Abstract

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The paper investigates an alternative history of the principle of Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources (PSNR) in the twentieth century. By looking at attempts in the Americas in the interwar period, rather than the commonly studied period of the United Nations General Assembly in the 1950s and 1960s, we are able to reimagine the stakes of this international legal principle, and frame it against a broader story of the use of narratives around cosmopolitanism as a means to reinforce military and economic power structures.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS : Dr Lucas Lixinski is Associate Professor of Law, University of New South Wales. He researches and writes primarily in the areas of public international law, international cultural heritage law and international human rights law. Dr Mats Ingulstad is a Researcher in Historical Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is currently leading a project on ‘European integration and the quest for access to external natural resources, 1945–2015’, and the international institutions section of another major project, ‘Fate of Nations. Natural resources and historical development, 1880-2015’.

ABOUT THE SEMINAR : The Legal Histories beyond the State series is an initiative of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, the Centre for History and Economics, and the Cambridge Centre for Political Thought. It brings together historians, political theorists and lawyers who are interested in the social, economic and political dimensions of law in the early modern and modern periods. We focus on the ways in which law and legal institutions order and organize space and people. This encompasses both imperial and international law, and domestic public and private law in its manifold influences on the nature and form of relations across borders. We are interested in legal actors and institutions, both national and supranational; doctrines and concepts, like jurisdiction; and also diverse forms of legal border-crossing, including the migration of people, ideas and objects across time and place. Embracing new trends in legal and historical research, we pursue the exchange of legal ideas in formal and informal contexts, and the creation, appropriation and interpretation of law by non-traditional actors, and in unexpected places.

Some sessions will be devoted to discussion of new, published work in the field, and others to the sharing of works-in-progress, whether draft articles, chapters or book prospectuses, with a core group of scholars from a variety of disciplines.

All are welcome.