International Community

William E. Conklin, "International Community" in Anthony Carty, ed, Oxford Bibliographies in International Law (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Abstract

This annotated bibliography, preoccupied with Anglo-American scholarship, analytically distinguishes several very different competing senses of an international community. The scholarship exemplifies a serious tension between the universalism of the international community and the particularism of state members, non-state organizations, the global markets, and excluded communities such as nomadic and Indigenous peoples. A fundamental paradox has characterized the scholarship. On the one hand, the universalism of an international community includes everyone everywhere. And yet, on the other hand, historically contingent, context-specific particularities have fragmented the universality into a more realistic critique of the universality.