International lawyers typically start with the legal. What is a legal as opposed to a political question? How should international law adapt to the unforeseen? These are the routes by which international lawyers typically reason. This book begins, instead, with the non-legal. In a series of case studies, Fleur Johns examines what international lawyers cast outside or against law - as extra-legal, illegal, pre-legal or otherwise non-legal - and how this comes to shape political possibility. Non-legality is not merely the remainder of regulatory action. It is a key structuring device of contemporary global order. Constructions of non-legality are pivotal to debate in areas ranging from torture to foreign investment and from climate change to natural disaster relief. Understandings of non-legality inform what international lawyers today do and what they refrain from doing. Tracing and potentially reimagining the non-legal in international legal work is, accordingly, both vital and pressing.

An international river basin is an ecological system, an economic thoroughfare, a geographical area, a font of life and livelihoods, a geopolitical network and, often, a cultural icon. It is also a socio-legal phenomenon. This book is the first detailed study of an international river basin from a socio-legal perspective. The Mekong River Basin, which sustains approximately 70 million people across Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, provides a prime example of the socio-legal complexities of governing a transboundary river and its tributaries. The book applies its socio-legal analysis to bring a fresh approach to understanding conflicts surrounding water governance in the Mekong River Basin. The authors describe the wide range of uses being made of legal doctrine and legal argument in ongoing disputes surrounding hydropower development in the Basin, putting to rest lingering caricatures of a single, 'ASEAN' way of navigating conflict. They call into question some of the common assumptions concerning the relationship between law and development. The book also sheds light on important questions concerning the global hybridization or crossover of public and private power and its ramifications for water governance. With current debates and looming conflicts over water governance globally, and over shared rivers in particular, these issues could not be more pressing.

Events: The Force of International Law presents an analysis of international law, centred upon those historical and recent events in which international law has exerted, or acquired, its force. From Spanish colonization and the Peace of Westphalia, through the release of Nelson Mandela and the Rwandan genocide, and to recent international trade negotiations and the 'torture memos', each chapter in this book focuses on a specific international legal event. Short and accessible to the non-specialist reader, these chapters consider what forces are put into play when international law is invoked, as it is so frequently today, by lawyers, laypeople, or leaders. At the same time, they also reflect on what is entailed in naming these 'events' of international law and how international law grapples with their disruptive potential. Engaging economic, military, cultural, political, philosophical and technical fields, Events: The Force of International Law will be of interest to international lawyers and scholars of international relations, legal history, diplomatic history, war and/or peace studies, and legal theory. It is also intended to be read and appreciated by anyone familiar with appeals to international law from the general media, and curious about the limits and possibilities occasioned, or the forces mobilised, by that appeal.

Events: The Force of International Law presents an analysis of international law, centred upon those historical and recent events in which international law has exerted, or acquired, its force. From Spanish colonization and the Peace of Westphalia, through the release of Nelson Mandela and the Rwandan genocide, and to recent international trade negotiations and the 'torture memos', each chapter in this book focuses on a specific international legal event. Short and accessible to the non-specialist reader, these chapters consider what forces are put into play when international law is invoked, as it is so frequently today, by lawyers, laypeople, or leaders. At the same time, they also reflect on what is entailed in naming these 'events' of international law and how international law grapples with their disruptive potential. Engaging economic, military, cultural, political, philosophical and technical fields, Events: The Force of International Law will be of interest to international lawyers and scholars of international relations, legal history, diplomatic history, war and/or peace studies, and legal theory. It is also intended to be read and appreciated by anyone familiar with appeals to international law from the general media, and curious about the limits and possibilities occasioned, or the forces mobilised, by that appeal.

An international river basin is an ecological system, an economic thoroughfare, a geographical area, a font of life and livelihoods, a geopolitical network and, often, a cultural icon. It is also a socio-legal phenomenon. This book is the first detailed study of an international river basin from a socio-legal perspective. The Mekong River Basin, which sustains approximately 70 million people across Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, provides a prime example of the socio-legal complexities of governing a transboundary river and its tributaries. The book applies its socio-legal analysis to bring a fresh approach to understanding conflicts surrounding water governance in the Mekong River Basin. The authors describe the wide range of uses being made of legal doctrine and legal argument in ongoing disputes surrounding hydropower development in the Basin, putting to rest lingering caricatures of a single, 'ASEAN' way of navigating conflict. They call into question some of the common assumptions concerning the relationship between law and development. The book also sheds light on important questions concerning the global hybridization or crossover of public and private power and its ramifications for water governance. With current debates and looming conflicts over water governance globally, and over shared rivers in particular, these issues could not be more pressing.

International lawyers typically start with the legal. What is a legal as opposed to a political question? How should international law adapt to the unforeseen? These are the routes by which international lawyers typically reason. This book begins, instead, with the non-legal. In a series of case studies, Fleur Johns examines what international lawyers cast outside or against law - as extra-legal, illegal, pre-legal or otherwise non-legal - and how this comes to shape political possibility. Non-legality is not merely the remainder of regulatory action. It is a key structuring device of contemporary global order. Constructions of non-legality are pivotal to debate in areas ranging from torture to foreign investment and from climate change to natural disaster relief. Understandings of non-legality inform what international lawyers today do and what they refrain from doing. Tracing and potentially reimagining the non-legal in international legal work is, accordingly, both vital and pressing.

Like many other areas of life, humanitarian practice and thinking are being transformed by information and communications technology. Despite this, the growing digitization of humanitarianism has been a relatively unnoticed dimension of global order. Based on more than seven years of data collection and interdisciplinary research, #Help presents a ground-breaking study of digital humanitarianism and its ramifications for international law and politics. Global problems and policies are being reconfigured, regulated, and addressed through digital interfaces developed for humanitarian ends. #Help analyses how populations, maps, and emergencies take shape on the global plane when given digital form and explores the reorientation of nation states' priorities and practices of governing around digital data collection imperatives. This book also illuminates how the growing prominence of digital interfaces in international humanitarian work is sustained and shaped by law and policy. #Help reveals new vectors of global inequality and new forms of global relation taking effect in the here and now. To understand how major digital platforms are seeking to extend their serviceable lives, and to see how global order might take shape in the future, it is essential to grasp the perils and possibilities of digital humanitarianism. #Help will transform thinking about what is at stake in the use of digital interfaces in the humanitarian field and about how, where, and for whom we are making the global order of tomorrow.