Anything Can Be Rescinded (alt. title: When Can You Start a War?)

By artappraiser on Wed, 04/25/2018 - 1:41am |

Book review by Isabel Hull @ London Review of Books, for April 2018 print issue (free online), of The Internationalists and Their Plan to Outlaw War by Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro , 608 pp, September 2017. Lede:

Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro’s point is that ‘for all its problems, the New World Order is better than the Old.’ Theirs is a valuable reminder that law matters and that international co-operation is not a utopia, but a functioning reality. Recently, it has been hard to hear that truth above the din produced by bad actors, like Putin and Trump, and by criticism of the neoliberal order from the left and the populist right, which obscures the positive effects of internationalism. What’s more, we take for granted a world in which the assumption is that countries will not engage in war.

URL:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n08/isabel-hull/anything-can-be-rescinded