This is a totally updated version of a dictionary first published a dozen years ago (Boczek, 2005). Reviewing that title our reviewer, Stuart Hannabuss, said that “For anyone familiar with international law […] this dictionary will have few surprises but will be recognised immediately as a very useful work” (RR 2006/135). He went on to say “[…]specialists in politics, environment, human rights, maritime law and intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations will find much of more focussed interest”.
The same comments could apply to this new book, with, unfortunately, some reservations. The first, and most surprising, is that I cannot find anything in here about the increasing power of international corporations. Even when reviewing the Handbook of International Law (Aust, 2010) I noted that “Economic power is increasingly in the hands of corporations with their headquarters in one country, their tax registration in another, and their computer servers in yet another” (RR 2011/65). In the intervening eight years, the FAANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) have grown in power and influence to the extent that no individual nation-state can stand up to them, with the possible exception of China. The power of the state is withering away, though not, perhaps, in the way that Marx would have expected. No international organization has yet managed to get a grip on the FAANGs, though the EU has tried to make a start. If major corporations answerable to no one can wield such enormous political and social influence, I would expect a book like this to at least notice the absence of any effort to control them. Negative facts need to be recorded.
More unfortunately, this book is sadly dated. For those of us who have been observing international relations over the past half-century or so, it has seemed as though there has been an erratic but perceptible progress towards an international consensus. When reviewing Aust, I expressed the personal view that “people historically have been happier in large loose multicultural empires than they have been in monolithic states. It seems plausible to me that the independent nation-state may eventually come to be seen as an odd West European aberration, propped up by Woodrow Wilson […] which has caused considerable problems for the rest of the world”.
This dictionary bears the publication date of 2018, but clearly has been some years in gestation. The most recent reference I noticed was to a 2016 publication, and most are earlier. The past few years have seen a huge increase in conflict – in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, etc. – with a concomitant increase in the number of refugees. There is no entry for refugees here, though there are international agreements on the subject. There is no entry for migrants either, though climate change, economic and population pressures are, at the time of my writing this review, straining international agreements to near breaking point. The decision of the UK to leave its obvious close international group of friendly states has put a strain on the EU. The rise of President Putin to absolute power in Russia and the election of his puppet/pupil/similar-minded colleague (delete whichever you feel is not applicable) in America has meant that the post-war consensus of the slow increase in formal international co-operation is ending. I feel sure that the author, if he was starting to write this book now, would have felt obliged to give it a far less upbeat and optimistic tone.
International law has a long but wavering history. Early empires tended, at first, to be unaware of the existence of other independent states. The Historical Dictionary of the Mongol World Empire (Buell and Fiaschetti 2018), reviewed elsewhere in these columns, says that the Mongol term for foreigner at the time of Genghis Khan was the same as the word for rebel. A distinction between the two came later. This book claims that the first recorded ‘international’ treaty was that which established the border between the Sumerian city-states of Lagash and Umma in c. 2500 BCE. The chronology here goes up to the election of Donald Trump, obviously squeezed in at the last minute. There are some unexpected omissions to it – I could not see any mention of the Schleswig-Holstein Question, which triggered off the rise of Prussian military aggression in the nineteenth century, for example.
The author of this book is a renowned international human rights lawyer, who has brought an enormous amount of expertise to the task. The book contains a list of acronyms and abbreviations; a glossary of foreign-language (mainly Latin) legal terms; an extensive list of treaties and legal cases; the chronology, starting in 2500 BCE but concentrating mainly on more recent years; a lengthy and informative introductory essay; the dictionary proper; and a small select bibliography of recent relevant English-language publications and online resources. The dictionary proper contains about 400 entries, taking up 580 pages. The entries vary from brief definitions to short essays. Thus, as examples, the definition of Bilateral Treaties takes up about a quarter of a page, the discussion of Biodiversity takes up three pages, and Law of the Sea takes five. Cross-references are indicated in bold type.
The target reader here is obviously someone with a bit of a background in the field, but most of the entries should be comprehensible to a reasonably well educated general reader. There were only one or two places I noticed where a general law dictionary might have proved useful for back-up definitions. This book could therefore be used in public reference libraries, though I suspect that its main use will be in law libraries, government offices, libraries of non-governmental organizations, etc.
I fear that another, updated edition will be needed very shortly. My only hope is that there will be enough international cooperation left by then to fill a new edition for us.
