PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This chapter explores how unequal treaties—international agreements lacking in reciprocity and signed under conditions of duress—were posed during the 1920s as serious challenges to the liberal international order represented by the League of Nations. It first traces the emergence of unequal treaties as a “question” for both Chinese domestic and international politics after the First World War. In two case studies, it then identifies the divergent “strategic positions” held by semi-peripheral lawyers and anti-colonial activists with respect to the field of international politics and law overseen by the League: one associated with China’s denunciation in 1926 of its “unequal treaty” with Belgium of 1865, which caused a high-profile case at the League’s Permanent Court of International Justice; the other with the founding of the League Against Imperialism, an international anti-imperialist organization which held its first and most important conference in Brussels in February 1927. Studying these “inside” and “outside” challengers in their strategies to oppose the continuation of more-or-less (in)formal colonial relations in the interwar period provides a better understanding of how global challenges have been practically and discursively produced, identified, and dealt with in different international fora and by actors with various political and professional backgrounds.