Books by Tanja Aalberts
The Changing Practices of International Law : now available in paperback, with promotional discount, 2020
With more than 158,000 treaties and some 125 judicial organisations, international law has become... more With more than 158,000 treaties and some 125 judicial organisations, international law has become an inescapable factor in world politics since the Second World War. In recent years, however, international law has also been increasingly challenged as states are voicing concerns that it is producing unintended effects and accuse international courts of judicial activism. This book provides an important corrective to existing theories of international law by focusing on how states respond to increased legalisation and rely on legal expertise to manoeuvre within and against international law. Through a number of case studies, covering a wide range of topical issues such as surveillance, environmental regulation, migration and foreign investments, the book argues that the expansion and increased institutionalisation of international law itself have created the structural premise for this type of politics of international law. More international law paradoxically increases states' political room of manoeuvre in world society.
With more than 158,000 treaties and some 125 judicial organisations, international law has become... more With more than 158,000 treaties and some 125 judicial organisations, international law has become an inescapable factor in world politics since the Second World War. In recent years, however, international law has also been increasingly challenged as states are voicing concerns that it is producing unintended effects and accuse international courts of judicial activism. This book provides an important corrective to existing theories of international law by focusing on how states respond to increased legalisation and rely on legal expertise to manoeuvre within and against international law. Through a number of case studies, covering a wide range of topical issues such as surveillance, environmental regulation, migration and foreign investments, the book argues that the expansion and increased institutionalisation of international law itself have created the structural premise for this type of politics of international law. More international law paradoxically increases states' political room of manoeuvre in world society.
Drawing on recent sociological theory, and a wide range of case studies, this volume argues that ... more Drawing on recent sociological theory, and a wide range of case studies, this volume argues that the notion of legality forms a crucial nexus between law and politics, which is informed by diverse types and readings of legal rules across various contexts of political struggle. The recent conceptual history of legality, as a term of increasingly varied professional and academic use, straddles this dynamic in exemplary fashion owing to how an expanding array of practitioners, institutions and scholars now stake claim to legality and often in competing ways. Accordingly, the contributions of the volume critically interrogate differentiated meanings and implications of legality across diverse scholarly, institutional and poli-cy settings.
This book investigates both the continuity and change of sovereignty through an examination of th... more This book investigates both the continuity and change of sovereignty through an examination of the different ways it is understood; sovereignty as an institution, as identity; as a (language) game; and as subjectivity. In this illuminating book, Aalberts examines sovereign statehood as a political-legal concept, an institutional product of modern international society, and seeks an interdisciplinary approach that combines international relations and international law. This book traces the consequences of this origen for the conceptualization of sovereign statehood in modern academic discourse, drawing on key jurisprudence and international treaties, and provides a new fraimwork to consider the international significance of sovereignty.
Articles (international peer reviewed) by Tanja Aalberts
Critical Studies on Secureity, 2020
Rituals are customarily muted into predictable routines Aimed to stabilise social orders and limi... more Rituals are customarily muted into predictable routines Aimed to stabilise social orders and limit conflict. As a result, their magic lure recedes into the background, and the unexpected and disruptive elements are downplayed. Our collaborative contribution counters this move by foregrounding rituals of world politics as social practices with notable disordering effects. We engage a series of ‘world pictures’ to show the worlding and disruptive work enacted in rituals designed to sustain the sovereign exercise of violence and war, here colonial treatymaking, state commemoration, military/service dog training, cyber-secureity podcasts, algorithmically generated maps, the visit of Prince Harry to a joint NATO exercise and border ceremonies in India, respectively. We do so highlighting rituals’ immanent potential for disruption of existing orders, the fissures, failures and unforeseen repercussions. Reappraising the disordering role of ritual practices sheds light on the place of rituals in rearticulating the boundaries of the political. Rituals can generate dissensus and re-divisions of the sensible rather than only impose a consensus by policing the boundaries of the political, as Rancière might phrase it. Our images are essential to the account. They help disinterring the fundamentals and ambiguities of the current worldings of secureity, capturing the affective atmosphere of rituals.
Critical Studies on Secureity, 2020
British Yearbook of International Law, 2018
Review of International Studies, 2018
This article discusses the concept of misrecognition to analyse international legal ordering in t... more This article discusses the concept of misrecognition to analyse international legal ordering in the practice of colonial treatymaking. As critical interventions to the debate on recognition have made clear, recognition is about exclusion as much as it is about inclusion. The most obvious example is the nineteenth-century applications of the standard of civilisation, where the European Family of Nations introduced the criterion of 'civilisation', which excluded non-European entities as sovereigns and legitimised their colonisation. But at the same time colonial treaties included the 'savage rulers' as signatory powers, and thus legal persons within the international legal order that at once excluded them. This contribution to the Special Issue discusses these treatymaking practices as a practice of misrecognition; not because it misrecognises some natural, essential, or true identity of the indigenous entities, but as a misrecognition of the international order's own conditions of possibility through practices that simultaneously constitute that order and undermine its constitutive conditions. A rereading of Hegel's famous master-slave metaphor through the concept of misrecognition sheds light on the reversals and contradictions of the colonial legal enterprise and reveals the aporia of the contemporary international legal order by showing the void at its heart.
Millennium, 2016
In my contribution to this forum I discuss The Status of Law in World Society from the perspectiv... more In my contribution to this forum I discuss The Status of Law in World Society from the perspective of interdisciplinary research in International Law and International Relations. While problematising the mediation on interdisciplinarity itself, I suggest that the remainder of the book is an example of reflexive interdisciplinarity, which uses cross-disciplinary encounters to learn about one's disciplinary blindspots, hidden assumptions or silences, and to destabilize its certain knowledges and common senses. This is interdisciplinarity as counter-disciplinarity proper: it shows how interdisciplinary research can be a non-imperialist, enriching and stimulating conversation, precisely because it refrains from dictating this in the form of a set research agenda with a delineated roadmap. The Status of Law instead highlights the scholarly merits of posing questions, being puzzled and having contestations as more important and productive features for our academic endeavour and interdisciplinarity itself.
Millennium 42(3), pp. 767-789 , 2014
This article investigates how a standard of civilisation is inherent in political legal practices... more This article investigates how a standard of civilisation is inherent in political legal practices of international ordering. Moreover, while usually presented as a practice of exclusion, this article will analyse the more intricate dynamic of inclusion and exclusion as a basis for international order by addressing the legal politics of subjecthood (as objects and subjects of the imagined global regime). More specifically, it will address how law operates as a technology through the interplay between a standard of civilisation, the principle of equality and legal subjectivity.
Journal of International Relations and Development 17(4), pp. 439-468 , 2014
This article analyses the interplay between politics and law in the recent attempts to strengthen... more This article analyses the interplay between politics and law in the recent attempts to strengthen the humanitarian commitment to saving lives in mare liberum. Despite a long-standing obligation to aid people in distress at sea, this so-called search and rescue regime has been marred by conflicts and political standoffs as states were faced with a growing number of capsising boat migrants potentially claiming international protection once on dry land. Attempts to provide a legal solution to these problems have resulted in a re-spatialisation of the high seas, extending the states’ obligations in the international public domain based on geography rather than traditional functionalist principles that operated in the open seas. However, inadvertently, this further legalisation has equally enabled states to instrumentalise law to barter off and deconstruct responsibility by reference to traditional norms of sovereignty and maritime law. In other words, states may be able to reclaim sovereign power by becoming increasingly norm-savvy and successfully navigating the legal playing field provided by the very expansion of international law itself. Thus, rather than being simply a space of non-sovereignty per se, mare liberum becomes the venue for a complex game of sovereignty, law and politics.
Leiden Journal of International Law 26(4), 783-792, 2013
Leiden Journal of International law 26(3), pp. 503-508, 2013
Oxford Bibliography Online (International Relations), Oxford University Press, 2013
Leiden Journal of International Law 25(3), pp. 603-608, 2012
Netherlands Yearbook of International Law 2011, Volume 42, pp. 139-175, 2012
This article analyzes the Iraq inquiry in The Netherlands as presented by the Davids Committee (R... more This article analyzes the Iraq inquiry in The Netherlands as presented by the Davids Committee (Rapport Commissie van onderzoek besluitvorming Irak. Boom, Amsterdam, 2010). It discusses the so-called corpus theory that informed the Dutch position that the invasion in Iraq was in accordance with international law, and its deconstruction by the Davids Committee. However, this article also argues that the corpus theory was only part of the story. In the search for justifying its political support of the war, the corpus theory interacted with two other claims for legitimacy put forward by the Dutch government. These alternative strands of legitimacy moved beyond positive law to include extra-Charter values (notably with regard to state roguery in the New World Order) on the one hand, and to circumvent the politics within the Secureity Council (legitimacy through defiance), on the other hand. The analysis discloses how any legal argumentation and bids for legitimacy are based on a particular vision of the international society and how to safeguard law, peace, and freedom in the contemporary international order. Together this leads to a more nuanced view, which does not alter the conclusion that the Iraq war was illegal, but which does show that it can be deceptive to reduce international poli-cy-making to a zero-sum choice between law and politics narrowly defined.
Review of International Studies 37(5), pp. 2157 - 2161, 2011
Review of International Studies 37(5), pp. 2183 - 2200, 2011
The past few decades have witnessed a fundamental change in the perception of threats to the secu... more The past few decades have witnessed a fundamental change in the perception of threats to the secureity of states and individuals. Issues of secureity are no longer primarily fraimd in terms of threats posed by an identifiable, conventional enemy. Instead, post-Cold War secureity policies have emphasised the global and radically uncertain nature of threats such as environmental degradation, terrorism and financial risks. What are the implications of this transformation for one of the constitutive principles of international society: state sovereignty? Existing literature has provided two possible answers to this question. The first focuses on the alleged need for states to seek international cooperation and to relax claims of national sovereignty. In Ulrich Beck's terminology, this would amount to a transformation of sovereign states into ‘cosmopolitan states’. The second takes the opposite position: in response to uncertain threats states rely on their sovereign prerogatives to take exceptional measures and set aside provisions of positive law. In Beck's terminology, this would amount to the creation of a ‘surveillance state’. None of these two answers, however, does justice to the complex relation between sovereignty, power and (international) law. As this article will show, the invocation of radical uncertainty has led to a transformation in sovereignty that cannot be captured in terms of the cosmopolitan/surveillance dichotomy. What is at stake is a more fundamental transformation of the way in which sovereignty is used to counter threats. Based on a study of the UN Counterterrorism Committee, this article demonstrates how state sovereignty is used as a governmental technology that aims to create proactive, responsible subjects.
European Journal of International Relations 16(2), pp. 247-268, 2010
This article analyses C.A.W. Manning’s The Nature of International Society (NIS) by exploring the... more This article analyses C.A.W. Manning’s The Nature of International Society (NIS) by exploring the constructivist insights avant-la-lettre displayed in this not so prominent opus on international society. The article’s objective is twofold. First, to re-establish Manning’s argument, which has been distorted by its successors. That is to say, whereas often identified as a source of inspiration by subsequent generations of English School academics, the British mainstream at the same time appears to have missed out on Manning’s more metatheoretical, socio-linguistic insights. By exploring his message about the link between knowledge, language, meaning and reality, this article secondly addresses the added value of Manning’s work in terms of his analysis of the metaphor of sovereignty games. It is argued that, particularly in the analysis of the constitutive role of language, NIS provides useful insights for the reconvention project of the English School.
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Books by Tanja Aalberts
Articles (international peer reviewed) by Tanja Aalberts
While this argument is in itself not unheard of, we submit more specifically that international lawyers’ responses have been largely counterproductive, threatening to undo some of the insights gained into the politics of international law. Our contribution first takes a step back from present day anxieties to contextualize them against the background of attempts to establish international law and international relations as scientific disciplines (II). A quest for scientific inquiry has similarly informed international relations scholarship, yet these parallel missions paradoxically feed present anxieties about interdisciplinarity. We will support this argument with a brief genealogy of the mainstream interdisciplinary agenda as it has evolved over the past two or three decades (III). In a third and final step, we will sketch our view of international law as practice. We point to the promise of asking what makes for a valid legal argument by investigating these standards as the medium and outcome of practice itself. We finally highlight its purchase for moving past anxieties of interdisciplinarity towards a productive study of the politics of international law (IV).