Acts of repetition abound in international law. Security Council Resolutions typically start by recalling, recollecting, recognising or reaffirming previous resolutions. Expert committees present restatements of international law. Students and staff extensively rehearse fictitious cases in presentations for moot court competitions. Customary law exists by virtue of repeated behaviour and restatements about the existence of rules. When sources of international law are deployed, historically...

Punitive practices are highly revealing of a society's social fabric, its normative order, and power structure. Punishment in International Society examines the penal philosophies and practices in international society. The contributions to this book show the added value of a punitive lens to international politics in two major ways: First, punitive practices reveal the contours of the international normative order, its structures, and hierarchies. Such a perspective highlights th...

International courts and tribunals are often asked to review decisions originally made by domestic decision-makers. This can often be a source of tension, as the international courts and tribunals need to judge how far to defer to the original decisions of the national bodies. As international courts and tribunals have proliferated, different courts have applied differing levels of deference to those originial decisions, which can lead to a fragmentation in international law. International...

For decades, Martti Koskenniemi has not just been an influential writer in international law; his work has caused a significant shift in the direction of the field. This book engages with some of the core questions that have animated Koskenniemi's scholarship so far. Its chapters attest to the breadth and depth of Koskenniemi's oeuvre and the different ways in which he has explored these questions. Koskenniemi's work is applied to a wide range of functional areas in international law and d...

This volume of the Netherlands Yearbook of International Law explores the many faces of populism, and the different manifestations of the relationship between populism and international law. Rather than taking the so-called populist backlash against globalisation, international law and governance at face value, this volume aims to dig deeper and wonders ‘What backlash are we talking about, really?’. While populism is contextual and contingent on the society in which it arises and ...

This volume of the Netherlands Yearbook of International Law (NYIL) is the fiftieth in the Series, which means that the NYIL has now been with us for half a century. The editors decided not to let this moment go by unnoticed, but to devote this year’s edition to an analysis of the phenomenon of yearbooks in international law.Once the decision was made that this would be the subject of this year’s NYIL, the editors asked themselves a number of questions. For instance: Not m...

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 ...

Is it possible and desirable to translate the basic principles underlying cosmopolitanism as a moral standard into effective global institutions. Will the ideals of inclusiveness and equal moral concern for all survive the marriage between cosmopolitanism and institutional power? What are the effects of such bureaucratisation of cosmopolitan ideals? This volume examines the strained relationship between cosmopolitanism as a moral standard and the legal institutions in which cosmopolitan no...

The Netherlands Yearbook of International Law (NYIL) was first published in 1970. It offers a forum for the publication of scholarly articles of a more general nature in the area of public international law including the law of the European Union. With this volume on ‘Legal Equality and the International Rule of Law’, the Netherlands Yearbook of International Law celebrates Pieter Kooijmans’ academic, diplomatic, and judicial career by picking up on an important subject in his early writin...

International law is not merely a set of rules or processes, but is a professional activity practised by a diversity of figures, including scholars, judges, counsel, teachers, legal advisers and activists. Individuals may, in different contexts, play more than one of these roles, and the interactions between them are illuminating of the nature of international law itself. This collection of innovative, multidisciplinary and self-reflective essays reveals a bilateral process whereby, on the...

International law holds a paradoxical position with territory. Most rules of international law are traditionally based on the notion of State territory, and territoriality still significantly shapes our contemporary legal system. At the same time, new developments have challenged territory as the main organising principle in international relations. Three trends in particular have affected the role of territoriality in international law: the move towards functional regimes, the rise of cos...

The concepts of humanity, human dignity and mankind have emerged in different contexts across international law and biolaw. This raises many different questions. What are the aims for which 'humanity' is mobilised? How do these aims affect the ensuing interpretations of this concept? What are the negative counterparts of humanity, mankind and human dignity? And what happens if a concept developed in one particular context is taken up in another? By bringing together research from internati...