The Many Paths of Change in International Law

How does international law change? How does it adapt to meet global challenges in a volatile social and political context? The Many Paths of Change in International Law offers fresh, theoretically informed, and empirically rich answers to these questions. It traces drivers, conditions, and consequences of change across the different fields of international law and paints a complex and varied picture very much in contrast with the relatively static imagery prevalent in many accounts today. Drawing on inspirations from international law, international relations, sociology, and legal theory, this book explores how international law changes through means other than treaty-making. Highlighting the social dynamics through which different areas and institutional contexts have generated their own pathways, it presents a theoretical framework for tracing change processes and the conditions that affect their success. Based on this framework, each contribution illuminates the paths of change we observe in contemporary international law. The explorations centre on strategies, forms, forces, and social contexts and draw on primary source material and in-depth case studies. Overall, the volume offers a fascinating account of an international legal order in flux-with a dynamic not captured through traditional doctrinal lenses-and helps situate change processes and their varied implications in international law and politics. A relevant book for everyone wanting to understand change and its consequences in international law. This is an open access title. It is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International licence. It is available to read and download as a PDF version on the Oxford Academic platform.

1 - The Many Paths of Change in International Law: A Frame
2 - Trump as a Change Agent in International Law: Ends, Means, and Legacies
3 - Norm-instability as a Strategy in International Law-making: The Case of Self-defence against Non-state Actors
4 - Transnational Lawmaking Coalitions as Change Agents in International Law
5 - Tracing International Legal Change in Genocide Prevention
6 - The Making of Lawmaking: The ILC Draft Conclusions on the Identification of Customary Law
7 - The Turn to Metrics in International Environmental Law
8 - Resurgent Authoritarianism, Rights, and Legal Change
9 - The Future of Oceans: The Role of Human Rights Law and International Environmental Law in Shaping the Law of the Sea
10 - World Trade Law and the Rise of China: Struggles over Subsidy Rules
11 - The Appellate Body's Judicial Pathway: Precedent, Resistance, and Adaptation
12 - Whose International Law is Changing? The Practice of Fragmented Communities Constructing Legal Change
13 - A Quiet Revolution in the Making? The Changing State Authority in Treaty Interpretation
14 - The Path not Taken: On Legal Change and its Context
15 - Epilogue: Fragmentary Thoughts on Informal Change

Nico Krisch is a professor of international law at the Geneva Graduate Institute. He has held faculty positions at the London School of Economics, the Hertie School in Berlin, and the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals, as well as visiting appointments at Harvard and Columbia Law Schools. His research interests concern the legal structure of global governance and the politics of international law. His 2010 book, Beyond Constitutionalism: The Pluralist Structure of Postnational Law (OUP), received the Certificate of Merit of the American Society of International Law, and in 2019, he was awarded the inaugural Max Planck-Cambridge Prize for International Law. Ezgi Yildiz is an assistant professor at California State University, Long Beach, and a research associate at the Global Governance Center of the Geneva Graduate Institute. She is also a member of the Expert Group for the EU's Anti-Torture Regulation and the Coordinating Committee of the European Society of International Law's Interest Group on Social Sciences and International Law. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Geneva Graduate Institute and the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and a visiting fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University.