This book offers a wholly new way of thinking about the ideas, struggles and practices that constituted the 'historical' Cold War. In particular, it seeks to redescribe and defamiliarise what we might think of as Cold War international law in order to bring out a rich but now obscured plurality of law and legal forms during the period and to make visible the ways in which we live and work in the aftermath of this legal order. This book challenges the dominant myths about the history of the Cold War, arguing that far from being defined only by ideologically rivalry, the US and the Soviet Union were engaged in a conjoint project of world ordering.

‘Rival Legalities fundamentally re-orients received understandings of the cold war through a nuanced and illuminating account of the relationship between the history of law and the history of international relations. It brilliantly reinterprets how the encounter between competing legal worlds co-created a pluriverse of empire and resistance, risk and possibility.'

Vasuki Nesiah - New York University

‘This rich and illuminating reinterpretation of the Cold War, competing visions of international ordering and international law, will compel a re-evaluation of the discipline and its relationship to the Cold War. This is a valuable and rewarding book.'

Antony Anghie - National University of Singapore and University of Utah

‘Confronting the ongoing afterlives of the Cold War, this field-expanding work of legal history radiates with resistance against the foreclosure of alternative international legalities.'

Dimitri Van Den Meerssche - Queen Mary University of London

‘A vitally imagined and executed history that fundamentally resets our understanding of the Cold War. This fascinating and endlessly probing work offers a complex braiding of worldviews of and beyond the ‘Amero-Soviet' project as well as the part or parts claimed for public international law within that context. It is slow history undertaken at its cerebral best, complicating well-worn and well-rehearsed narratives that, in turn, richly refracts back on the very discipline itself. As elegant as it is enlightening, Craven, Pahuja and Simpson have delivered a masterclass in collaborative endeavour with rewards for the reader leaping off every page.'

Dino Kritsiosis - University of Nottingham

‘By unsettling the commonplace ‘Cold War' periodization that has narcotized the field of international law for decades, this book challenges us to reconsider what we know about the practice of international law, past and present, and wrestle with rival memories, imaginations and horizons of the ‘international' that remain urgent and necessary. Written with clarity, insight and wit, Rival Legalities is a welcome and important intervention, untimely in the best sense.'

Christopher Gevers - University of The Witwatersrand

‘This highly anticipated book provides a powerful conceptual framework for observers of international law. Rival Legalities comes at a crucial moment when the international legal order appears upended. The authors' brilliant theory of worldmaking offers desperately needed clarity on the future of the international. An essential guide for uncertain times.'

Jason Jackson - Massachusetts Institute of Technology