This chapter examines the concept of territory. While administrative space was no novelty in East Asia, notions related to space transformed in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Treaty of Nerchinsk marked the borderlines between the the Qing and Russian empires. Similar treaties in the early eighteenth century solidified them. Kangxi initiated a geographical survey spanning the country. This significantly impacted Korea, which made efforts to secure its border, altering perceptions of the state. Russian expansion along the Pacific coast raised concerns in Japan. From the late eighteenth century, Japanese intellectuals explored the Ezo region – areas that had held little interest. These developments introduced fresh concepts like territory, borders, and exclusive ownership (often considered European inventions) into traditional notions of imperial land. The new ideas didn’t supplant existing understandings, or engender a new interpolity system in East Asia.

This chapter historicises the current moment of transformation in international trade governance by examining the evolving boundaries of trade expertise and the shifting techniques of trade governance. It adopts a periodisation of post-Second World War international economic governance, starting with the ‘embedded liberal’ period, continuing with the ‘neoliberal period’, and concluding with the contemporary period of liberalism ‘in motion’ or kineo-liberalism. The chapter demonstrates how the boundaries of the expert field and the available governance techniques are deeply connected to the broader politics of trade governance, reflecting and sustaining larger shifts in convictions concerning the purposes and rationales of international trade governance. The current moment is characterised by instability, uncertainty, and contestation, leading to a denaturalisation of the boundaries of trade governance and a reinterpretation of its fundamental aspects.

This chapter examines the relationship between trade and sustainable development, including its developmental dimension. It argues that trade policy and international trade institutions must be integrated into broader international efforts to promote sustainable development. This requires an end to the siloed treatment of trade and other policy areas. It also requires a more holistic approach to international law-making, including greater cooperation among international organisations and a willingness to make trade-offs between competing goals. Finally, it requires a recognition of the different preferences of rich and poor countries and a willingness to address the power imbalances that exist in the global trading system.

Studies of imperial Chinese and Byzantine diplomacy conventionally assume that their diplomatic norms had indigenous origins that became models for neighbouring polities. This chapter questions this assumption by comparing the diplomatic traditions of empires of Sui and Tang China (581–907), Byzantium (395–1453), Sasanian Iran (224–651), Turkic polities, and smaller Eurasian states. Eurasia shared diplomatic protocols incorporating pageantry, status ranking, displays of obeisance to the ruler, gift exchange, and feasting. Visiting envoys enjoyed rights to safe passage that sometimes were violated during periods of interpolity tension. Peaceful relations were normally signalled when a greater power invested a lesser one as a vassal, and sometimes when two great powers negotiated and ratified written treaties. Diplomatic agreements were reinforced via marriage or fictive kinship relations between rulers, trade accords, and/or direct payments from one polity to another. This customary diplomatic tradition provided rulers with shared standards to negotiate agreements that protected their perceived strategic, political, economic and symbolic interests.

Chapter 2 examines the continued centrality of the state and how states, as the main duty-bearers, define and implement human rights and humanitarian principles domestically, as well as promote and protect them internationally.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book makes it clear that the law of international organisations is dominated by the united nations (UN). It defines and explains inter-governmentalism and the role of law in its regulation. The book presents a number of case studies that shows how the law works within an institutional order dominated by politics. The case studies highlight the debates that surround even the most basic legal issues; the furore surrounding the membership application of Palestine to join the UN, or the UN's claim to immunity in Haiti where it has been responsible for a catastrophic outbreak of cholera. The book also shows that law plays a significant role in curbing excesses and the abuse of power, as well as facilitating the channelling of power to achieve those purposes.

This chapter analyses the WTO’s institutional features, focusing on rule-making and dispute settlement. It describes the creation of the GATT and the shift to the WTO, analysing salient aspects of the WTO’s structure. It reviews how WTO institutions have operated, highlighting problematic features and identifying potential reforms. The WTO is widely viewed as a seriously flawed institution. Despite its goal of promoting liberalised trade, members have found it virtually impossible to conclude new agreements. The dispute settlement system, once viewed as its crown jewel, now lies in tatters. While many factors have contributed to the current situation, the multilateral trading system’s institutional architecture is deeply implicated.

This chapter considers the development of secondary rules of international law to cover the wrongful acts and omissions of inter-governmental organisations. It analyses the Articles on Responsibility of International Organisations (ARIO) developed by the International Law Commission. The chapter focuses on the weaknesses of the ARIO in distinguishing the responsibility of the UN from that of member states, something that has caused difficulties in judicial interpretation of the ARIO in the case of UN-mandated operation. It examines the issues of attribution in firstly the Behrami case before the European Court of Human Rights and secondly various cases before Dutch courts following the failure of the Dutch battalion of the United Nations Protection Force to protect civilians in Srebrenica in 1995.

This chapter examines the political economy of international trade policy, exploring the evolution of the international trading system from the GATT to the WTO. It analyses the fault lines between free trade and fair trade and winners and losers, and the role of labour market policies in addressing transition costs. It also discusses the challenges facing the WTO, including institutional dysfunction and an expanding mandate. It proposes potential solutions, such as plurilateral agreements and improved institutional arrangements, while emphasising the need for collaboration with other international agencies. The chapter concludes by stressing the urgency of recovering the aspirations of the post-war international order to address current global challenges.

Thes chapter argues that both Britons and South Asians made use of instruments such as treaties and a broader world of diplomatic paperwork to construct a framework for interstate legality in the eighteenth century. South Asian efforts to make and remake arrangements with British traders and government agencies constituted a source of inter-imperial legal forms. Inter-imperial treaties were not blunt instruments of European imperialism, but legal documents co-produced by South Asian bureaucrats. By emphasising the activism and political thought of South Asian actors in their pursuit of a new inter-imperial order, this chapter rethinks the focus on European actors as the architects of international law. Of course, multilingual and multipolar claim making did not impose a stable legal order in South Asia. Treaties were regularly abrogated and renegotiated. Nevertheless, such efforts to negotiate relationships among states and enshrine them punctuated and shaped the upheavals of the eighteenth century as well as the explosion of new projects of state building. Inter-imperial lawmaking emerged as a vital site for politics in the eighteenth century.