Abstract Punitive practices are highly revealing of a society’s social fabric, normative order, and power structure. However, the social sciences and humanities have hitherto studied punishment mostly in the context of the nation-state by examining how people, organizations, and legal institutions punish individual offenders within national boundaries. In contrast, this chapter examines punitive practices of international society, where punitive practices have assumed three main forms: sanctions, international courts and tribunals, and the punitive use of armed force. A punitive lens on international affairs contributes to the understanding of international society in three ways: It identifies which norms and values are at the core of the international order and its conception of justice, it helps identify structures of power and authority in international society, and an analysis of the penal philosophies that buttress the punitive enforcement of norms points to the potential for conflict and cooperation in international society.

Legal systems across the world contain the obligation to prevent ‘absurd interpretations’ of law. In international law, an instruction to avoid ‘manifestly absurd’ interpretations can be found in Article 32 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. This gives rise to at least two questions that I will take up in this article. First, what is meant by the ‘absurd’ that is to be avoided in legal interpretation. The short answer to this question is: no one knows exactly. The absurd, by its very nature, resists definition in pre-given categories, as I will argue on the basis of four core thinkers on the absurd: Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Thomas Nagel. The second question is more technical and easier to answer: how should lawyers try to avoid absurd interpretations? Here, I turn to absurdist writing and the theatre of the absurd for assistance. Absurdist writing and theatre have developed a number of techniques to make the absurd appear, to let the audience experience that something is fundamentally out of tune. Lawyers use similar techniques, but in reverse and with an opposite purpose: they add exposition, narrative, reasonable language, and stable, rational legal personae. In this way, they boost the rationality and reasonableness of the legal order. However, to come full circle, it is exactly the pretension of rationality and reasonableness that makes the law vulnerable to manifestations of the absurd. The rationality of law is the springboard for the very same absurdity it tries to suppress.

Moot Court Competitions, Experimental Moot Courts and Documentary Role Plays To be an international lawyer is to perform international law behavior. As Schechner has put it, ‘Performance means: never for the first time. It means for the second to the nth time. Performance is twice-behaved behavior’ (Schechner, 1985, p. 36). Moot courts are a classical way to teach students ‘twice-behaved legal behavior’. In international law, moot court competitions have proliferated lately. However, the format of the moot court is copied rather uncritically, and not much attention is devoted to other, more reflexive theatrical means. In this article I try to open up space for such critical thinking beyond moot courts. I study moot courts as a form of performance, as a re-enactment. This perspective on moot courts allows me to focus on one of the core questions brought up in existing studies on re-enactments: who or what is re-enacted in such role plays? The equally main question is whether it is possible to reenact court cases differently. In order to answer this question, I will explore two alternative forms of reenactment of international law behavior: experimental moot courts and documentary role-plays. I examine what sort of behavior, what sort of character is restored in these two other forms of role-play.

Daniel Joyce’s book is more than a publication. It is a testimony to courage. When he started this book project, I had a few brief chats with the author. He harboured doubts, as some experienced scholars in the field had given him free advice: do not take up such a vague and undefined topic. International law is about sources and rules and their application; not about media and public communication. The author wisely decided to ignore this free advice, to follow his own intuition and curiosity instead. The result is the topic of this symposium: Informed Publics, Media and International Law, a remarkable and important book. The book also shows that Joyce’s premature critics suffer from lack of knowledge of the history of the discipline. What may sound like a hip, twenty-first century topic, was actually already discussed extensively in 1907, with the launch of the very first issue of the American Journal of International Law. Joyce’s book discusses how Elihu Root opened that issue with an editorial discussing the need for an enlightened public, one that is morally and legally educated about its rights and entitlements.1 The book traces the attention to the notion of public opinion in the discipline since then, pointing, for example, to Hersch Lauterpacht’s belief in a well-informed public opinion as a source of legitimacy and effectiveness in international law.2 The book could even have gone back much further in history, pointing at the ‘right to communicate’ which underpinned Francesco de Vitoria’s natural law foundations of international law. The rise of international law is, after all, closely tied to colonial expansion and the corresponding imperatives to travel, trade and communicate.3 In any case, the book makes a clear point: publics, communication and media have always been a central topic for international lawyers (and for good reason). What has changed of course are the particular forms through which information and communication are mediated. Since ‘the media is the message’, it is essential to keep updating how international law is mediated and how international law defines and seeks to regulate the media. Because of this, Joyce’s book is a welcome and original contribution to the field. It is also a book that fits within a longer tradition in international law. This is not only true for the very topic (media and international law), but also for the main concern expressed in the book: how to facilitate informed, enlightened publics?

Acts of repetition abound in international law. Security Council Resolutions typically start by recalling, recollecting, recognising or reaffirming previous resolutions. Expert committees present restatements of international law. Students and staff extensively rehearse fictitious cases in presentations for moot court competitions. Customary law exists by virtue of repeated behaviour and restatements about the existence of rules. When sources of international law are deployed, historically contingent events are turned into manifestations of pre-given and repeatable categories. This book studies the workings of repetition across six discourses and practices in international law. It links acts of repetition to similar practices in religion, theatre, film and commerce. Building on the dialectics of repetition as set out by Søren Kierkegaard, it examines how repetition in international law is used to connect concrete practices to something that is bound to remain absent, unspeakable or unimaginable.

There is a long-standing dispute between the African Union and the International Criminal Court. At one level, this dispute concerns legal-technical questions such as immunities of heads of states, the identification of customary law, or the scope of resolutions of the UN Security Council. However, underlying these legal disputes are highly political questions regarding recognition, respect, and equality. The African Union has addressed these questions in a series of formal Decisions, adopted by its highest organ, the Assembly of Heads of State and Government. These Decisions reveal what gives the more doctrinal debates their political bite. In addition, these Decisions present the stance of the African Union in the form and with the authority of law, thus binding member states and presenting a unified position vis-à-vis the International Criminal Court and other international audiences. Political struggles are thus partly articulated in legal form, a type of “argumentation through law” that attaches formal validity to claims about membership, recognition, and equality.

As one of many portraits collected in Immi Tallgren’s eye-opening portrait gallery of (forgotten) women in International Law, this chapter paints a picture of Gezina van der Molen. Contrary to many of the women discussed in this book, Van der Molen was already recognized as a significant actor in the world of international law and relations in her day. In many of her roles she was the first woman in a man’s world: the first woman to obtain a doctorate at the Free University of Amsterdam; the first female professor at that university; the first woman to be appointed as a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. For Van der Molen, it was not so much the positions that were important, but the work she could do through those positions – work that she had also pursued as a resistance fighter in the Second World War and in various social groups. This work was initially heavily inspired by the religious and moral principles of the church to which she belonged: the Neo-Calvinist. But her increasing encounter with plurality created a dilemma that still confronts international lawyers today: given that there are many different readings of what justice requires, who should be able to determine its meaning in concrete circumstances? In one prominent role, that of Chairwoman of the ‘Committee for War Foster Children’, it was Van der Molen who was to a large extent responsible for deciding just that. It has been her insistence on equality without wanting to recognize cultural differences as being legally relevant that has turned her into a pioneer who cannot be celebrated.

In 1970 the first Netherlands Yearbook of International Law (NYIL) was published. The current Volume is No. 50, which means that the Yearbook has now been with us for half a century. The current General Editors decided not to let this moment pass unnoticed, and have devoted this entire Volume to an analysis of the phenomenon of Yearbooks in international law as such. Indeed, not many academic disciplines have Yearbooks, so why do we? What is the added value of having a Yearbook alongside the abundance of international law journals, regular monographs and edited volumes that are produced each year? Does the existence of Yearbooks tell us something about who we are, or who we think we are, or what we have to contribute to the world?

Articles.- Why Criminal Culpability Should Follow the Critical Path: Reframing the theory of 'Effective Control'.- Dimensions under International Law Linked to the Dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles.- The Continental Shelf in the Polar Regions: Cold War or Black-Letter Law?.- Interaction between EU Law and International Law in the Light of Intertanko and Kadi: The Dilemma of Norms Binding the Member States but Not the Community.- Documentation.- Classification Scheme.- Netherlands State Practice for the Parliamentary Year 2007-2008.- Treaties and Other International Agreements to Which the Kingdom of the Netherlands is a Party.- Netherlands Municipal Legislation Involving Questions of Public International Law, 2008.- Netherlands Judicial Decisions Involving Questions of Public International Law, 2007-2008.

I have always felt ambivalent about coaching teams for moot courts competitions. While these competitions offer very valuable experiences for students and a lot of fun in the preparation stage, they also force teams and their supervisors to focus on a very particular form of competition. The competition takes place in an artificial environment that often has little to do with how international law is most often applied in practice. What is more: students are trained to compete; as if winning is the most important part of the exercise. In this chapter, I explore my ambivalence about moot court competitions. To that end, I treat those competitions as theatrical exercises in two different ways: (a) as theatrical re-enactments and dress rehearsals at the same time (see section ‘Moot courts as representations of past and future’); as a series of rehearsals in preparation for a performance (see section ‘Moot courts and rehearsal traditions’). Building on two traditions in theater rehearsal, I develop a critical take on moot courts and sketch some possible avenues for alternative ways of rehearsing legal practices.