A sneak preview of the introduction to a collection on state socialism and international law that I wrote with Raluca Grosescu is now available online from the Journal of the History of International Law. The complete collection should be available in a few weeks [Is now online!]

ABSTRACT:

This introductory essay provides an overview of the scholarship on state socialist engagements with international criminal and humanitarian law, arguing for a closer scrutiny of the socialist world’s role in shaping these fields of law. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the historiography on post-1945 international law-making has been generally dominated by a post-1989 sense of Western triumphalism over socialism, where the Soviet Union and its allies have been presented as obstructionists of liberal progress. A wave of neo-Marxist scholarship has more recently sought to recover socialist legal contributions to international law, without however fully addressing them in the context of Cold War political conflict and of gross human rights violations committed within the Socialist Bloc. In contrast, this collection provides a balanced understanding of the socialist engagements with international criminal and humanitarian law, looking at the realpolitik agendas of state socialist countries while acknowledging their progressive contributions to the post-war international legal order.

The special issue is based on the conference the 2016 conference State Socialism, Legal Experts and the Genesis of International Criminal and Humanitarian Law after 1945.