The Changing Practices of International Law

With more than 158,000 treaties and some 125 judicial organisations, international law has become an inescapable factor in world politics since the Second World War. In recent years, however, international law has also been increasingly challenged as states are voicing concerns that it is producing unintended effects and accuse international courts of judicial activism. This book provides an important corrective to existing theories of international law by focusing on how states respond to increased legalisation and rely on legal expertise to manoeuvre within and against international law. Through a number of case studies, covering a wide range of topical issues such as surveillance, environmental regulation, migration and foreign investments, the book argues that the expansion and increased institutionalisation of international law itself have created the structural premise for this type of politics of international law. More international law paradoxically increases states' political room of manoeuvre in world society.

1. Introduction: the changing practices of international law Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen and Tanja Aalberts; 2. Sovereignty games, law and politics in world society Tanja Aalberts and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen; 3. Abandonment, construction and denial: the formation of a zone Margareta Brummer; 4. Backlash and state strategies in international investment law Malcolm Langford, Daniel Behn and Ole Kristian Fauchald; 5. 'Part of the game': government strategies against European litigation concerning migrant rights Moritz Baumgärtel; 6. The disaggregated law of global mass surveillance Itamar Mann; 7. Legalisation in international environmental law Jaye Ellis; 8. Search and rescue as a geopolitics of international law Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen and Tanja Aalberts; 9. Conclusion: the dark side of legalisation Tanja Aalberts and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen.

Tanja Aalberts is Professor of Law at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and Director of the Centre for the Politics of Transnational Law (www.ceptl.org). She has a Ph.D. in International Relations and her research focuses on the interplay between international law and international politics in practices of governance.
Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen is Research Director at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law and Honorary Professor of Law at Aarhus Universitet, Denmark. He received his Ph.D. in international law from Aarhus University, M.Sc. in refugee studies from the University of Oxford and M.A. in political science from the University of Copenhagen.