In the name of nature: Making the League of Nations, the International Rights of Nature Tribunal and international law

Abstract In 1919, the League of Nations and the Mandate System were established through the Treaty of Versailles. Shy of 100 years later, the International Rights of Nature Tribunal gathered in the same city to establish itself as an international peoples’ tribunal, taking form outside the international legal order. For all their differences, these institutions shared some commonalities. Both institutions claimed to be concerned with the ‘wellbeing’ of ‘peoples’ through international law. Both also claimed to represent some kind of international legal community. For the League, this was a community of states. For the Tribunal, it was a community of peoples. This article reads these institutional moments together and considers what they tell us about the discipline of international law. It traces how both institutions constituted and authorized themselves as if speaking for an already given international legal community – and how they did so precisely by mobilizing competing ideas of ‘nature’, ‘peoples’, and ‘statehood’. The article argues that the institutions deployed similar legal techniques and narratives that limited what the international legal domain might, and might not, look like. Namely, they presented their ideas of ‘nature’ and ‘peoples’ as part of a natural order of things, authorizing themselves as vanguards for whatever form of international legal order they saw as ‘natural’. Ultimately, the piece complicates our understanding of the international legal domain and peoples’ tribunal in it, inviting a reflexivity over what it means to speak law in the name of an international community – be it as ‘states’, ‘peoples’ or ‘nature’ itself.