Cold War International Law

The Cold War is increasingly understood as our past, present and destiny. In this presentation we offer a wholly new way of thinking about the ideas, struggles and practices that constituted the “historical” Cold War. In particular, we seek to redescribe and defamiliarize what we might think of as cold war international law in order to bring out a rich but now obscured plurality of law and legal forms during the period and to make visible the ways in which we live and work in the aftermath of this legal order. Against a common narrative of the Cold War as a long aberration or interruption in the development of international law, we counterpose a rethinking of the Cold War as a time of rivalrous but mutually constitutive projects of internationalism.

Professor Gerry Simpson, Chair in Public International Law, LSE Law School

Professor Sundhya Pahuja, ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow and Director of the Laureate Research Program in Global Corporations and International Law, Melbourne Law School