Ezgi Yildiz - Böcker

How does international law change? How does it adapt to meet global challenges in a volatile social and political context? The Many Paths of Change in International Law offers fresh, theoretically informed, and empirically rich answers to these questions. It traces drivers, conditions, and consequences of change across the different fields of international law and paints a complex and varied picture very much in contrast with the relatively static imagery prevalent in many accounts today.Drawing on inspirations from international law, international relations, sociology, and legal theory, this book explores how international law changes through means other than treaty-making. Highlighting the social dynamics through which different areas and institutional contexts have generated their own pathways, it presents a theoretical framework for tracing change processes and the conditions that affect their success. Based on this framework, each contribution illuminates the paths of change we observe in contemporary international law. The explorations centre on strategies, forms, forces, and social contexts and draw on primary source material and in-depth case studies. Overall, the volume offers a fascinating account of an international legal order in flux-with a dynamic not captured through traditional doctrinal lenses-and helps situate change processes and their varied implications in international law and politics. A relevant book for everyone wanting to understand change and its consequences in international law.This is an open access title. It is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International licence. It is available to read and download as a PDF version on the Oxford Academic platform.

How does international law change? How does it adapt to new contexts and meet new challenges? The typical answer to these questions makes international law appear rather static, due to high hurdles for change and formal rules that require widespread agreement among states. In reality, however, change is far more common: new legal norms and understandings are generated constantly through the practices of legal actors. This book explores these actual, often gradual processes of international legal change. Combining qualitative analysis and statistical examination of data derived from twenty-five cases across eight subfields, the book offers the most systematic study to date of international legal change in practice beyond treaty-making. It approaches international law as a discursive process characterized by distinctive, socially constructed communities and authorities, and identifies five distinct paths through which legal change occurs. These paths shape who can act, how change is framed, and whether and under what conditions it gains traction, and they - and their relative weight - vary heavily across the different areas of international law. On these paths, change comes about in ways which defy common expectations of a state-centric international law: the analysis presented in the book shows that the success of change attempts depends less on broad state support or even the support of major powers, but to a greater extent on support from authorities and institutions in the respective fields. The result is an international law that may not be dynamic enough to cope with the speed of change in today's accelerated world, but one that is significantly more dynamic than is usually assumed.

When international courts are given sweeping powers, why would they ever refuse to use them? The book explains how and when courts employ strategies for institutional survival and resilience: forbearance and audacity, which help them adjust their sovereignty costs to pre-empt and mitigate backlash and political pushback. By systematically analysing almost 2,300 judgements from the European Court of Human Rights from 1967-2016, Ezgi Yildiz traces how these strategies shaped the norm against torture and inhumane or degrading treatment. With expert interviews and a nuanced combination of social science and legal methods, Yildiz innovatively demonstrates what the norm entails, and when and how its contents changed over time. Exploring issues central to public international law and international relations, this interdisciplinary study makes a timely intervention in the debate on international courts, international norms, and legal change. This book is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.