Formation/Cours

At the end of the course, the student should be able to:

• Have improved their understanding of global governance, the international legal order, and international institutions as well as their understanding of Law of the European Union.

• Have improved their ability to think critically, engage in complex reasoning and express their thoughts clearly through their written work.

• Have been exposed to a variety of intellectual and often confronted international legal traditions including Global-South perspectives and new approaches to international law.

• Have mastered a basic understanding of how to research questions in and identify its main actors and key-concepts.

• Recognize works by the principal protagonists of global governance and understand why they are significant for the fields of international law

• Have improved their understanding and become more familiar with contemporary topics and their implications for international law

Taking its cue from the impact of the post-Cold War emergence of the notion of Global Governance and the different specialized sectoral international legal dimensions that have been surging around it in a time of proliferation of international institutions and of, increasingly, both regional and global political and economic interdependence, the course will examine the fundamentals of global governance and study contemporary international institutions including the workings of key international courts and tribunals.

The course will also introduced a array of contemporary approaches to the revitalization and critique of the discourse of global constitutionalism among international legal scholars.

In order to do so, it provides a historical intra-disciplinary perspective on the evolution of the constitutionalist discourse back to the modern origins of the discipline of international law. Once an introduction to the narrative of continuation with the past as a building block of global constitutionalism has been accounted for, the course examines six interrelated milestones behind the intellectual appeal of global constitutionalist studies in international law.

These, respectively deal with, firstly, the post-Cold War spread of constitutional liberal states and the ensuing rise of comparative constitutional law; secondly, the great proliferation of international institutional organizations, international courts and tribunals, and the emergence international legal regimes along with the phenomenon of fragmentation of the international legal order; and, thirdly, with the effects that the on-going constitutional debate and approaches to global governance in Europe are having on the contemporary international legal mindset of international law and the UN Charter as a global constitution of mankind.

The course also engages with contemporary topics such the current backlash against global governance institutions i.e. Brexit and the impact on international law and international institutions of the nationalist/aislationist policies of the Trump Administration and of the rise of China as key-player in global governance schemes e.g. the silk and road initiative of the 21st century.