module specification

 The aim of this module is to provide students with an understanding of (a) the practical reality of international law (b) the essentials of the existing international legal order and (c) the main politically effective alternatives to (b) proposed since 1945.

 The syllabus will consist of two main sections.

(1) In the first section, students will be introduced to the concept of and essential principles of international law and learn about examples of its practical operation as a tool for inter-state cooperation and the regulation of disputes.

(2) In the second section, the post-1945 international legal order will be described and the main politically-effective alternatives presented. These alternatives will include: Globalism and transnational law; Soviet Marxism; the school of Carl Schmitt/Russian Eurasianism; Islamic concepts of world order/neoOttomanism; modern Chinese concepts. As well as outlining the positive ideas on offer in each case, attention will be paid to their theoretical and practical attitude to both the existing order and the concept of inter-state international law as such.

Upon completion of this module students will be better equipped to:
(1) Understand the function and operation of the “imposing edifice” of international legal rules and institutions identified by Henry Morgenthau in Power Among Nations;
(2) Understand the content of the main critiques and counter-proposals to the existing international legal order advanced from 1945 to the present day.

Teaching consists of a weekly two-hour lecture period followed by a one-hour tutorial. Lectures will be supported by substantial PowerPoint notes that contain relevant web links and are made available to students in a timely manner on Weblearn. Lectures will be recorded and the recordings made available to students on Weblearn.

A weekly programme of students’ tutorial tasks will be prepared before the start of the semester and published on Weblearn, along with relevant reading, including brief programmatic statements (policy-makers’ speeches, political programmatic documents, editorials, etc.) accessible online, thus enabling all students to participate in every tutorial session.

The Weblearn site will also offer a selection of links to relevant databases, institutions, think-tanks and online publications.

 Upon completion of this module students will be better equipped to:
(1) Understand the function and operation of the “imposing edifice” of international legal rules and institutions identified by Henry Morgenthau in Power Among Nations;
(2) Understand the content of the main critiques and counter-proposals to the existing international legal order advanced from 1945 to the present day.

 There will be two assessment items corresponding to the two sections of the syllabus.

 Core reading

Martin Dixon, Textbook on International Law, 7th ed., (Oxford University Press, 2013)
‘The aims of Soviet foreign policy’ (Pravda editorial), Survival, 1965, issue 7.

Other reading

• Gerhard Bowering ed., Islamic Political Thought: An Introduction (Princeton, 2015)
• Ahmet Davutoglu, Alternative Paradigms: The Impact of Islamic and Western Weltanschaungs on Political Theory (University Press of America, 1994)
• Yong Deng; Fei-Ling Wang, China rising: power and motivation in Chinese foreign policy, (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005)
• William Hooker,  Carl Schmitt's International Thought : Order and Orientation (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
• Martti Koskenniemi, The gentle civilizer of nations : the rise and fall of international law, 1870-1960 (Cambridge, 2002)
• Marlène Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (John Hopkins, 2008)
• Margot Light, The Soviet Theory of International Relations (Wheatsheaf, 1988)
• G. I. Tunkin, Theory of International Law (Harvard, 1974)
• Rorden Wilkinson, ed., The Global Governance Reader (Routledge, 2005)