In This Issue – Reviews

Our review section in this issue features two review essays and a regular review. In her essay, Mavluda Sattorova engages with three books dealing with international investment issues that arise during armed conflict. Sattorova invites us to understand the corporation as victim, contributor, beneficiary, perpetrator and accomplice of, and in situations of, conflict. Tracing the law’s ‘troublesome origins, biases and complicities’, she unveils a research agenda that tackles questions surrounding the extensive protections for foreign investors and continuing lack of corporate accountability.

Next up is Cait Storr’s review essay on ‘that little book’ referring to Jennings’ 1963 The Acquisition of Territory in International Law, recently republished by Manchester University Press. Storr offers an overview of how the law relating to territory has aged and argues that ‘the work is a prism that refracts the world of early 1960s international law.’ This is a deft and insightful essay that observes the ‘basic paradox at the heart of international law’, which is the universalization of the white liberal capitalist European expert.

The regular review is Matthias Goldmann’s review of Bénédicte Savoy’s Afrikas Kampf um seine Kunst. Geschichte einer postkolonialen Niederlage (now also available in English, as Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat). We are always glad to feature reviews of works in a language other than English, but this is an especially timely review of a book by an art historian of narratives surrounding the original looting of works of art from Africa, and contemporary calls for their restitution. Goldmann connects this discourse with debates surrounding the New International Economic Order and the importance for postcolonial nations to reclaim their cultural heritage in international law.