Development of Regional International Law Lessons from Russia and Eurasia

Introduction

Part I: Russia, International Law, and The French Revolution: A Universalist Counter-project and Its Regional Uses

1. The French Revolution and the Remaking of International Law

2. Counter-revolutionary Responses to Revolutionary International Law: The Russian Empire’s View

3. Territorial Expansion and Intervention: Russia’s Departure from the Byzantine-centred Regional Conception of International Law

Part II: Two Socialist International Laws: Between Universalism and Regionalism

4. Constructing Socialist International Law: An Early Attempt       

5. Socialist International Law Reasserted: The Brezhnev Doctrine 

6. The Union Republics and International Law: From Socialist Self-Determination to grossraum (dis)ordering

Part III: Post-Soviet Eurasia: Between Multipolarity and Regional Legal Ordering

7. Russia’s Dual Position vis-à-vis Contemporary International Law: A Weak Universal Guardian and a Regional Hegemon

8. Consolidating Regional International Law in Post-Soviet Eurasia

Conclusion: Universality as a Form of Regional Ordering   

Biography

Artur Simonyan is an Assistant Professor of International Law at the American University of Armenia. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg and a senior fellow at the Berlin-Potsdam research group “International Rule of Law: Rise or Decline?” at the Free University of Berlin. He holds a PhD in International Law from the University of Tartu. His articles have appeared in the European Journal of International Law, the Chinese Journal of International Law, and the Hague Yearbook of International Law and the Baltic Yearbook of International Law, among others. His research and teaching focus on the history and theory of international law and critical approaches to international law.

Regionalism, regional spheres of influence and the idea we live in a ‘world of regions’ are all firmly back on the agenda of international law and international relations. This important book provides an original and deeply researched longue durée analysis of imperial Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russian engagements with international law.  Most accounts of regionalism and of regional international law stress what is different about the region and its national, cultural or civilizational distinctiveness.  By contrast what is most original about Professor Simonyan’s study is the way in which he traces constant interplay between universal ideas on the one hand and regional ordering on the other, and the different forms that this interplay has taken over time.

Andrew Hurrell, Balliol College, Oxford University

Artur Simonyan has written a thoughtful and intellectually compelling book on the relationship between universality and regional ordering in international law. By tracing this question across imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet contexts, he offers a historically grounded and analytically precise account of how legal ideas both shape and reflect the organisation of power in Europe and its wider neighbourhood. This is an original and persuasive contribution to debates on the structure and evolution of international legal order.

Pierre Mirel, Honorary Director general, European Commission; adviser to the Jacques Delors Institute; Lecturer at Sciences Po-Paris 2010-2022