Since 2006, the Leiden Journal of International Law (LJIL) has been dedicating a series of special issues of its Articles section to the theme ‘International Law and the Periphery’. This issue marks the fourth in this series.
Previous issues have explored ramifications of this theme in the life and work of particular scholars: Chilean Alejandro Álvarez (1868–1960) and Nigerian Taslim Olawale Elias (1914–91). Each of these men was a prominent and influential international lawyer of geographically ‘peripheral’ natality in whose work centre-periphery passages and dynamics remained, to varying degrees, a preoccupation. There then followed an issue focused on a single nation or subcontinent: India. Contributions to that third special issue examined how Indian scholars have shaped and reshaped international law, how India's domestic legal system has received international law, and ways in which India has been projected by the international legal system.
This issue changes tack again by adopting an institutional and temporal focus. The articles in this issue explore various techniques and endeavours through which the ‘periphery’ (understood geographically, politically, economically, and discursively) was reconstituted in and by the work of the League of Nations and its agencies during the period between the First and Second World Wars. In so doing, they also confront one sense in which the League of Nations itself has been rendered peripheral in some accounts of international law. In remarks to the UN General Assembly in September 2002, for instance, US President George W. Bush spoke of the imperative of UN members showing that ‘unlike the League of Nations, our deliberations would be more than talk’. The contributions to this issue compel reconsideration of such prevailing tendencies to equate the League of Nations with failure and impotence in the making of world order. On the contrary, these contributions suggest that League agencies – and states and other actors working within the League – exerted considerable power in the formation and transformation of non-European nations and states during the interwar period. They suggest, moreover, that the imprint of this work remains discernible today, as much in central locales as in peripheral ones.
Contributors to this issue deploy various historiographical, analytical, critical, and doctrinal techniques in their reading of League records and League-related materials. From these readings, we can see how rich these materials remain for international lawyers puzzling over contemporary phenomena, including the persistence of dispossession, forced migration, ‘intentional hybridization’ (per Parfitt), violent intervention, trade-related deadlock, and postcolonial technologies on international law's peripheries. Also evident from this provocative and engaging body of work is how much more remains to be said on the theme of ‘International Law and the Periphery’. With that conviction, we invite any LJIL readers to volunteer ideas for subsequent issues in what is proving an intriguing series.
