Acceso usuarios
Philipp Dann has long been committed to the legal issues of international development cooperation, and now his monograph on this subject, originally written in German, has been published in English. The comprehensive monograph entitled The Law of Development Cooperation skilfully builds upon the knowledge that already exists on this topic and systematizes an enormous amount of relevant literature. The reader is presented with a stimulating text that is dense in terms of its arguments and yet easy to engage with.
The book is indeed a monumental piece of writing. Not only does it attempt to glue together the whole array of relevant regulations into a common legal framework that applies to development cooperation, but it also contextualizes simultaneously this framework with past and present debates about law and development. Hence, the task of the book is immense by any measure, and it clearly runs a risk of not striking the right balance between the breadth and the depth of the argument. However, Dann masters this challenge well. The book can be treated as both a thorough research handbook on legal aspects of international development cooperation and, at the same time, as an academic contribution that contains a plausible set of arguments. While the encyclopaedic element of the monograph is arguably of great value in itself, the following review will engage with two central claims of the book that are proposing new perspectives to the academic debate.
The argument that the "law of development cooperation" should be regarded as a distinct field of study in international law is a common thread that runs throughout the entire book. To posit that development cooperation is the subject of a body of international law may encounter criticism. It might seem as an attempt to legalize something that is by definition political
