In This Issue

Opening the articles section of this issue, Negar Mansouri uses the French ‘wine laws’ of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to present a view of international economic law that challenges the neoclassical account of global economic integration. She traces a link between French efforts to protect its wine producers from the unexpected competition by wine from colonial Algeria and broader European efforts to secure legal protection for geographical indications. In tracing this link, she outlines a historical materialist account of geographical indications and highlights a form of state capitalism that deployed international law and ethno-nationalist imaginaries to promote national economies at the expense of free competition and economic integration.

In the next article, Bernhard Knoll-Tudor and Marko Prelec examine international supervision and co-administration in Bosnia and Herzegovina through the ongoing controversy regarding the appointment of the High Commissioner for Bosnia and Herzegovina. Delving into doctrinal questions of authorization, subsequent institutional practice, formation of procedural customary norms and fiduciary authority, the authors argue that the absence of United Nations Security Council approval invalidates the appointment of the current High Commissioner. They conclude that this invalidity poses a threat to the constitutional stability of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and raises a broader challenge to international institutionalism and international co-administration of territory.

This issue continues with a Focus section on the history of international investment law. In the first article, Alexis Galán and Nicolás M. Perrone unpack an under-explored milestone in the history of international investment law – the 1967 OECD Draft Convention on the Protection of Foreign Property. Although it was never adopted, the Draft Convention has played a significant role in shaping substantive protections in investment protection treaties. Through archival research into confidential treaty negotiations, the authors draw out the prominence – even at this early juncture – of issues that continue to resonate across international investment law: structural issues such as the differing interests of capital-exporting and importing states and the significant role of business groups, and substantive issues such as the definition of investment, corporate nationality, investor obligations, exceptions and dispute settlement.

In the next article of the Focus section, Wiebe Hommes and Laurens Ankersmit delve into the role of energy giant Shell in shaping international investment law. In doing so, they highlight corporate influence in the development of international law, as well as the imbrication of the interests of the oil industry in the current system of investor-state dispute settlement.

Next up, in the Critical Review of Jurisprudence section, Salvatore Fabian Nicolosi and Türkan Ertuna Lagrand analyse a series of cases from the Court of Justice of the European Union that examine and develop the accommodation of gender-related claims within the scope of European Union asylum legislation. Their analysis draws attention to the Court’s adoption of a gender-based reading of refugee law that gives effect to the refugee law concept of effective protection and strengthens the protection of women in refugee law.

This issue continues with an EJIL: Debate! Christiane Ahlborn responds to Orfeas Chasapis Tassinis’ take on the conceptual relation between the legal personality of states and of international organisations (in volume 36, issue 3) and highlights its limitations. She defends the possibility of analogising between international organisations and states and corporations  and argues that these established ways of thinking about international organisations are largely capable of producing the same results as Chasapis Tassinis’ framework.

The next section of this issue is the ESIL Corner. This section of the journal is dedicated to short reflections on and from the European Society of International Law’s annual conference. This edition of the ESIL Corner starts with Heike Krieger’s opening remarks at the 20th annual conference, held in Berlin in 2025. It continues with a series of contributions on the conference theme of ‘Reconstructing International Law’ – Qin (Sky) Ma on ‘fragile ambition’ as a productive site for reconstruction, Soheil Ghasemi on the disciplinary ambivalence of reconstruction, Marina Aksenova on the scale and potential of uncertainty that frames the current reconstructive effort, and Kyra Wigard on where to start with reconstruction. It concludes with a reflection on institutional neutrality and academic freedom from outgoing ESIL President Gleider I. Hernández.

In Roaming Charges, we feature a photograph titled ‘Life – it’s not always black and white’.

The Last Page of this issue is William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 – ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’.