The Individual in International Law

Shifts across the corpus of international law have brought the international legal system into a closer alignment with the interests of the individual. This has led to a great and growing interest in the roles and status of individuals in international law, and provided new impulses for debate.
The Individual in International Law is an exploration of what is described as the humanisation of international law. It examines how international law has accommodated individuals, and how individual status, rights, and obligations have become denser and more important in the international legal system. Split into two parts, the book analyses the humanisation of international law in different historical periods and from various theoretical perspectives. The first part focuses on the historical evolution of international law, exploring how the interests of individuals have shaped the development of the legal system from antiquity to 1945, providing a counterpoint to State-centric readings of international law's history. The second part contains theoretical debates, critical approaches, and interdisciplinary investigations, offering perspectives from ius positivism and ius naturalism, Marxism, TWAIL, feminism, global law, global constitutionalism, law and economics, and legal anthropology. The book aims to stimulate further research on the humanisation and dehumanisation of new fields ranging from the ius contra bellum to climate law. The editors' introduction and conclusion frame the contributions, draw together their findings, and address critiques comprehensively.
Written by a team of acknowledged experts in their fields, this volume elucidates how the interests, rights, obligations, and responsibilities of individuals have shaped international norms and regimes, and suggests how a reoriented transformative humanism can inform and develop international law in an era of profound ideological, ecological, and technical challenge.
This is an open access title. It is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International licence. It is available to read and download as a PDF version on the Oxford Academic platform.

Tom Sparks is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, where he works on international environmental law, the humanisation of international law and legal theory. He wrote his doctoral thesis at the University of Durham, entitled Towards a Human-Centred International Law: Self-Determination and the Structure of the International Legal System. The thesis won the Global Policy North network of research universities' prize for the best doctoral dissertation of 2018. He is the author of Self-Determination in the International Legal System: Whose Claim, to What Right? (Hart 2023).
Anne Peters is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law Heidelberg, a professor at the universities of Heidelberg, Freie Universität Berlin, Basel, and Michigan. She has been a member of the European Commission for Democracy through Law (Venice Commission) in respect of Germany (2011-2015), served as the President of the European Society of International Law (2010-2012) and as President of the German Society of International Law (DGIR) (2019-2023). She is a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration and an associate member of the Institut de Droit International.