The Law of an International Civil Society: The Road Not Taken - Lecture by Martti Koskenniemi

VUB Honorary Doctor Martti Koskenniemi will deliver the keynote speech to the symposium ‘Imagining Peace in the Long Nineteenth Century. In search of New Actors and Vocabularies’. The symposium aims to investigate unofficial forms of normative peace-thinking in the long nineteenth century.

In the period roughly between 1789 and 1914, political, legal, economic, and cultural developments made a radical and lasting impact on the possible representations of peace. Significant sections of European and American society came to define peace not simply as the mere ‘absence of war’, but as a desirable, long-term condition in which disputes were consistently settled pacifically.

Changing patterns of communication and political agency increasingly enabled new actors from within civil society to contest these realities. Outside of the narrow circles of government and high diplomacy, a plethora of new actors campaigned for a new kind of international law. Their ideal was ‘peace through law’.

Our symposium investigates the legal imagination of ordinary lawyers, philanthropists, economists, feminists, nationalists, and pacifists. In his public opening lecture, professor Koskenniemi will engage with these questions. What were the roads not taken?