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Tom Ginsburg, Democracies and International Law, Cambridge University Press, 2021, 329 pp, £29.99 (hb) doi: 10.1017/9781108914871
Never judge a book by its … well, title! Democracies and International Law, Tom Ginsburg’s newest book, is as much about authoritarian states – and their engagement with international law – as it is about democracies. For those familiar with the author’s more recent work, this will not come as a surprise. Indeed, the book can be seen as a culmination of Ginsburg’s earlier reflections on the erosion of democracy and the rise of authoritarian governance in many parts of the world and the various consequences that these phenomena have, or might have, for international law and international institutions. 1
When looking closer at Democracies and International Law (which grew out of the Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures given by Ginsburg at Cambridge in March 2019) it soon becomes clear that the monograph is essentially made up of three major inquires, which are conceptually related but, in many ways, also reflect fairly autonomous debates that may well stand for themselves, as independent scholarly expositions. In that sense, the first issue taken up by Ginsburg is mainly of a socio-political nature and centres on whether and, if so, why democracies differ from autocracies in their use of international law (Chapters 1 and 2). The author then sets out to examine whether international law and international institutions might help protect democracy against outright assaults and incremental erosion (Chapters 3 and 4). Lastly, Ginsburg turns to the future shape of the international normative framework ‘in an era dominated by authoritarian and not democratic regimes’. 2 In so doing, he first introduces the reader to the key concept of ‘authoritarian international law’ (Chapter 5), before specifically focusing on China and its engagement with international law (Chapter 6). Some suggestions as to what might be done to preserve what the author calls ‘prodemocratic international law’ are presented in the concluding section of Ginsburg’s multi-faceted study.
In exploring the empirical relationship between democracies and international law, Ginsburg starts from the premise that much of modern (post-Second World War) international law has been produced and refined by democratic states, either among themselves or in their interactions with non-democratic states. Using a plethora of descriptive data to...