Date/Time: to
Type: Lecture, Presence
Location: Strohsackpassage, 5. Stock, Raum 5.55 Nikolaistraße 6-10, Leipzig
Event series: GlobeLecture

A Missing Link: The League of Nations, interwar international law, and the current triple planetary crises

With Omer Aloni

The role of international law—and international lawyers—in addressing and managing environmental problems is often considered to be very new. However, this lecture uncovers a much deeper history, demonstrating how international law was mobilized to address and confront environmental challenges during the interwar period. In particular, it emphasizes the pivotal role of the League of Nations in shaping a nascent environmental agenda throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The lecture shows how many of the global concerns that contemporary commentators decry as novel have in fact a long (hi)story, and thereby reveals a missing link in the current understanding of the roots of our triple planetary worsening ecological crisis.

Through a series of interconnected case studies, the League’s environmental dilemmas, campaigns, and initiatives illustrate a deliberate reliance on environmental diplomacy and international law to mediate conflicts between human development and nature. These issues included campaigns to: protect endangered species in response to growing fears of extinction; stop oil pollution of the seas, which threatened the livelihoods of communities and coastal environment in countries such as Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan; fight diseases spread by sanitation failures; and raise public awareness of the environmental risks posed by rapid deforestation. This lecture explores how both legal frameworks and practices evolved and examines what this history of global environmental governance can tell or teach us about the pressing global ecological challenges we face today.


Omer Aloni holds a Doctor of Law degree (awarded in May 2019). He earned his LL.M. (cum laude) and Ph.D. at the Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel-Aviv University. He also holds a B.A. (cum laude) in General History and Law from Tel-Aviv University. In October 2018, Omer was invited to the University of Potsdam's Law Faculty as a postdoctoral researcher. Through the Joint Exchange Program between Tel-Aviv University and the University of Potsdam, he collaborated with Prof. Andreas Zimmermann (University of Potsdam's Law Faculty) and was supported by the Joint Program. Between 2016 and 2018, he was a visiting scholar at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, as a recipient of the Minerva Fellowship, funded by the German Federal Government. In 2017, he also collaborated with the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt, supported by the Dialogue Scholarship. The European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) awarded Omer’s dissertation the Tallinn Prize for the best dissertation in the field for 2018 and 2019. In 2021, Cambridge University Press published his work as a book titled "The League of Nations and the Protection of the Environment" as part of its International and Comparative Law series.