Course summary

The CIA launches drones to “legally” kill Al-Qaida leaders. An arbitrator rules that anti-smoking policies infringe a bilateral investment treaty. A father is suddenly detained at the airport as his name appears on a no-fly list. After recent decades of rule of law promotion, the need to “legally” harm, detain, profit or pollute has transformed how policy moves are now performed and contested on the world stage. This has elevated the significance of international legal rules for a range of governmental, corporate and societal actors, who each compete to devise legal norms, characterisations and strategies to address global political and economic problems. Thus, international law has become a central domain of struggle across a variety of pressing policy challenges, ranging from robotised military strategies, territorial claims spurred by climate change, the global projection of EU rules, to transnational blacklists. Our LLM in International Law provides a programme of study that responds to increasing complexity in the international legal order; where international law evolves through transformations such as global counter-terrorism, global value chains, and foreign investment arbitration. Our academic staff are at the forefront of teaching, research and practice in international law, and our LLM modules encompass subfields that range from European Union law, public international law, and the law of the sea, to the law of armed conflict and tade and investment law. The programme is delivered at our Brussels School of International Studies (BSIS) in conjunction with our law school.