As a legal history, the book is indispensable. It traces the intellectual origins of today’s international legal order to the much-maligned Paris peace pact of 1928 ... Among the greatest strengths of The Internationalists is the authors’ acute attention to the role of individual thinkers, some long overlooked, and to the impact of happenstance — the ways, for instance, an idealist’s memo could land in a pragmatist’s hands ... It is a shame the authors don’t focus as strongly on personalities in the book’s chapters on how the law changed behavior. Instead, they turn their attention to demonstrating statistically that interstate wars resulting in lasting territorial conquest became dramatically less significant after the 1928 peace pact...Yet even accepting the finding that the nature of land claims changed after 1928, it remains far from clear that this shift in state behavior came about in some measure because of the prewar revolution in law the authors so ably describe ... The Internationalists provides a great service in illustrating the ways in which law can speak powerfully to individual decision-makers. An even greater service would be to show us more about what kind of decision-maker it takes to listen.

Genuine originality is unusual in political history. The Internationalists is an original book. There is something sweet about the fact that it is also a book written by two law professors in which most of the heroes are law professors. Sweet but significant, because one of the points of The Internationalists is that ideas matter ... Hathaway and Shapiro are lawyers, and, in making their case for the supreme explanatory power of Kellogg-Briand, they litigate themselves around some tricky historical corners ... Hathaway and Shapiro acknowledge the Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem after the Six-Day War, in 1967, but say almost nothing about the West Bank. They scarcely mention America’s two Iraq wars, and they ignore the eight-year Iran-Iraq War that preceded them, which they presumably regard as a border dispute. Part of the interest of their deeply interesting book, though, is seeing how far and in which cases you are willing to go along with them.

That is a lot of credit to give to a treaty that, until now, pretty universally has been dismissed as inconsequential. Hathaway and Shapiro deserve medals of intellectual valor for even daring to make a case that is so at odds with what almost every other expert in the field of international relations believes. But, sadly, their thesis, while backed up by many erudite, carefully footnoted pages, is not persuasive. 'There are some ideas so absurd only an intellectual could believe them,' George Orwell wrote. The notion that the Kellogg-Briand Pact was a raging success is one of them ... In short, by the end of The Internationalists, Hathaway and Shapiro are forced to acknowledge that the Kellogg-Briand Pact was not nearly as important as they claimed in the beginning.

...even if ultimately most readers will not be convinced by the overall argument, one of the pleasures of this thought-provoking and comprehensively researched book is that it challenges us to see the figures who thought they could outlaw war not as fools but as pragmatists whose failed idea had a surprising afterlife in the creation of the postwar world ... The case that the authors make is clever and nuanced, but it does often feel exactly like that: a case, one made by talented lawyers on behalf of a patently guilty client to a doubtful jury ... There is a vibrant optimism to The Internationalists that we can all surely hope is well-founded. But optimism can often walk hand in hand with complacency on the world stage. Underlying the case made by Ms. Hathaway and Mr. Shapiro is the premise that we are living in a continuation of the postwar world whose emergence they describe. It’s a statement of the obvious to note that the world order created in 1945 is fragmenting.

...a five-hundred-page attempt to portray Kellogg-Briand as ‘among the most transformative events in human history’ … The Allies did not go to war against Hitler to enforce the rules of the New World Order established by the Kellogg-Briand Pact. They fought Hitler because he broke all the rules. Hathaway and Shapiro’s account of how the Allies reckoned with the war after its end — in the courtroom in Nuremberg — is no less problematic … If wars of aggression have indeed become less common since 1945 — and Hathaway and Shapiro marshal an impressive range of data to support this claim — it is not because would-be aggressors have feared being hauled before an international court. Rather, the ban on aggression has been enforced by what the authors call outcasting — isolating transgressing states through economic sanctions and the withholding of international trade … Only at the end of The Internationalists do the authors consider the fragility of the ban on war.

The Internationalists is a fascinating and challenging book, which raises gravely important issues for the present. At times, however, the authors’ enthusiasm runs away with them. Was the Kellogg-Briand Pact really 'among the most transformative events of human history'? Did it start a process that reshaped the world map, catalysed the human rights revolution, and fuelled the rapid growth of international institutions? Was the second world war primarily about the conflict between the Old and the New Orders? Overstating a case doesn’t make it better ... If you believe ideas matter and that views change, and like the authors I do, we have far more international acceptance of the criminality of war and of our common responsibility for each other. Given the state of the world, The Internationalists has come along at the right moment.

...an interesting, sprawling, and detailed argument on how the Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed in Paris in 1928, shifted global attitudes from approval of the waging of 'just war' to all but ruling out armed conflict and holding leaders and combatants to a higher standard than before ...narrative in The Internationalists slows in the minute detailing of just how the primacy of the new world order of negotiation over conflict took shape, but picks back up when it comes to seeing how the Allies chose to try the Nazis both for the war itself and for war crimes related to the Holocaust ... Stepping back from the Nuremburg trials, Hathaway and Shapiro examine the question of what to do about civilians in war ... The authors’ conclusion to The Internationalists addresses these nascent questions. They are looking for a new equilibrium between the chaos of 'might is right' and 'war is illegal.' In their writing, they offer realistic grounds for optimism.

Hathaway and Shapiro’s sparkling book asks how this happened and what it really meant. They take as their starting point a long-forgotten moment in the interwar era’s long history of worthy but meaningless resolutions – the 1928 Kellogg-Briand pact to outlaw war ... They see the pact as ushering in nothing less than a new world order in which war – and the spoils of war – came to be regarded as illegitimate ... This is a marvellously readable book that makes what could have been arcane matters of international jurisprudence comprehensible and lively. Anecdote and colourful characters abound, and the writing rests on a very serious trawl through some farflung archives ...there is much here to enjoy and much to ponder. Is the new world order that Hathaway and Shapiro extol about to pass into history in its turn?

The Internationalists by Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, both law professors at Yale, is an impassioned history of how the liberal international order came into being and why it must be defended as never before. They believe that the basis of what they call the New World Order (to distinguish it from the Old World Order, codified by a 17th-century Dutch scholar, Hugo Grotius, in which might was nearly always right) was an extraordinary diplomatic event in Paris in 1928 ... Yet the authors argue persuasively that the liberal order of the past 70 years has been better than any of the alternatives and is well worth striving to preserve. The authors pay proper tribute to those who defined and fought for the principles that brought it into being ... Ms Hathaway and Mr Shapiro are right to sound the alarm that the post-second-world-war consensus on the illegality of war is under siege.

For starters, the book is engagingly written, and much of it is highly entertaining. Hathaway and Shapiro take the reader into areas of 20th-century diplomacy that are all-too-often neglected, and their portraits of key individuals from recent and more distant history... The bottom line: Reading the book is an enjoyable experience and far from a waste of time ... Unfortunately, the evidence Hathaway and Shapiro present does not come close to proving their case. Although they tend to avoid using clear causal language, the novelty of The Internationalists lies in the ambitious causal claim the authors are making ...what is perhaps most striking about The Internationalists is the absence of clear and direct evidence showing their proposed causal mechanism at work in concrete cases ... Last but not least, the conclusion to The Internationalists is at odds with its upbeat thesis.

The Internationalists is an exhaustive but well-written text revolving around changes in war, particularly in the past hundred years. The writers endeavor to detail how global conflicts are a thing of the past due to the work of treaties such as the Kellogg-Briand pact. Some might disagree, but the authors offer compelling evidence proving their thesis. An excellent and informative study.

A searching analysis of contending views of state violence and warfare ... Rich in implication, particularly in a bellicose time, and of much interest to students of modern history and international relations.”