International Law and the Cold War

Description

International Law and the Cold War is the first book dedicated to examining the relationship between the Cold War and International Law. The authors adopt a variety of creative approaches - in relation to events and fields such as nuclear war, environmental protection, the Suez crisis and the Lumumba assassination - in order to demonstrate the many ways in which international law acted upon the Cold War and in turn show how contemporary international law is an inheritance of the Cold War. Their innovative research traces the connections between the Cold War and contemporary legal constructions of the nation-state, the environment, the third world, and the refugee; and between law, technology, science, history, literature, art, and politics.

Matthew Craven is a Professor of International Law at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and Chair of the Centre for the Study of Colonialism, Empire and International Law. He is also a Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School and a member of the Advisory Council for the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School. He is author of The Decolonization of International Law: State Succession and the Law of Treaties (2007) and The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1995). Sundhya Pahuja is a Professor of International Law and Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at the University of Melbourne. She is a leading scholar of postcolonial international law, and author of Decolonising International Law (Cambridge, 2011). Gerry Simpson is a Professor of International Law at London School of Economics and Political Science. He held the Sir Kenneth Bailey Chair of Law at the University of Melbourne Law. He is the author of Great Powers and Outlaw States (Cambridge, 2004) and Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law (2007).

'... a volume that definitely refutes the biased view of the Cold War as a terra incognita for international lawyers and summons historians to take up the gauntlet of writing Cold War histories that account for the multiple dimensions in which international law was made and performed during a period we have not entirely moved out to this day.' Etienne Peyrat, Journal of the history of International Law