This book examines the everyday functioning and impact of international law and the development project, particularly across cities in emergent nations.

The Oxford Handbook of International Law and Development is a unique overview of the field of international law and development, examining how normative beliefs and assumptions around development are instantiated in law, and critically examining disciplinary frameworks, competing agendas, legal actors and institutions, and alternative futures.

This groundbreaking Research Handbook provides a comprehensive analysis and assessment of the impact of international law on cities. It sheds light on the growing global role of cities and makes the case for a renewed understanding of international law in the light of the urban turn.

International law's rich existence in the world can be illuminated by its objects. International law is often developed, conveyed and authorized through its objects and/or their representation. From the symbolic (the regalia of the head of state and the symbols of sovereignty), to the mundane (a can of dolphin-safe tuna certified as complying with international trade standards), international legal authority can be found in the objects around us. Similarly, the practice of international law often relies on material objects or their image, both as evidence (satellite images, bones of the victims of mass atrocities) and to found authority (for instance, maps and charts). This volume considers these questions; firstly what might the study of international law through objects reveal? What might objects, rather than texts, tell us about sources, recognition of states, construction of territory, law of the sea, or international human rights law? Secondly, what might this scholarly undertaking reveal about the objects - as aims or projects - of international law? How do objects reveal, or perhaps mask, these aims, and what does this tell us about the reasons some (physical or material) objects are foregrounded, and others hidden or ignored. Thirdly what objects, icons and symbols preoccupy the profession and academy? The personal selection of these objects by leading and emerging scholars worldwide, will illuminate the contemporary and historical fascinations of international lawyers. As a result, the volume will be an important artefact (itself an object) in its own right, capturing the mood of international law in a given moment and providing opportunity for reflection on these preoccupations. By considering international law in the context of its material culture the authors offer a new theoretical perspective on the subject.

At a time when environmental and social stakes are at their highest – with rising crises and contradictions at the nexus of a building sense of environmental and social collapse – there are no easy solutions. Global Im-Possibilities explores just what can be done around the world to ameliorate this dynamic. Using a range of essays and a multitude of case studies, this book explores what new lessons can be learned from examining the challenges and impediments to achieving just sustainabilities on the levels of policy, planning, and practice, and considers how these challenges and impediments can be addressed by individuals and/or governments. Taking a nuanced approach to provide an intersectional analysis of a particular issue relating to the ideals for achieving sustainability, this book asserts that that it is only in recognizing such complexity that we can hope to achieve just sustainabilities.

The Oxford Handbook of Jurisdiction in International Law provides an authoritative and comprehensive analysis of the concept of jurisdiction in international law. Jurisdiction plays a fundamental role in international law, limiting the exercise of legal authority over international legal subjects. But despite its importance, the concept has remained, until now, underdeveloped. Discussions of jurisdiction in international law regularly refer to classic heads of jurisdiction based on territoriality or nationality, or use the SS Lotus decision of the Permanent Court of International Justice as a starting point. However, traditional understandings of jurisdiction are facing new challenges. Globalization has increased the need for jurisdiction to be applied extraterritorially, non-State forms of law provide new theoretical challenges and intersections between different forms of jurisdiction have become more intricate. This Handbook provides a necessary re-examination of the concept of jurisdiction in international law through a thematic analysis of its history, its contemporary application, and how it needs to adapt to encompass future developments in international law. It examines some of the most contentious elements of jurisdiction by considering how the concept is being applied in specific substantive and institutional settings.

This book’s essays aim subversively and resolutely to replace the hegemonic discursive frame governing comparative law. Beyond harnessing negative critique to resist the orthodoxy’s self-assured cognitive assumptions, at once unexamined and indefensible, the argument mobilizes negativity as an empowering idea, a resource towards the displacement of the brand of comparative law that has been fostering a closing of the comparing mind. To answer the demands of the moment and herald foreign law research as a creditable intellectual development, one requires to engage in a culturalist theorization and practice of comparative law at radical variance from the prevailing positivist model. The negative turn, then, is a call to comparative action – a comparactive motion – in support of the robustly indisciplined thinking that must thoroughly inform research into foreign law. In photography, the negative has been employed productively to generate a positive print. In comparative law, negation wants to affirm edifying epistemic yields. This book will benefit all law teachers and postgraduate law students interested in the workings of law on the international scene, whether specialists in comparative law, public international law, private international law, transnational law, or foreign relations law – in particular, individuals bringing to bear a critical inclination to their subject-matter.