CANCELLED: Book Launch of the Cambridge Handbook of the League of Nations and International Law

Book launch followed by a Q&A with the audience.

Unfortunately, the event is postponed until further notice. 

This event celebrates the publication of The Cambridge Handbook of the History of the League of Nations and International Law. Edited by historians Haakon A. Ikonomou (UCPH), Karin van Leeuwen (Maastricht University) and Morten Rasmussen (UCPH), the book presents a new history, as it is the first time that historians and legal scholars have used extensive archival resources to systematically explore the relationship between international law and the League of Nations.

When negotiating the Versailles Treaty in 1919, the Great Powers opted for a decisional logic at the heart of the new international order that was deeply political and limited the role of the planned new world court. Key protagonists such as British Prime Minister Lloyd George and US President Woodrow Wilson considered the vision of peace through law to be an unrealistic utopia. Nevertheless, despite this setback for international law, the establishment of the League of Nations meant that the world now had multilateral machinery within which international law could operate. International law evolved from being a nineteenth-century instrument of imperial and interstate relations, implemented through a diplomatic apparatus, ad hoc arbitrations and the occasional multilateral conference, to becoming a catalyst and, in turn, a product of institutionalised world ordering. The interlinking of the League of Nations and international law was transformative, and this multilateral order – fragile, contested and experimental though it was — acted as the first mass producer of embryonic global governance.

The twenty-one chapters of the handbook offers different episodes and examples of what role international law played in the League of Nations and brings out with new empirical clarity both the strengths and weaknesses of international law and legal techniques in the building of the first system of global governance.

The book launch offers presentations of the book editors followed by a Q&A with the audience.