Forschungsprojekt

Creating international law through practice? International commissions and early human rights debates

This project challenges the common narrative that commissions of inquiry are chiefly a twentieth-century, post–Cold War phenomenon. It argues that such commissions were already central to international investigation and norm formation from the late nineteenth century onward, and examines later twentieth-century commissions in light of this longer history.

The central hypothesis is that commissions have shaped international law since the late 1800s through practice—documenting violence, framing it in legal terms, and publicly condemning it—rather than primarily through treaties or scholarship.

Six comparative case studies anchor the analysis: three early commissions (the 1876 Bulgarian uprising, the post-1877–78 Rhodope Commission, and the Putumayo investigations from 1910) and three twentieth-century landmarks (Argentina's CONADEP, the UN Commission of Experts for the former Yugoslavia, and the Truth Commission for El Salvador).

Methodologically, the project combines the history of international law in practice with discourse analysis, drawing on diplomatic archives, commission reports, legal scholarship, newspapers, and visual sources.

Its three objectives: (1) offer the first comprehensive history of commissions of inquiry from the late nineteenth to late twentieth century; (2) write a history of international law from the "semi-periphery"—regions like Latin America, the Ottoman Empire, China, Japan, Siam, and Persia deemed semi-sovereign yet subject to intervention; and (3) trace how legal norms around "atrocities" emerged from investigative practice and public controversy rather than formal codification alone.