International Law and the Cold War

The atmosphere of fear and suspicion that pervaded the Cold War period is emerging again today. The combination of uncertain planetary survival and existential threat (nuclear war then, climate catastrophe now), ideological enmity (communism then, 'radical' Islam now), Great Power rivalry (the US and USSR then, the US and China and Russia now), the perceived need to defend the capitalist economy (then and now), and the suppression of plural forms of cultural and economic life by polarities of various kinds, have become features of our present circumstances.
Almost everything in the history of contemporary international law is explained with reference to the Cold War. The commencement of the Cold War, its duration and its end are all regularly invoked as constitutive moments in the development of international law. Contemporary accounts almost invariably assert that the Cold War was an interruption of some kind to the 'normal' liberal-capitalist order of the world, and its corollary regulative frame. Key normative and institutional projects of the post-war era are described as being 'casualties' of 'the political struggle between the two blocs'. In essence, this consensus presents the Cold War as a period of suspension or aberration in the progress toward the establishment of a liberal international order after the end of Empire.

The motivating concern of this project is that treating the Cold War as a forty-year aberration in the establishment of the liberal international legal order reinforces a disciplinary blindness toward the constitutive role the Cold War played in the very formation of international law and institutions, and toward the role international law played in making the Cold War real. This blindness exemplifies and manifests the disciplinary bias toward understanding international law as 'innocent', never implicated in violence, ideological conflict and suffering, but only in their resolution. Such restricted accounts impede the kinds of understandings of those relations which are necessary help to illuminate the causes of conflict, suffering and state 'failure' in the present day. If we are re-living, or are about to re-live, the Cold War in different terms, and if we wish to reinvigorate international law as a way of engaging normatively with global circumstances, then developing multi-perspectival and rigorous understandings of international law's relation to the Cold War is essential.

This project aims to generate and give voice to diverse perspectives on histories of the relationship between the Cold War and international law, and their legacies for law and policy. It aims both to address a significant gap in current understandings, and to strengthen modes of scholarly engagement that actively counteract the polarisation of political perspectives in the present moment. The network will join scholars from international law, history, film, Cold War studies, international relations and other disciplines in the humanities, from research institutions in the UK, Europe, North America, Australia, India, South Africa, Indonesia and several former Eastern Bloc countries, and develop diverse and rigorous perspectives on international law and the Cold War. These accounts will push against standard periodisations, question common assumptions about the progress and completion of the War, and put forward innovative accounts of its relationship to international legal development. Bridging the fields of scholarship and policy, the network will be uniquely placed to develop a shared understanding of how the proliferating regulatory domains of international law and institutions may meet the challenges of the future. The project will impact on future research agendas in many substantive areas of international law, from armed conflict to development, from trade to migration, and from human rights to international environmental law.

The proposed research network aims to provide useful insights for legal advisors and practictioners, policy makers, non-governmental organisations, civil society movements and individuals in a wide variety of settings, both national and international. An improved understanding of the historic role played by international law and legal institutions through the period of the cold war, and of the way in which the cold war shaped contemporary international law is important for all of these actors. The re-emergence in recent years of an atmosphere of fear and suspicion around questions of planetary survival (nuclear holocaust then and climate change now), ideological enmity (communism then, 'fundamentalism' now), and Great Power rivalry (formerly the US and USSR, now the US, Russia and China) makes all the more urgent a clear understanding of how international legal structures and initiatives may, from experience, either dampen or exacerbate those threats.

The proposed research has clear policy implications. By examining the mutual constitution of the cold war and international law, the network will contribute to the revision of a reified account of power politics that underpins much international legal activity to this day. In developing an understanding of the way in which international legal interventions (relating for example to the regulation of the use of force, the control of weaponry, the promotion of human rights or humanitarian law) may operate recursively - to frame as well as be framed by - the social, political and economic order in which they are located, will invigorate a much more profound reflection upon the utility and effectiveness of various contemporary initiatives. The network, in that sense, will provide policy makers with evidence of the complex interplay between international law and the social, economic, political relations that underpin ideological competition, providing examples of the way in which legal initiatives may offer alternative means by which tensions and conflict may be addressed.

The published research will provide policy makers, legal advisors and activists with a series of detailed case studies of particular fields of international law and legal initiatives and institutions, providing a much more complex account of their emergence and more nuanced account of their social, economic or cultural 'effects'. Potential beneficiaries include, in the UK, the Foreign Office, the Department of International Development as well as a range of NGOs such as Amnesty International and Chatham House. Beyond the UK, it includes the foreign ministries of other States, and UN and regional agencies dealing with questions of trade, human rights.

Network investigators have a wide range of contacts with governmental and non-governmental agencies with whom they intend to communicate research network results for further discussion. For purposes of this project network investigators have already established contacts with the Georgian Ministry of Defence which has agreed to convene a workshop in Tbilisi, bringing together scholars, policy makers and legal advisors from across the former Soviet Union and parallel initiatives within Australia, the UK and elsewhere are envisaged.

Further, the network will be reaching out to a public audience through the hosting of a seminar/film series in London hosted at the LSE and SOAS which will provide an opportunity not merely to broaden access to the academic discussion, but deepen public understanding of international law and its role in shaping international order.