the 2010 Francis Deák Prize) and the European Journal of International Law.

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Où en est la critique en droit international ?

MS ANNE-CHARLOTTE MARTINEAU, PhD Candidate, University of Helsinki/Université Paris I

Résumé: Les années 1989-2010 ont été marquées par deux courants opposés qui ont cherché à transformer le droit international de manière radicale. Les années 1990 ont en effet vu l’apparition de lectures critiques et progressistes, regroupées sous l’acronyme « NAIL », visant à remettre en question la conception dominante et le fonctionnement du droit international. C’est au moment où ce mouvement se dissolvait de lui-même que des lectures tout aussi sceptiques à l’égard du droit international mais s’appuyant sur le modèle empirique des relations internationales se sont faites largement entendre. Alors que tout semble, à première vue, opposer ces deux projets disciplinaires, ils se rapprochent dans la mesure où ils partent tous deux d’un constat d’indétermination. Ainsi cherchent-ils tous deux à répondre à la question : comment le droit international peut-il fonctionner si ce n’est pas par le droit lui-même ? La différence entre les deux projets se trouverait dans les mécanismes extra-juridiques privilégiés par les uns et les autres pour expliquer la possibilité et l’état du droit international. Aujourd’hui, l’approche critique tend à se tourner vers l’histoire tandis que l’approche managériale prend appui sur l’économie. En fin de compte, l’objectif de cette présentation est double : il s’agit de retracer la trajectoire du projet critique à travers ses rapports avec le projet adverse au cours des 20 dernières années et de montrer que son repli vers l’histoire peut être préjudiciable dès lors que cela implique de laisser l’approche managériale seule détentrice du langage de la causalité.

Biography: Anne-Charlotte Martineau is currently writing her PhD dissertation at the University of Helsinki and Université Paris on the fragmentation of international law. She holds a LLM in international law and a LLM in legal theory. Prior to her graduate studies, she worked for the OSCE in Croatia and for UNHCR in Guinea. Her publications include “The Rhetoric of Fragmentation: Fear and Faith in International Law” in the Leiden Journal of International Law (2009) and “The Politics of Normalization” in the New York University Journal of International Law and Politics (2009).

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Time's carcass: the risk and promise of international law

MS YORIKO OTOMO, PhD Candidate, University of Melbourne

Abstract: Following the Thirty Years’ War, the concept of risk emerged as a placeholder for future ‘unknowns’ (of which God was previously an unconditional guarantee). It emerged in the context of rapidly increasing international trade, and continued to develop as an organising principle of industrial society and the modern state, proliferating today within the lexicons of international law. This proliferation is bound up with the production of post-Cold War technologies that have the potential for salvation and destruction on a global scale, whose consequences may be incalculable or unknown.


Shortly before and after the turn of the millennium, the unbounded risks of contamination (for example by genetic technology) and annihilation (for example by military technology) came into direct encounter with international law, specifically in the International Court of Justice’s Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion, and the World Trade Organisation’s EC-Biotech case. The impossibility in these texts of containing any discussion of risk has provoked a crisis of decision at international law, which I argue prefigures a deeper tension at the heart of its mandate to guarantee a secular human life. In describing this tension I use the work of Martin Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler to think about international law as a technology of human time, and to recover the question of risk as the danger and promise of modern nihilism.

Biography: Yoriko Otomo is a PhD candidate at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities. Her doctoral thesis, ‘Unconditional Life: The Time and Technics of International law’ is supervised by Professor Anne Orford, Melbourne Law School. Yoriko has worked in both governmental and non-governmental organisations, and her research interests include international law, critical animal law, feminist legal theory and environmental law.

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