Intellectual History of International Law: Religion and Empire

The research project “Intellectual History of International Law: Empire and Religion” is funded by the Academy of Finland through a research grant awarded for Academy Professor Martti Koskenniemi. The first stage of the project runs from 2012 until 2014. A second stage is planned for the years 2015-16.

The project focuses on two dimensions of the history of international legal thought, namely the role of religion in the formation and application of legal concepts and institutions from early modernity (16th century) to the present, and the way those concepts and institutions have contributed to specifically imperial ideas about how the world ought to be governed. The project is divided into two “streams”, one on “religion” and the other on “empire”. The idea is that each researcher would work broadly focusing on either one or the other of the streams. These would also lend themselves to the organization of seminars and workshops with the eventual objective of producing collective works on the relations of international law to religion and empire.