In This Issue – Reviews

In our Book Review section for this issue, we invite readers to reflect on international law’s institutions, concepts and subjects from the late Habsburg Empire, through the League of Nations, to the contemporary Security Council and the emergent language of resistance.

We open with Ville Kari’s discussion of Natasha Wheatley, The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty. Kari’s enthusiastic review underscores the importance of Wheatley’s reconstruction of Central European experiments in statehood and constitutionalism as a key constitutive moment in the formation of international legal ideas and institutions. The Life and Death of States returns to Georg Jellinek, Hans Kelsen and their circle of Austrian intellectuals, positioned at the heart of the turmoil that first fragmented and ultimately destroyed the Habsburg Empire. Wheatley is praised for powerfully connecting internal constitutional struggles to the remaking of the international legal order after 1919.

Felix Lange’s review of An International Anomaly. Colonial Accession to the League of Nations, by Thomas Gidney, focuses on the League era. Lange explores Gidney’s account of the colonial accession of India, Ireland and Egypt as an ‘international anomaly’. While he challenges the categorization of all three as ‘quasi-sovereign colonial entities’, Lange commends the book’s meticulous archival research. Gidney distils how imperial governments in each of these cases used League membership as a platform to enhance their colonial rule, which may help explain why anti-imperialist movements remained wary of the League as a fruitful arena for their endeavours. Nevertheless, despite such misgivings, Gidney also shows how membership could at the same time underwrite claims to self-determination and resistance.

Michel Erpelding’s review of Paulo Borba Casella’s International Law, History and Culture is quite critical of the wide range of ‘historical vignettes’ the book covers. At the same time, Erpelding emphasizes the important contribution of the book in its exploration of the Spanish- and Luso-American origins of uti possidetis (which predated the independence of the Latin American states in the 1820s), the delimitation of Brazil’s borders, and British imperialism in late 19th-century Brazil.

In The Human Right to Resist in International and Constitutional Law, Shannonbrooke Murphy offers a comprehensive study of the right to resist. Natalie Jones praises the author’s forensic and detailed analysis, while expressing reservations about some of the interpretative moves developed in the book. She regrets the limited engagement with case-studies and historical examples, but ultimately regards the work as ‘breaking new ground’ and as an important and particularly timely contribution to debates on resistance and legality.

This issue also includes Simon Chesterman’s review essay of Mona Ali Khalil and Floriane Lavaud, Empowering the UN Security Council: Reforms to Address Modern Threats, and the Max Planck trialogue by Congyan Cai, Larissa Van den Herik and Tiyanjana Maluwa (edited by Anne Peters and Christian Marxsen), The UN Security Council and the Maintenance of Peace in a Changing World. Chesterman draws on these two volumes to interrogate which reforms to the Security Council might actually make a difference, and what prospects there are for implementing them. The review offers a sympathetic but ultimately sober account of the pragmatic reform agenda advanced by Khalil and Lavaud, and of the more diagnostic, ‘multiperspectival’ trialogue by Cai, Van den Herik and Maluwa, which juxtaposes institutionalist optimism with realist scepticism about law’s capacity to constrain power. Chesterman leaves the reader with the sense that the core problem may be less a matter of institutional design than the waning willingness of states to sustain the Council’s authority, or one of mismatched expectations that the Security Council could ever fully maintain international peace and security.

Taken together, these reviews trace a longue durée trajectory from the conceptual and constitutional crises of the Habsburg world, through colonial ‘anomalies’ of League membership and broader historical–cultural engagements with international law, to contemporary debates about the right to resist and the future of the Security Council. Across very different genres and methods, they return us to enduring questions about who is represented, how legal concepts travel between constitutional and international planes, and what resources international law offers to – or withholds from – those who contest the existing order.

Finally, in keeping with our now well-established ‘Christmas tree’ tradition – a small ritual that EJIL has maintained for the past 12 years – we close the section with Joseph Weiler’s 10 Good Reads of 2025: a set of recommendations offered in the same spirit in which they have always been received, as a seasonal gesture to our readers and an invitation to carry these conversations into the holidays and beyond.