The paper gives a very brief account of the most important historical milestones in the evolution of international organisations until 1945. Then, some material and ideational explanations for the emergence of international organisations in the 19th century are offered. The next sections deal...

In July 2010, the International Court of Justice rendered an Advisory Opinion on the conformity of the unilateral declaration of independence of Kosovo with international law. The paper examines the contribution of this opinion to the constitutionalization of international law....

The paper discusses five charges which are raised against international legal scholarship: (1) the charge of epistemic nationalism (that much or all international legal scholarship is (maybe inevitably) determined by the national background of the researcher and therefore suffers from a national...

This contribution examines the international legal relevance of the recent Crimean referendum, starting from the premise that, as a matter of international customary law, and as a matter of legal consistency and fairness, a free territorial referendum is emerging as a procedural conditio sine...

After Kosovo’s independence, politicians and the press of various territorial entities aspiring for independent statehood had pointed to the Kosovo ‘precedence’, for example Transdniestria, Nagorno-Karabakh, the Republika Srpska, and Palestine. Overall, both in the context of the...

International law feeds on preconditions which it cannot guarantee itself. International scholarship, too, must come to grips with pre-conditions and existing parameters over which it has no control itself. But such scholarship must not ‘succumb' to these factual and ideational realities by...

The concluding paper of the volume on the legal framework of the OSCE (forthcoming in Steinbrück Platise/Moser/Peters (eds), The Legal Framework of the OSCE, Cambridge University Press) brings together some of the main empirical and theoretical insights of the research project which has been...

The international law on reparation for victims of armed conflict is complex. Numerous subfields of international law are involved, among them international human rights law, international criminal law, international humanitarian law, and the law on State responsibility. In addition to this...

This paper (forthcoming in Steinbrück Platise/Moser/Peters (eds), The Legal Framework of the OSCE, Cambridge University Press) disentangles the complex questions relating to the legal status of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). It unfolds in five steps. First, the...

The German regime on the use of military force provides an important reference point for legal comparison. In a seminal judgment of 1994, the Constitutional Court identified a constitution-based requirement for each military deployment to have parliamentary approval. The formalities of the...