Rights and Civilizations: A History and Philosophy of International Law
Cambridge University Press, 11/26/2020
EAN 9781108464017, ISBN10: 1108464017
Paperback, 408 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
Rights and Civilizations, translated from the Italian original, traces a history of international law to illustrate the origins of the Western colonial project and its attempts to civilize the non-European world. The book, ranging from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, explains how the West sought to justify its own colonial conquests through an ideology that revolved around the idea of its own assumed superiority, variously attributed to Christian peoples (in the early modern age), Western 'civil' peoples (in the nineteenth century), and 'developed' peoples (at the beginning of the twentieth century), and now to democratic Western peoples. In outlining this history and discourse, the book shows that, while the Western conception may style itself as universal, it is in fact relative. This comes out by bringing the Western civilization into comparison with others, mainly the Islamic one, suggesting the need for an 'intercivilizational' approach to international law.
Preface to this English translation
Introduction
Acknowledgements
A note on the contents
Part I. Ius Gentium and the Origins of International Law
1. The rights of peoples and ius gentium
The origins of the modern age
2. Hugo Grotius and the law of peoples
3. Samuel Pufendorf and Emer de Vattel
Kant's 'miserable comforters'
4. The rights of man and cosmopolitan law
Kantian roots in the current debate on rights
Part II. International Law and Western Civilization
5. International law and Western civilization
6. International law, peace, and justice
Hans Kelsen's normativism
7. Realist perspectives
historiography, international law, international relations
8. Order and anarchy
the Grotian tradition
Part III. International Law, Islam, and the Third World
9. The law of peoples and international law
10. Islam and rights
Islamic and Arab charters of the rights of man
11. The Third World and international law
Part IV. Conditions for Peace
12. The foundation of human rights
an intercultural perspective
13. Parallel worlds
international governance and the (utopian?) principles of international law
Glossary of Arab terms
Index.