Review of Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017) 608 pp. $30.00

Abstract

The thesis of The Internationalists is that the Kellogg Briand Pact of 1928 fundamentally reshaped the international legal order. By outlawing war, the Pact replaced one basic norm of international legal ordering with another. Hathaway and Shapiro present their argument in the form of a narrative, including biographical details about the central protagonists and vignettes about key meetings. They present it all with an eye not only to the importance of particular characters, but also to sheer coincidence. Underneath the sweeping historical narrative lies a serious, scholarly book with a central legal and philosophical argument. Hathaway and Shapiro use the history of international law from the seventeenth through the twentieth century to examine the nature of enforcement mechanisms, the relation between rights and remedies, issues of collective as opposed to individual responsibility, and—perhaps most strikingly—the changing status of neutrality.