Across 14 chapters modified from essays written over the past two decades, Koskenniemi (international law, U. of Helsinki, Finland) explores different contexts in which international law takes on a contested, political appearance through the use of international law as an inseparable vocabulary for politics. Chapters are organized into sections that introduce the basic conceptual understanding of the "politics of international law" promoted herein; collective security as a platform for the use of legal argument in the context of the first Iraq crisis in 1990-91 and the debates among European lawyers during the 1999 Kosovo crisis; issues of ambition, uncertainty, innovation, and stasis in the human rights field; the operation of international law in "limit situations" in the context of crimes against humanity and nuclear weapons as compared to more routine types of institutional work and legal argument; and the politics of international law as it applies to the subject that operates the law and the specificity of legal language. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)