International law is usually conservative, with lawyers and judges emphasizing consistency, stability and predictability as the major advantages of the law. Legal scholars often prefer not to challenge the status quo, to suggest amendments, or to reform institutions, advocating simply to focus on the implementation of the laws that already exist. This collection stands different. It shares the authors’ discomfort with the present legal order and some of its institutions and courts, and dives into either a corrective or a profound reimagination of these, so that they can better address rising global challenges. Leading experts in their areas present their new and cutting-edge perspectives. Divided into six parts, the volume paints a vast yet solid thematic landscape of unique and critical approaches. The book invites and allows for a deep engagement with a wide range of opinions from across the world. It enables a free and courageous reimagining of the international legal order, detached from the endless feasibility skepticism. The work will be fascinating reading for students, academics and researchers working in the areas of International Law and International Relations.

Child soldiers are generally perceived as faultless, passive victims. This ignores that the roles of child soldiers vary, from innocent abductee to wilful perpetrator. This book argues that child soldiers should be judged on their actions and that treating them like a homogenous group prevents them from taking responsibility for their acts.

It is often argued that there is an inherent tension between international human rights law and the rules of free trade. This book explores the assumptions underlying this debate and argues that we need to reconsider them, focusing more on how expert knowledge and informal relationships shape trade law and its interaction with human rights.

The story of the women, financiers, and other unsung figures who helped to shape the post-Napoleonic global order In 1814, after decades of continental conflict, an alliance of European empires captured Paris and exiled Napoleon Bonaparte, defeating French military expansionism and establishing the Concert of Europe. This new coalition planted the seeds for today's international order, wedding the idea of a durable peace to multilateralism, diplomacy, philanthropy, and rights, and making Europe its center. Glenda Sluga reveals how at the end of the Napoleonic wars, new conceptions of the politics between states were the work not only of European statesmen but also of politically ambitious aristocratic and bourgeois men and women who seized the moment at an extraordinary crossroads in history. In this panoramic book, Sluga reinvents the study of international politics, its limitations, and its potential. She offers multifaceted portraits of the leading statesmen of the age, such as Tsar Alexander, Count Metternich, and Viscount Castlereagh, showing how they operated in the context of social networks often presided over by influential women, even as they entrenched politics as a masculine endeavor. In this history, figures such as Madame de Staël and Countess Dorothea Lieven insist on shaping the political transformations underway, while bankers influence economic developments and their families agitate for Jewish rights. Monumental in scope, this groundbreaking book chronicles the European women and men who embraced the promise of a new kind of politics in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, and whose often paradoxical contributions to modern diplomacy and international politics still resonate today.

Using the theoretical tools drawn from historical materialism and deconstruction, Tzouvala offers a comprehensive history of the standard of civilisation.

Aimed at readers interested in constructing a less West-centric, more global discipline of International Relations, this book provides a concise, thorough introduction to the thought and practice of international relations from premodern India, China and the Islamic world, and how it relates to modern IR.

This book examines what value, if any, the state has for the pursuit of progressive politics; and how it might need to be reimagined and remade to deliver transformative change. Is it possible to reimagine the state in ways that open up projects of political transformation? This interdisciplinary collection provides alternative perspectives to the ‘antistatism’ of much critical writing and contemporary political movement activism. Contributors explore ways of reimagining the state that attend critically to the capitalist, neoliberal, gendered and racist conditions of contemporary polities, yet seek to hold onto the state in the process. Drawing on postcolonial, poststructuralist, feminist, queer, Marxist and anarchist thinking, they consider how states might be reread and reclaimed for radical politics. At the heart of this book is state plasticity – the capacity of the state conceptually and materially to take different forms. This plasticity is central to transformational thinking and practice, and to the conditions and labour that allow it to take place. But what can reimagining do; and what difficulties does it confront? This book will appeal to academics and research students concerned with critical and transformative approaches to state theory, particularly in governance studies, politics and political theory, socio-legal studies, international relations, geography, gender/sexuality, cultural studies and anthropology.