This introduction to Part II explains why the WCC shifted toward a “liberationist” human rights agenda in the late 1960s and 1970s. One key factor was Cold War détente, which opened up space for criticism of the Cold War deadlock and the superpower interventionism it supposedly justified. Another was decolonization, which contributed to a global reconfiguration of Christianity. These enabled the rise of the New Left, which favored grassroots activism over bureaucratic structures and projected hopes for political renewal onto the Third World. While often overlooked because of the simultaneous process of secularization, especially in Western Europe, religion played an important role in the ferment of the 1960s. Liberation theology, emanating above all from Latin America, inspired much of the WCC’s new agenda, which was defined by its overtly political positioning against liberalism and alignment with socialism and especially anti-imperialism. The WCC’s course contrasted with the liberal rights agenda of Amnesty, the statist agenda espoused by postcolonial leaders promoting a New International Economic Order, and the anticommunism of more conservative actors, like US evangelicals.

What was Pahlavi Iran’s role in the 1974 declaration of the New International Economic Order? How does this history, largely ignored and dismissed, alter political theories of decolonization? The Pahlavi state’s diplomatic efforts from 1968 until the 1979 revolution were a reflection of Iran’s semi-colonial history. Iran occupied an intermediary posture alongside peers who espoused anticolonial visions of nondomination more recognizable as revolutionary. The state’s posture is illegible in regnant theories of decolonization. To see it, scholars must adopt methods attuned to imprecision. Pahlavi state diplomacy thus set the stage for a popular transnational revolutionary movement, which would assume an intermediary posture of its own.

This chapter reevaluates the origins and political significance of the “neoconservative turn” in American politics. Focusing on prominent Cold War liberals such as Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Norman Podhoretz, Eugene V. Rostow, and Charles Tyroler, it challenges the prevailing view that these figures merely shifted rightward in response to the Democratic Party’s leftward turn and the radicalism of the 1960s. Instead, it argues that their transition to neoconservatism was rooted in the conservative elements intrinsic to Cold War liberalism itself, particularly its emphasis on national security, military power, and global hegemony. By tracing the networks and institutions – both political and literary – that sustained the influence of these individuals, the chapter reveals how Cold War liberals reshaped their ideology to accommodate the changing political landscape of the 1970s, without, however, abandoning their core principles. Central to this transformation were organizations such as the Democratic National Committee and publications such as Commentary and The Public Interest, which provided platforms for these figures to align with conservatives while preserving their liberal heritage. This reinterpretation underscores the continuity between Cold War liberalism and neoconservatism, reframing the latter as an adaptive evolution rather than a radical departure.

In crosscurrents of the shift away from an imperial world order surfaced another contentious debate over changing hierarchies within human rights: Were universal human rights primarily about socioeconomic rights (requiring states to strengthen social welfare and economic opportunity), or were they about the right of individuals to exercise their civil and political rights? In underscoring a need for histories of socioeconomic rights that account for interactions between civil, economic, political, and social rights over a long timespan, Steven L. B. Jensen questions the historical accuracy of too stark of a distinction. At the crossroads of decolonization and Cold War geopolitics, however, leaders of liberal democracies insisted that the political and civil rights of the individual were the most important in the universal package, while socialist states emphasized socioeconomic rights (the right to education, the right to work, the right to development) that could benefit individuals as part of their collective belonging, thus furthering the cause of the socialist revolution.

As the first chapter in Part One (which describes the book’s two main characters – sustainable development and the World Bank exemplifying the IFIs – and narrates how their paths meet), chapter 1 maps the international community’s varied and evolving understandings of sustainable development, drawing particular attention to how these understandings overlap with and echo themes from early attempts to reform international economic law, ie the legal rules governing the global economic order, and the contemporary efforts to codify the human right to development.

The tumultuous early years of the 1973–1982 conference placed enormous strains on both the developing countries and the maritime powers. The ‘group of seventy-seven’ managed to secure recognition of the 200-mile exclusive economic zone and a consent regime for marine scientific research. But the divisions within the group, along with the pressures exerted on it by the powers, meant that they achieved less than they had originally hoped for, with the coastal states losing out to the powers over military activities in the exclusive economic zone, and the landlocked and geographically disadvantaged states losing out to the coastal states over guaranteed access to fishing surpluses. By contrast, the powers’ ‘group of five’ made a strong start to the conference, securing their navigational interests in the territorial sea, then in straits, and then in archipelagos and the exclusive economic zone. Consensus worked in their favour, allowing them, as a minority, to prevail over the majority. But having secured their initial objectives, their incentive to continue cooperating with each other would be weakened as they entered the final stretch of the conference.

In 1967, Tanzania nationalized many foreign companies as part of the Arusha Declaration’s effort to create socialism and self-reliance. Among the most important were the dominant British banks that shaped investment and exported capital. Building on transcripts, private diaries, correspondence from Barclays Bank, as well as other sources, this chapter analyses how politically independent Tanzania endeavored to remake finance. Economic self-determination depended, in part, on the negotiations between Barclays and Tanzania over how much compensation government would pay for the 1967 expropriation. At stake was not merely a final price; instead, the struggle for economic sovereignty depended on the ability to determine the accounting protocols through which price would be calculated and even to define the bundle of different assets that would be subject to valuation. It was on these technicalities that postcolonial statecraft depended, meaning formulas and figures were imbued with political importance and ethical significance. Yet, ultimately, Tanzania found its authority to govern value was stymied by the enduring inequalities of the global capitalist order.

Most ICC commentators are enthusiastic about the promise of management as a way to optimise the court’s performance. Yet few are as eager to historicise the practices they advocate. Chapter 2 seeks to read the court’s managerial present through its past deployments, journeys, and consequences for other institutional projects long predating the contemporary Rome Statute system. The chapter begins by tracing the uses of management in such institutions as the plantation, war, and the nineteenth-century factory before following them as they entered the practice of early international institutions. Beyond these spaces, a major part of management’s pre-history lies in its invocation at the United Nations after decolonisation. The chapter demonstrates that two of management’s key assumptions – regarding its lack of history and its claim to political neutrality – are only the ‘truth effects’ of protracted expert and political struggle within various institutional spaces. The most important of these for the ICC has been the United Nations, where management formed part of a counter-strategy against the democratisation efforts of newly decolonised states. Whilst purportedly neutral today, the management practices taken up at the ICC continue to bear the scars of these earlier political wins and losses.

This chapter considers the concept of permanent sovereignty over natural resources as articulated in the New International Economic Order (NIEO) project. At the NIEO’s core was the push to consolidate the legal status of ‘permanent sovereignty’ over natural resources. This idea’s champions argued that ownership and control of resources is an essential and necessary element of statehood, one that involves the right to nationalize foreign-held property. By contrast, its critics contended that no state could lawfully seize assets of foreign investors without compensation. They also insisted that the quantity of such compensation should be determined by international law, or through international arbitration, in the event of disagreement. While most aspects of the NIEO, including resource sovereignty, had been debated for some time, partly during broader discussions of neocolonialism and uneven development within the UN Conference on Trade and Development, it was only in 1974 that the project was formalized in a set of General Assembly resolutions. This project was largely the expression of a desire on the part of political and legal elites in the global South to renegotiate their roles in the world capitalist system, reforming rather than repudiating the existing international order.

Helmut Schmidt’s Germany helped to found several multilateral institutions in the mid-1970s. Chapter 14 opens with the European Council, a thrice-annual gathering of EC-9 leaders that reasserted the primacy of European nation-states over supranational governance. Schmidt reconciled with Britain, acceding to the Regional Fund in hopes of swaying a British referendum on EC membership. The CSCE summit, held in Helsinki, was a milestone for East-West détente – though Bonn’s relations with the USSR remained strained, even as improvements with Poland were achieved. The Federal Republic fell into recession, and Schmidt fretted about Global South proposals for a New International Economic Order. Bonn’s response was to court major countries individually, highlighting Germany’s interest in positive trade relations while loosening controls on weapons exports and nuclear commerce. Economic anxiety also animated Schmidt’s urgent demands on allies to cooperate in staving off protectionism. Informal coordination with Britain, France, and the United States became commonplace, a more structured grouping, the G-7 (adding Japan, Italy, and soon Canada), reestablished confidence in Western leadership.

This chapter looks at the direction the debates on social and economic human rights took after the adoption of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1966 and until the late 1980s. The focus is on the United Nations as the debates here reflected larger political questions about the meaning and relevance of social and economic rights as obligations in the unfolding post-colonial world. With decolonisation, the former colonial powers had been ‘liberated’ from the obligations of empire while many rulers in newly independent states used the new-found sovereignty to avoid scrutiny of the broad range of human rights. Decolonisation proved to be the perfect storm for social and economic rights denial. This would be further entrenched by expanding neo-liberal reforms and debt management leading to the ‘lost decade’ for development during the 1980s. Despite social and economic rights being continually neglected, the chapter argues that they always remained central to the problem of human rights.

This chapter uses a single case study – the NGO response to calls for a new imternational economic order (NIEO) – to analyse the mechanics of the global justice movement in the 1970s and the future it created for non-governmental aid. This NIEO ‘imaginary’ had a long history, rooted in the ethical consumerism of the anti-slavery movement, nineteenth century consumer ‘buycotts’, and the rise of alternative trading organisations in the aftermath of the Second World War. But it was also the product of the very specific ideological environment from which the NGO sector emerged. As this chapter shows, the debate surrounding the NIEO produced a conflict between welfarists and economic liberals about the kind of world they wished to build. Along the way, however, it also revealed much about the moral foundations on which non-governmental aid was constructed: its hierarchical nature, its politics and its ideological base. The chapter ends with a reflection on the NGO sector that this commitment to fair trade made. Put simply, it rooted its success in a commitment to reform rather than revolution – and an approach that was fundamentally incompatible with the radicalisation of aid.

This chapter uses a single case study – the NGO response to calls for a new imternational economic order (NIEO) – to analyse the mechanics of the global justice movement in the 1970s and the future it created for non-governmental aid. This NIEO ‘imaginary’ had a long history, rooted in the ethical consumerism of the anti-slavery movement, nineteenth century consumer ‘buycotts’, and the rise of alternative trading organisations in the aftermath of the Second World War. But it was also the product of the very specific ideological environment from which the NGO sector emerged. As this chapter shows, the debate surrounding the NIEO produced a conflict between welfarists and economic liberals about the kind of world they wished to build. Along the way, however, it also revealed much about the moral foundations on which non-governmental aid was constructed: its hierarchical nature, its politics and its ideological base. The chapter ends with a reflection on the NGO sector that this commitment to fair trade made. Put simply, it rooted its success in a commitment to reform rather than revolution – and an approach that was fundamentally incompatible with the radicalisation of aid.

In this chapter, the method of ‘frame-determination’ for IIA expropriation clauses is applied and three limits of the actus reus condition of typical IIA expropriation clauses are identified. (1) On the macro-structural level, concerning the interaction of IIA clauses with the rest of international law, facile references to customary international law are shown to be problematic: ‘’ in IIAs does not refer to a customary norm of certain validity and great specificity. (2) On the micro-structural level, the necessity of treating direct and indirect expropriation as fully equivalent is structurally inherent in typical IIAs. (3) All legality conditions are equal and cannot be doubled in the actus reus of indirect expropriation. The structure of typical IIA clauses does not support the majority of arguments based on ‘police powers’ or on a ‘right to regulate’.

International investment law and arbitration has a long history dating back to the nineteenth century. It has since developed and adapted following the political and societal forces at work both domestically and internationally. The balance between the interests of developing States and developed States and, more fundamentally, between public and private interests have played a key role in this process. It can be seen that the balance struck between these interests at different periods of time explains to a large extent the evolutive features of this field of law. This holds true with regards to the set of rules governing both the relations of foreign investors with the States in which they invest and the settlement of the disputes between them.

To make sense of this evolution and for the purpose of contextualising the analysis of international investment law and arbitration provided in the textbook, Chapter 1 distinguishes between three key stages in its history and analyses the respective societal context and legal features pertaining to each. These stages are: (1) the origin of international investment law and arbitration; (2) its emergence as a proper field of international law; and (3) the rise and then crisis this field of law has known since the 1990s.

This chapter inquires into the role of money, debt, and finance in colonial expansion, as well as practical attempts to decolonize financial and monetary regimes.

This chapter examines the law of extractive resources and money to clarify law’s constitutive role in political economy and, in particular, its implication in the expansion of exploitation. It also indicates how at various past junctures certain legal institutions have been chosen over possible alternatives. It, thus, draws attention to the “institutional toolbox” available for identifying ways in which law may re-configure and transform political economy. More specifically, the chapter explores the distributive effects that law generates - by allocating jurisdiction and exploitation rights, as well as by submitting distribution conflicts either to resolution through political procedures or market mechanisms. It explains how the principles of permanent sovereignty over natural resources and monetary sovereignty provide the basis not only for domestic, but also for international politics to be conducted in the legal framework of international organisations (international commodity agreements and the IMF). The chapter proceeds to trace how the assertion of government control over natural resources led to the expansion and proliferation of markets, not only because it prompted the emergence of a transnational economic law, but also as it contributed to the reverse integration of the industry and consequent changes in the structure of commodity trade. The chapter points to linkages between resource extraction and trade on the one hand and the demise of Bretton Woods and liberalisation of capital markets on the other hand with the effect of further reducing the scope for politics. Finally, it proposes to take a closer look at monetary design both as a driver of extraction and as a potential means to contain exploitation.

At the Havana conference of 1947–1948, development emerged as the top priority of the International Trade Organization (ITO). But the failure to establish the ITO meant that developing countries had to work with GATT to make trade serve development goals. This chapter examines key moments (including rounds of trade negotiations, the establishment of UNCTAD, the opening of the International Trade Centre, the addition of a development chapter to the General Agreement, and the campaign to establish a New International Economic Order) and issues (such as quantitative restrictions, preferential tariffs, textiles) to try to make GATT and trade support developing countries. Clashing conceptions of development, the pursuit of individual priorities, and disagreements and rivalry among developing countries undermined efforts to reform GATT. Although developing countries have been portrayed as ill-suited to GATT, this chapter argues that they were constructive members, sometimes leaders and ultimately champions of GATT and a rules-based trade system. The story of development displaces the Cold War as the dominant framework of postwar international relations, challenges the idea of American hegemony, and reveals how GATT perpetuated a racialized global order.