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The book “Contingency in International Law. On the Possibility of Different Legal Histories” poses a question that is deceptive in its simplicity: could international law have been otherwise? Today, there is hardly a serious account left that would consider the path of international law to be necessary, and that would refute the possibility of a different law altogether. But behind every possibility of the past stands a reason why the law developed as it did. Only with a keen sense of why things turned out the way they did is it possible to argue about how the law could plausibly have turned out differently.

Ingo Venzke is Professor of International Law and Social Justice at the University of Amsterdam, and Director of the Amsterdam Centre for International Law. He has held visiting positions at various universities including the National University of Singapore and Jindal Global Law School. He was a Hauser Research Scholar at New York University as well as a visiting scholar at the Cegla Center for the Interdisciplinary Research of the Law (Tel Aviv University) and the Center for the Study of Law and Society (UC Berkeley). 

Kevin Jon Heller is Professor of International Law and Security at the University of Copenhagen and Professor of Law at the Australian National University. He has previously held positions at the University of Amsterdam, SOAS, the University of Melbourne, the University of Auckland, and the University of Georgia.