PROJECT: ERC Consolidator Grant for Prof. Frederik DHONDT (TREATYLAB, “The Labyrinth of Treaties, 1712-1763”. International Law Behind the Scenes of Early Enlightenment Diplomacy.)

 

The European Research Council awarded Prof. Frederik Dhondt with a prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant for the proposal TREATYLAB (“The Labyrinth of Treaties, 1712-1763”. International Law Behind the Scenes of Early Enlightenment Diplomacy").

Proposal abstract:

The past of international law (the law produced and applicable between polities) is studied from various disciplinary perspectives. Our scholarly image prior to 1870 mainly rests on accounts of philosophy and theory, or the published final product of negotiations, treaties. This image ought to be corrected. International law is continuously produced and interpreted by the actors. The advisory work of Nicolas-Louis Le Dran (1687-1774), top civil servant in the forerunner of the French Foreign Ministry (bureaux des affaires étrangères) contains hundreds of substantial works drawn up on the basis of diplomatic correspondence and treaties, but also doctrine. Le Dran composed forward-looking advice for political decision makers. Preceding state behaviour and sources of law were the cornerstones of his judgement. This corpus is of an exceptional size, deterring many researchers. TREATYLAB is not a laboratory of treaties, but rather a team charting the labyrinth of documents underpinning and interpreting end-products as well as the daily practice of negotiation. Classical in-depth close reading will be both accelerated and enhanced by TREATYLAB’s critical and measured digitisation, building on the experience of Digital Enlightenment Studies and the cooperative Transkribus. The TREATYLAB team will digitize 112 000 folios from the French diplomatic archives and engage in Named Entity Recognition. The contribution to science will thus be twofold: a tagged transcription of the “Mountain of Paper” produced, as well as collective and individual analyses of Le Dran’s team’s preparatory work behind the scenes. The project will engage with the debate on international legal history as spurred recently by The Cambridge History of International Law and Martti Koskenniemi’s To The Uttermost Parts of the Earth, on two tracks: drawing insights from the materiality of practices, rather than sweeping big theories, and incorporating hidden strategic knowledge in the discipline’s narrative.

On the PI:

Frederik Dhondt (1984) studied law (Ghent, 2007), history (Ghent/Erasmus Paris IV-Sorbonne, 2008) and International Relations (Sciences Po Paris, École doctorale, 2009) and obtained his PhD in Law (Ghent, 2013; supervisor: prof. dr. Dirk Heirbaut) with a PhD fellowship of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). He was a faculty postdoctoral assistant (Ghent, 2013-2014), postdoctoral research fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO, Ghent, 2014-2017) and was appointed as assistant professor of political and legal history at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Faculty of Law and Criminology) in 2015. Between 2016-2020, he was a visiting professor/replacement lecturer at the University of Antwerp. In 2022, he held the OVR Visiting Chair at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He has been a visiting researcher in Frankfurt (MPI für europäische Rechtsgeschichte, 2010), Heidelberg (MPI für ausländisches öffentliches Recht, 2012) and Geneva (Graduate Institute, 2014-2015) as well as an auditor at the Hague Academy of International Law (2008, 2013) and was awarded -among other prizes- the Van Caenegem Prize 2016 (European Society for Comparative Legal History). He published (among others) Balance of Power and Norm Hierarchy. Franco-British Diplomacy after the Peace of Utrecht (Brill, series "Legal History Library/Studies in the History of International Law") and edited Small Power Neutrality and the Law of the Sea in the Long Eighteenth Century. Law as Argument in the Pelagic Arena (with Stefano Cattelan, Brill, series "History of European Constitutional and Political Thought") as well as the special issue "Histoire du droit international" (Clio@Thémis, with Raphaël Cahen and Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina). He is a member of the Committee for Legal History of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for the Arts and Sciences, presides the Royal Commission for the Publication of Old Laws and Ordinances of Belgium, is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the History of International Law/Revue d'histoire du droit international (Brill) and has been President and Vice-President of Standen en Landen/Anciens Pays et Assemblées d'États as well as member of the Steering Committee of the ESIL Interest Group History of International Law.

(source: European Research Council)