Overview

Established in the wake of the First World War, the League of Nations fundamentally transformed international politics, global governance and multilateral cooperation in a multitude of fields from the economy, labour and social affairs to colonial, minority and security questions. This Handbook analyses the central role of law in the construction of a new international order under the League of Nations. Drawing from innovative research of recent years that analyses the League of Nations through the prism of ultimate success and failure, it offers twenty-one rich chapters that showcase an interdisciplinary, contextual and archive-based approach with brand new and unexplored case studies that address key topics of the legal history of the League, the International Labour Organization and the Permanent Court of International Justice. Finally, it offers a new historical synthesis of how to understand the role of international law in international organizations during the interwar period.

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9781009655187

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Haakon A. Ikonomou is a historian of international organizations, global governance, international bureaucracy and diplomacy. His publications apply digital, global, prosopographical, biographical, institutional, social and oral history approaches. He is PI of 'INNER_LEAGUE: A Social-Bureaucratic History of the League of Nations Secretariat' (ERC Consolidator: 2025–30). Karin van Leeuwen specializes in the role of law in European political history. She has published widely on Dutch constitutional history, the legal history of European integration and interwar international law and currently leads a research project on the historical relation between judicialization of politics and democracy. Morten Rasmussen is a leading expert on the legal histories of European integration and the League of Nations. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on these topics and is editor with Bill Davies of a new anthology on the history of EU law: The History of European Union Law. Constitutional Practice, 1950 to 1993 (2026).

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