What is a History of International Law in Italy for? International Law through the Prism of National Perspectives

Abstract

This chapter provides the theoretical background of the volume and illustrates its structure and rationale. It tackles the growing debate on the need to explore international law from comparative and situated perspectives, a debate emphasizing how scholarship has partly been driven by the convergence of global dynamics and context-dependent solutions based on local features and key historical and political events in a continuum process of attractions and frictions. In this regard a review of the Italian context could contribute to a better appreciation of such dynamics, providing helpful points of reference to elaborate a proper global picture of challenges faced by international law, its institutions, and scholarship in the past, shedding light on a national perspective left at the margins of current historical research due in part to language barriers.