In our current state of affairs in the world some of us must feel a measure of fatigue. Helplessness. Despair. At loss. A loss. A sense that we’re losing. It might have been a day like this when George Orwell’s Winston Smith sat in his room and wrote the first page of his diary. ‘From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party: WAR IS PEACE – FREEDOM IS SLAVERY – IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH … Winston opened the diary and [i]n small clumsy letters he wrote: April 4th, 1984 … For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this …?’ (G. Orwell, 1984 (2025) [1949], 5-7.)
The Book Review Section in this issue opens with Lorenzo Gradoni‘s review of The Oxford Handbook of International Law in Europe (OUP, 2024), edited by Anne van Aaken, Pierre d’Argent, Lauri Mälksoo, and Johann Justus Vasel. Oxford Handbooks are remarkably difficult to review and no less challenging to produce. Gradoni takes on the demanding task of apprehending both the parts and the whole of this project. The Handbook offers an ambitious and timely survey of the intellectual traditions, institutions and national approaches that have shaped international law in Europe. The editors of the Handbook argue that Europe is experiencing a ‘Copernican shift’ and must now understand itself as one region among many. Gradoni’s review engages closely with this claim and examines how the Handbook both responds to this shift and wrestles with its implications. He traces several tensions in the Handbook’s treatment of Russia, in the contexts in which critical perspectives such as TWAIL are incorporated, and in the ways different authors narrate the history of European international law in relation to the colonial spaces through which Europe was constituted and continues to define itself. Gradoni ultimately invites us to read the Handbook as an exercise in self-reckoning: a reflection on what scholars in the field consider to be ‘part of Europe’, and what remains at its margins or beyond them.
From questions of how a legal tradition understands itself, Olivier Corten‘s review of Terry D. Gill and Kinga Tiber-Szabó’s The Use of Force and the International Legal System takes us to the realm of legal interpretation in one of the most contested and consequential areas of the discipline. Gill and Tiber-Szabó seek to bring clarity to a field characterised by deep and persistent disagreement: on the scope of self-defence, on the relationship between the law on the use of force and international humanitarian law and human rights law, and on the legal frameworks governing military operations in complex, multilateral contexts. Corten’s engagement with the book is itself a lesson in methodological rigour and in the enduring difficulty of the questions that methodology must navigate. What does it mean to adopt a positivist approach to a body of rules whose content is genuinely disputed? How does one identify and weigh state practice when states disagree? Where, precisely, does interpretation end and prescription begin? While the authors profess adherence to a strict positivist methodology, Corten contends that their treatment of certain questions – most notably that of preventive self-defence – betrays a more flexible interpretative stance. In his view, the argumentative techniques they employ sit uneasily with the tenets of orthodox legal positivism.
Legal scholarship is not only bound to interpreting the legal reality as it is but calls for imagining how it could be altered. ‘We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?’ This quote from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale opens Eliana Cusato‘s review of Jonathan White’s In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea. ‘Insatiability’ is the noun form of the adjective ‘insatiable’, which comes from the Latin insatiabilis: the quality of being impossible to satisfy; a state of perpetual wanting. Cusato describes White’s book as an invitation to rethink the meaning of the future as one of perpetual wanting, of openness and desire to break existing boundaries. The book, she argues, is ‘a fascinating voyage across time and space’ in which White chronicles how different epochs have imagined, contested and instrumentalized the future as a political idea. White traces a long arc: from the utopian fiction of the late eighteenth century, with its tentative but transformative suggestion that the present is contingent and the future open, through the technocratic calculation of risks and probabilities that came to dominate the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the emergency imaginary of our current moment. Cusato reads this history as an international law scholar, and the encounters she identifies are illuminating: the temporal assumptions embedded in climate agreements, the tension between democratic deliberation and executive emergency or the concept of future generations as a legal category. Cusato’s review of White’s book is an invitation to international lawyers to become more conscious of the temporal imaginaries they carry and more honest about whose visions of the future their legal analysis serves to entrench.
The quest for a future, and the capacity to endure the labours of a lengthy struggle in its pursuit finds its most moving expression in the final contribution to this issue. Sergio Puig reviews Natalie Jones’s Self-Determination as Voice: The Participation of Indigenous Peoples in International Governance (CUP, 2024). Puig praises the book as a work of meticulous scholarship that charts how Indigenous peoples have engaged with international institutions to advance claims of self-determination over several decades. Jones’s book, as Puig shows, is distinguished above all by its patience: it does not tell a story of grand victories or dramatic breakthroughs, but of the slow, grinding, and arduous struggles of drafting committees, working groups, and determined advocates whose steady presence has quietly reshaped the norms and vocabulary of international law. The book invites us to ask what counts as progress in lawmaking, and how incremental, procedural gains can, over time, genuinely alter the architecture of a field. Puig situates Jones’s contribution within a broader tradition of scholarship on Indigenous rights and reflects, with generosity and candour, on what the history of Indigenous participation teaches us about the relationship between voice, agency, and the resilience required for structural change.
‘For whom, it suddenly occurred to [Winston] to wonder was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. … For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.’ Each of our reviewers sat down to write their own diaries; the authors of the books they reviewed had sat at their desks a while earlier, and for quite a long time. None of them knew whether anyone would read their work, or whether reading it would make any difference. In this issue we hope to make the point that it does.
In This Issue – Reviews
Written by Anne Lagerwall and Doreen LustigIn our current state of affairs in the world some of us must feel a measure of fatigue. Helplessness. Despair. At loss. A loss. A sense that we’re losing. It might have been a day like this when George Orwell’s Winston Smith sat in his room and wrote the first page of his diary. ‘From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party: WAR IS PEACE – FREEDOM IS SLAVERY – IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH … Winston opened the diary and [i]n small clumsy letters he wrote: April 4th, 1984 … For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this …?’ (G. Orwell, 1984 (2025) [1949], 5-7.)
The Book Review Section in this issue opens with Lorenzo Gradoni‘s review of The Oxford Handbook of International Law in Europe (OUP, 2024), edited by Anne van Aaken, Pierre d’Argent, Lauri Mälksoo, and Johann Justus Vasel. Oxford Handbooks are remarkably difficult to review and no less challenging to produce. Gradoni takes on the demanding task of apprehending both the parts and the whole of this project. The Handbook offers an ambitious and timely survey of the intellectual traditions, institutions and national approaches that have shaped international law in Europe. The editors of the Handbook argue that Europe is experiencing a ‘Copernican shift’ and must now understand itself as one region among many. Gradoni’s review engages closely with this claim and examines how the Handbook both responds to this shift and wrestles with its implications. He traces several tensions in the Handbook’s treatment of Russia, in the contexts in which critical perspectives such as TWAIL are incorporated, and in the ways different authors narrate the history of European international law in relation to the colonial spaces through which Europe was constituted and continues to define itself. Gradoni ultimately invites us to read the Handbook as an exercise in self-reckoning: a reflection on what scholars in the field consider to be ‘part of Europe’, and what remains at its margins or beyond them.
From questions of how a legal tradition understands itself, Olivier Corten‘s review of Terry D. Gill and Kinga Tiber-Szabó’s The Use of Force and the International Legal System takes us to the realm of legal interpretation in one of the most contested and consequential areas of the discipline. Gill and Tiber-Szabó seek to bring clarity to a field characterised by deep and persistent disagreement: on the scope of self-defence, on the relationship between the law on the use of force and international humanitarian law and human rights law, and on the legal frameworks governing military operations in complex, multilateral contexts. Corten’s engagement with the book is itself a lesson in methodological rigour and in the enduring difficulty of the questions that methodology must navigate. What does it mean to adopt a positivist approach to a body of rules whose content is genuinely disputed? How does one identify and weigh state practice when states disagree? Where, precisely, does interpretation end and prescription begin? While the authors profess adherence to a strict positivist methodology, Corten contends that their treatment of certain questions – most notably that of preventive self-defence – betrays a more flexible interpretative stance. In his view, the argumentative techniques they employ sit uneasily with the tenets of orthodox legal positivism.
Legal scholarship is not only bound to interpreting the legal reality as it is but calls for imagining how it could be altered. ‘We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?’ This quote from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale opens Eliana Cusato‘s review of Jonathan White’s In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea. ‘Insatiability’ is the noun form of the adjective ‘insatiable’, which comes from the Latin insatiabilis: the quality of being impossible to satisfy; a state of perpetual wanting. Cusato describes White’s book as an invitation to rethink the meaning of the future as one of perpetual wanting, of openness and desire to break existing boundaries. The book, she argues, is ‘a fascinating voyage across time and space’ in which White chronicles how different epochs have imagined, contested and instrumentalized the future as a political idea. White traces a long arc: from the utopian fiction of the late eighteenth century, with its tentative but transformative suggestion that the present is contingent and the future open, through the technocratic calculation of risks and probabilities that came to dominate the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the emergency imaginary of our current moment. Cusato reads this history as an international law scholar, and the encounters she identifies are illuminating: the temporal assumptions embedded in climate agreements, the tension between democratic deliberation and executive emergency or the concept of future generations as a legal category. Cusato’s review of White’s book is an invitation to international lawyers to become more conscious of the temporal imaginaries they carry and more honest about whose visions of the future their legal analysis serves to entrench.
The quest for a future, and the capacity to endure the labours of a lengthy struggle in its pursuit finds its most moving expression in the final contribution to this issue. Sergio Puig reviews Natalie Jones’s Self-Determination as Voice: The Participation of Indigenous Peoples in International Governance (CUP, 2024). Puig praises the book as a work of meticulous scholarship that charts how Indigenous peoples have engaged with international institutions to advance claims of self-determination over several decades. Jones’s book, as Puig shows, is distinguished above all by its patience: it does not tell a story of grand victories or dramatic breakthroughs, but of the slow, grinding, and arduous struggles of drafting committees, working groups, and determined advocates whose steady presence has quietly reshaped the norms and vocabulary of international law. The book invites us to ask what counts as progress in lawmaking, and how incremental, procedural gains can, over time, genuinely alter the architecture of a field. Puig situates Jones’s contribution within a broader tradition of scholarship on Indigenous rights and reflects, with generosity and candour, on what the history of Indigenous participation teaches us about the relationship between voice, agency, and the resilience required for structural change.
‘For whom, it suddenly occurred to [Winston] to wonder was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. … For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.’ Each of our reviewers sat down to write their own diaries; the authors of the books they reviewed had sat at their desks a while earlier, and for quite a long time. None of them knew whether anyone would read their work, or whether reading it would make any difference. In this issue we hope to make the point that it does.
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