Allison Powers, "Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

New Books Network Episode:

Allison Powers, "Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Allison Powers
Date: February 23, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features a conversation between host Dr. Miranda Melcher and Dr. Allison Powers about Powers' groundbreaking book, Arbitrating Empire. The discussion centers on how the United States' imperial expansion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was inextricably linked with transformations in international law, particularly through state-to-state arbitration tribunals. Powers reveals how thousands of international legal claims—often by marginalized and colonized peoples—both challenged and shaped international law, and how their stories have been systematically erased from the official record.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Book's Core Intervention and Methodological Approach

• Powers positions herself as a "legal historian of the U.S. empire and a social historian of international law" ([01:47]).
• She underscores the book’s focus: not diplomats or famous jurists, but ordinary people using international law to challenge U.S. state violence amid imperial expansion ([01:47]-[03:50]).
• The U.S. Government’s effort to avoid liability for harms to people outside its borders has deep historical roots.
• Powers’ major historiographical intervention: the erasure of claims against the U.S. is itself a form of power, shaping both international law and the global record.

Memorable Quote:
"The erasure of these claims from the international legal record was itself a constitutive feature of U.S. colonial and global power."
— Allison Powers ([03:21])

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2. Origins and Nature of State-to-State Arbitration

• State-to-state mass claims arbitration began in the late 18th century, famously with the 1794 Jay Treaty ([04:51]).
• Arbitration is traditionally heralded as an "enlightened alternative to war," but also served to justify and enforce new forms of imperial intervention ([05:11]).
• Arbitration tribunals became productive sites for creating, legitimizing, and contesting international legal concepts—not just regulating them.

Memorable Quote:
"These tribunals in fact become primary sites through which international legal concepts are produced, contested, and legitimized. So they're productive of power relations, not merely regulatory of them."
— Allison Powers ([05:39])

• Powers re-centers the timeline of international law not just with canonical European figures, but with anti-colonial claimants on the U.S.–Mexico border in 1868 ([06:14]).

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3. The Scope and Scale of Claims

• Powers focuses on five major tribunals (Mexico 1868, Samoa 1899, post-1898 Cuba/Philippines, Panama Canal Zone, and U.S.-Mexico 1920s), but emphasizes there are "hundreds of tribunals, thousands and thousands of claims" across this period ([08:06]-[09:57]).
• The five selected are not representative, but illustrative of ruptures—moments when claimants turned imperial mechanisms against their creators.
• The arbitral claims were vast: in the Panama Canal commissions "hundreds and hundreds" of claims, and almost 800 "denial of justice" claims by Mexican citizens living within the U.S. alone in the 1923 commission ([11:14]).

Memorable Quote:
"This is not like one isolated case here or there."
— Allison Powers ([12:10])

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4. Arbitrations in the Pacific and the Case of Samoa

• U.S. annexation of eastern Samoa relied on military violence and colonial governance, justified through "tridominium" (joint rule with Britain and Germany) and mediated by international law ([12:49]-[15:00]).
• Legal challenges to U.S. bombardment by Samoans were dismissed since Samoans and Chinese nationals were deemed "not sufficiently civilized" to make claims ([16:25]).
• Powers stresses that the erasure of these challenges was not accidental but part of how U.S. colonial power was constructed and narrated.

Memorable Quote:
"International law is being mobilized in this way to attempt to justify and legitimize what are really colonial power structures…"
— Allison Powers ([14:29])

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5. State Department and Government Bureaucracies

• Most arbitration tribunals were managed by the State Department, though sometimes the Attorney General's office was involved (notably in post-1898 Spanish Treaty claims) ([18:09]).
• The process of arbitration helped define power relations, not just administer justice.
• Crucially, "seemingly ordinary people"—not government lawyers—shaped the meaning and reach of international law via their persistent claims-making ([21:10]).

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6. The Panama Canal and "International Eminent Domain"

• The U.S. justified the takeover of the Canal Zone as an act of "international eminent domain" ([23:49]).
• Arbitrations over expropriation included not just landowners but multiracial and multinational coalitions, often challenging the violence of colonial administration ([24:42]).
• U.S. authorities used ongoing expropriations as tools to prevent residents from challenging colonial governance or seeking redress ([24:56]).
• Panama's government ultimately used these claims to renegotiate with the U.S., but this often erased or sidelined local claimants' visions of justice ([26:42]).

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7. The U.S.–Mexico Claims Commission (1923–1940)

• The commission was designed to neutralize the redistribution promised in Mexico's 1917 constitution by bankrupting Mexico through damages owed to U.S. nationals ([28:18]).
• Unexpectedly, nearly 800 Mexican citizens in the U.S. brought claims against the U.S. for violence, lynching, and denial of justice ([29:28]).
• The sheer volume and level of these claims alarmed the State Department, leading to the collapse of the commission and a private settlement—claimants received nothing ([32:18]).

Notable Segment:
"The State Department wanted desperately to insulate the federal government from the international legal claims brought by Mexican citizens against the U.S. ... when faced with these international legal claims, the U.S. government ultimately chooses to abandon the tribunal rather than risk being held legally and financially liable for racist state violence."
— Allison Powers ([29:28]-[32:18])

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8. Systematic Erasure and Active Forgetting

• After the 1940s, this form of state-to-state mass arbitration disappears from the international legal order ([33:07]).
• While the official explanation is inefficiency, Powers argues the real reason was that the tribunals were too effective at exposing U.S. state violence and potential liability.
• These cases were intentionally excluded from legal records, histories, and precedents to make such critiques "unthinkable" ([37:26]).

Memorable Quote:
"These claims disappeared from the international legal record not because they mattered too little, but instead because the State Department worried they mattered too much."
— Allison Powers ([38:36])

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9. Unofficial Memory and Interdisciplinary Engagement

• Despite official erasure, these histories persist in community memory and in the work of ethnic and critical studies scholars ([36:45], [40:26]).
• Powers calls for international law historians and U.S. foreign relations scholars to engage seriously with these alternative archives and traditions ([40:26]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "The erasure of these claims from the international legal record was itself a constitutive feature of U.S. colonial and global power." ([03:21])
• "These tribunals in fact become primary sites through which international legal concepts are produced, contested, and legitimized. So they're productive of power relations, not merely regulatory of them." ([05:39])
• "International law is being mobilized in this way to attempt to justify and legitimize what are really colonial power structures…" ([14:29])
• "This is not like one isolated case here or there." ([12:10])
• "These claims disappeared from the international legal record not because they mattered too little, but instead because the State Department worried they mattered too much." ([38:36])

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Key Timestamps

| Timestamp | Topic / Segment | |-----------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:47 | Powers introduces the book and its core interventions | | 04:51 | Origins of state-to-state arbitration and its dual role | | 11:14 | Scale—discussion of thousands of claims | | 12:49 | The case of Samoa and U.S. annexation in the Pacific | | 18:09 | The U.S. State Department and bureaucracy's role in arbitrations | | 23:49 | Arbitrations over the Panama Canal and "international eminent domain" | | 28:18 | U.S.-Mexico Claims Commission: plan vs. messy reality | | 33:07 | Why mass state-to-state arbitration disappears after the 1940s | | 37:26 | How and why these histories were systematically erased | | 40:26 | Powers' call for engaging with ethnic studies and unofficial histories |

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Further Resources

Allison Powers' current work:

• New book project on sovereign debt and corporate power
• Edited volume on sovereign debt in the global 1860s
• Projects on the Monroe Doctrine and debt-for-nature swaps in the Americas ([41:11])

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Takeaways

• U.S. use of international arbitrations was deeply entwined with its imperial projects, often facilitating expansion and the erasure of violence.
• Ordinary claimants—often marginalized or colonized people—used international law to challenge U.S. state violence, but their voices were strategically erased from the record.
• Official legal and diplomatic narratives have systematically omitted these challenges, affecting both precedent and memory in international law.
• Powers urges legal historians to look beyond traditional archives and embrace interdisciplinary, community-rooted scholarship.

"What might hundreds or even thousands of arbitral decisions, finding the everyday workings of the US Legal system to represent violations of international law, might have meant for this emerging mid 20th century the global order ... I do think it's telling that the State Department didn't want to find out."
— Allison Powers ([39:28])

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For more, see: Allison Powers, "Arbitrating United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[B]

Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Alison Powers about her book titled Arbitrating United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law, published by Oxford University Press in 2024. Now, this is a really interesting book because it takes a bunch of things that I think we think we know the history of, right? So, for instance, how does the US Start to get involved with all sorts of countries outside of its borders? Especially when we're talking about kind of who gets to make decisions around citizens having claims against the U.S. we're talking here about Mexico, we're talking about Panama. Like, that's a history that has been studied from a lot of different perspectives, sometimes in terms of law. But then we also have this other history of kind of how international law becomes an institution and sort of creates precedent and things like that. And US Imperial things aren't necessarily often part of that story. And yet what this book helps us understand is that those two stories actually can and are incredibly interrelated to each other. That this idea of the US Government trying to ensure that it cannot be sued by people, for instance, outside of its borders, that's relevant today, but that's not new. That actually goes back way further than I thought, at least. So this is a really interesting history that gives us plenty to discuss. Alison, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about it.

[A]

Miranda, thank you so much for having me.

[B]

Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? What sorts of interventions did you decide to make with this project?

[A]

Yes, absolutely. So I'm Alison Powers. I'm a legal historian of the U.S. empire and a social historian of international law. And I'm an assistant professor in the History department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. So what is the book about? Arbitrating Empire is about how really ordinary people, so not diplomats, not politicians, not only famous jurists, turned to international law to hold the US Government accountable for state violence during the decades when the US Was becoming a global empire. When I was doing dissertation research now many years ago, I wanted to understand how the United States had wielded international legal institutions to project novel forms of colonial power during the first decades of the 20th century. And I found plenty of evidence of that story. But I also kept coming across something else. International legal claims brought against the United States to actually expose and challenge the very imperial institutions that the State Department was attempting to legitimize. So thousands of cases brought by colonized subjects, migrant workers, non citizens living within the rapidly expanding boundaries claimed by the United States. And their Testimonies charged the U.S. with violating the laws of war by targeting non combatants, with disregarding treaty rights, by engaging in rampant land theft, with denying justice through a system of racist policing, judges and juries. And these critiques of state violence really transformed a series of international tribunals designed to facilitate US imperial interventions into forums through which to challenge the legality of US colonial governance. And I became fascinated by how that happened and also why it had been really erased, scrubbed from international legal records in the aftermath. And through this process, I came to the conclusion that the erasure of these claims from the international legal record was itself a constitutive feature of U.S. colonial and global power. So the book is a social history of international law. It demonstrates how formations of state responsibility that we typically attribute to jurists and diplomats were in fact, crucially informed by the words ideas, actions, visions, theories of plaintiffs not typically considered relevant to international legal thoughts, many of them women. And it shows how their claims making played a key role in the unraveling and reconfiguration of pre World War II forms of colonial power and international law itself.

[B]

A whole bunch of things then to investigate and stakes there clearly outlined as well, of kind of why this is important to look into. Thinking then about the origins before we get into kind of what happened with the claims and how they kind of got taken out of the record. As you said, what, when and why do we see these arbitration claim settlements starting in the first place?

[A]

Yeah, thank you for this question. So the kind of international claim settlement that I write about, known as state to state arbitration, state to state mass claim settlement, really begins in the late 18th century. Our origin story is often looked, for example, to the 1794 Jay Treaty following the US Revolutionary War and independence from Britain. And across the 19th and 20th centuries, this mode of dispute resolution is really often characterized as an enlightened alternative to war. And this origin story is in no way incorrect. But it does miss, to some extent, two features of state to state arbitration that I at least find crucial to consider. First, that this ostensible alternative to war in fact facilitates proliferating forms of military interventions or threats thereof across the Americas, across the Caribbean, across the Pacific. And second, that while arbitrations purport to offer compensatory damages for past violations of international law, according to existing doctrine, these tribunals in fact become primary sites through which international legal concepts are produced, contested and legitimized. So they're productive of power relations, not merely regulatory of them. And I would say that in the book, I'm trying not so much to rethink the origin stories we tell about arbitration as an institution, but instead about state responsibility as an emerging field of international law. And as you mentioned in your excellent intro, its entanglements with both various forms of US colonial power and anti colonial organizing. And so, as with all stories, of course, it matters where we begin. 1868 is a date that historians of modern international law will readily recognize. It's the year when famed Argentine diplomat Carlos Calvo published his soon to be canonical work, Theory and Practice of International Law in Europe and America. Printed at a Paris publishing house, the book laid the foundations for a theory of diplomatic protection that would come to be viewed as sort of a conceptual bulwark against US interventionism in the Americas in the decades to come. And the account of international law that I offer in Arbitrating Empire departs from the same year, but a different site, a town not yet renamed Juarez, a city split in two by a political border imposed only 20 years earlier, a place where legal theorists unknown to Calvo penned their own critiques of colonialism through bringing international legal charges against the United States and using that as a starting point to trace what would become thousands of similar claims across the decades when modern international law was being professionalized discipline. To ask what kinds of histories, what relations of power come into view when we consider these critiques of US State violence as not anecdotal to, not separate from, but in fact sensual to formations of international law itself?

[B]

That's really helpful to frame this in terms of kind of the bigger picture of, well, both international law and kind of US Empire. Why is it then that these claims are starting at this point?

[A]

Yeah. So first, I should also say that the five arbitral tribunals that I really focus on this book are in no ways exhaustive or representative of all arbitrations. Across the 19th century into the 20th state district, arbitration was really one of the key modes of international dispute resolution. So there are hundreds of tribunals, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of claims, and they in no way all relate to the United States, nor do they all relate to colonialism or imperialism. So the five arbitral claims commissions that I focus on are really convened as attempts to facilitate US colonial projects between the 1870s and the 1930s, but become something else. So the first is with Mexico in 1868. The second is formed in the aftermath of a joint US British naval bombardment trying to overthrow an election in Samoa in 1899. The third follows the US entry in the so called Spanish American War, Cuban Filipino wars for independence in 1901, when the office of the Attorney General tries to use claims for wartime damages as this new form through which to actually introduce racialized restrictions on citizenship. The fourth arbitral tribunal that I look at is assembled following U.S. attempts to, quote, depopulate the Panama Canal Zone. We can talk more about that in a moment, perhaps through invoking this right to exercise what jurists called international eminent domain. And then the final claims Commission convened in the 20s, early 30s, again between the US and Mexico after Mexico's revolution. So these five tribunals were by no means the only arbitrations to which the US was a party during these decades in question. I write about them not because they're representative of arbitration as an institution, but instead because of what they reveal about US Imperial power, critiques of state violence and everyday life. Because they didn't go as the Department, State Department had planned. Right. And I really came to see them as sites that represented moments of rupture and possibility in which these surprising, unexpected claimants were able to crack open existing legal concepts like, like state responsibility, like denial of justice, and make them do something new. To take institutions designed to justify and reproduce existing power relations and use them to call the legitimacy of those relations of power into question. So that's how I ended up focusing on these five tribunals. But I do want to flag that there are hundreds of arbitrations during this period and they don't all have to do with US empire by any means.

[B]

Well, but the ones you just mentioned definitely do, even just from the descriptions you've given us so far. And of course, we will get into them in more detail. But before we do, I just want to pick up on one other thing you've mentioned so far, which is the kind of scale of cases we're talking about here. It's not one or two moments of rupture. Right. Like, how many cases are we talking?

[A]

Oh, yeah, thank you. Excellent question. So thousands actually, and it does depend to some extent on the tribunal. But across the joint land commissions for the Panama Canal Zone, there are hundreds and hundreds of claims brought against the US Colonial government known as the Ispan Canal Commission. In the U. S. Mexico Claims Commission convened in 1923, there were close to 800 claimants who are Mexican citizens living in the United States who brought denial of justice charges against the US so that's 800 denial of justice charges just originating within the borders of the United States. This has nothing to say about the US Bombardment of Veracruz or anything else that happened during the revolution and its aftermath. So these are claims numbering the thousands, as you say. This is not like one isolated case here or there.

[B]

Yeah, no, I just want to make sure that's firmly established so that the kind of importance of this is kind of kept in mind. As we start to look at some of these tribunals in more detail, I think I'd like us to go to the Pacific first. So can we talk a little bit about how, you know, as you said, these claims have been sort of taken out of our usual histories of a lot of this. So we have kind of the story of how the US Annexed Eastern Samoa. What does looking at these arbitrations do to that understanding if we kind of add them back into the story?

[A]

Yeah. Thank you. This is a great question because this is an annexation that's really enacted through violence, through military force. The US Installs a military colonial regime in its aftermath. So it's an important question of what can we learn, or what do these international legal cases have to do with anything? But I would argue that they do actually help us to understand the dimensions of these particular configurations of U.S. colonial power that emerge at the turn of the 20th century in the Pacific and in Samoa specifically. So by way of a little bit of background leading right up to this, between 1889 and 1899, the U.S. britain, and Germany had attempted to wield arbitration as an institution, a concept, a justificatory framework, as sort of itself a form of colonial governance over Samoa. So they set up this joint protectorate. This is signed in Berlin. No Samoan representatives, president. And they install what they dub a quote, tridominium over Samoa. It's telling that the appointed administrator or one of the appointed administrators of this colonial body calls himself the chief justice. And he calls the proclamations that he issues by fiat from a ship floating in a deepwater harbor off the coast. He calls those international law awards. So is this mere posturing? To some extent, yes. But it's significant nonetheless that international law is being mobilized in this way to attempt to justify and legitimize what are really colonial power structures being enacted through fiat, through force. And also helps us to make sense of what happens next, because when Samoans, as well as foreign nationals residing on the islands, bring legal challenges against an unauthorized, really illegal US British naval bombardment of the coastline, their claims are then turned over to another arbitral tribunal. So arbitration becomes a Key for a said body in which these questions over colonial violence and critiques of it are sort of worked out and made sense of. And what I think attention to these seemingly perfunctory cases makes clear about the US annexation in 1800 is that the turn to military rule was in part a response to, to these very attempts to hold the United States accountable for that violence, for attempting to overthrow the results of an electoral process via bombardment. Because the critiques that the legal claims that go before this tribunal are really demonstrating quite clearly that the bombardment violated international law. And it did so by targeting civilians. It did by. Did so by targeting a sovereign polity during peacetime. They really puncture the justification that naval officers involved provide, which is that they were responding to, quote, threats to life and property. And it's telling too that the umpire tasked with evaluating these claims, King Oskar of Sweden and Norway, really just readily accepts the US and British lawyers arguments that neither Samoan nor Chinese nationals could bring claims before an international tribunal because they were supposedly not sufficiently civilized to do so, despite decades of international treaties recognizing Samoa as a sovereign independent polity and the really correct legal arguments pointing out the ways in which the bombartment had violated both constitutional and international law. So these legal claims are really one crucial site, I would say, of a racialized erasure of nation to nation relationships under international law at the end of the 19th century. And they're significant too for understanding how histories of US colonialism in the Pacific have been narrated and also distorted. So how Samoan's self governance itself came to be characterized as a quote, threat to US life and property. These are through legal arguments and also the scrubbing of counterarguments because the same vice Consul General who called in for that naval bombardment that prompted the arbitral claims against the colonial government, he characterized a peaceful political demonstration as a threat to his business. And then he's the same guy who's charged with representing or misrepresenting the history of the US annexation at the Pan American Exposition in 1901. So I think the legal claims help us to understand how the erasure of these international legal challenges to US colonialism was itself a constitutive feature of the kinds of colonial power we see emerging in the early 20th century.

[B]

Yeah, it definitely helps kind of link up a bunch of these aspects of colonialism in interesting ways. When we're thinking then about kind of how this is being enacted on the US government side, my assumption kind of going into this would be all right if we're talking about sort of International law and engaging with international actors. That would probably be the State Department. And you do talk about the State Department.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So can we discuss sort of the ways in which they are involved in this, but also other parts of the US Government that I certainly wasn't expecting to pop up?

[A]

Yeah, of course. So there is one chapter of the book on this Spanish treaty claims commission formed after the wars of 1898 that is really turned over to the Office of the Attorney General rather than the State Department in terms of preparing and arguing cases. Why? Because this is an explicitly colonial claims commission, one designated to award US Citizens compensation for damages resulting from Spain's violations of international law during the Cuban and Filipino wars for independence. So that's, that's the one tribunal that really has the, the AG taking front and center. But as you point out, most of the arbitrations that I write about are really helmed by the State Department. This is where they're formed. They're argued, they're interpreted, the results are disseminated. Because these tribunals are ostensibly about foreign relations, right? Not empire. And the State Department has a key stake in narrating them as such. Although, of course, as you mentioned, State then as now, is a constellation of agencies that do engage in explicit imperial administration in the absence of a formal colonial office. And I think to that point it's telling that the government lawyers mobilized to defend the United States before these arbitral tribunals comprised administrative units called agencies, which I do think of as sort of an administrative unit. That speaks to some extent the ways in which these tribunals were sites of enacting power relations, not simply retrospectively awarding compensation for discreet violations of international law. And the employees staffing these agencies, both in the US and the Statement Department and also in Mexico and Panama's Ministries of Foreign relations, very much see the arbitral tribunals that they're engaging with, not as perfunctory fora through which to enforce existing international law, but really instead as crucial sites through which to debate, enact and institutionalize, make real alternative visions of non intervention, sovereign equality, international law itself. All these ideas that are being fought over and contested in the era of the Pan American Conferences. And then a really central argument of the book is that while we often tell this story through the sources produced by this particular kind of government lawyer, bureaucrat, State Department, Ministry of Foreign Relations employee, it's really the words, lives, ideas, visions, actions, claims, legal arguments, testimonies of all of these seemingly ordinary people who are not government lawyers, but nonetheless turning to international law to demand redress for multiple forms of state violence that shape those State Department lawyers bureaucrats ability to interpret or not interpret all of these international legal concepts they're trying to think through and enact. And so it became really important to me to think about how these government lawyers goals, visions and decisions drew on, but also many times foreclosed and obscured alternative formations, visions, ideas of what international justice or international law might look like, particularly around critiques of inequality and injustice not only between states, but within them. Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry

[B]

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[B]

Experian this is really interesting to think about and helpful to have that kind of insight of like what these processes look like sort of on the inside as it were. But to then think about kind of in some ways comparing them with what the impact is on the inside of them then being enacted, right? The people that are making these claims going, hang on a second, like what have you done? So I think kind of the obvious next place to look at that is with the planning construction of the Panama Canal, right? You mentioned it earlier and it is a really, I think, visceral way to look at like these lines being drawn on a map, these kind of legal documents being created in Washington D.C. and like what that actually means for real people impacted by the planning and construction of this in some ways kind of crazy idea.

[A]

Right?

[B]

So can you help us understand how these sorts of legal instruments and the people behind enacting them were involved in all of this with the Panama Canal?

[A]

Yes, yes, of course. So in 1903, US Secretary of War Eli Huron gives a speech and he explains that the US takeover of the Panama Canal Zone, you know, this 10 mile strip connecting the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of the Isthmus of Panama, is an act of, quote, international eminent domain. And again, this could just be sort of colonial bluster rhetoric, but it's telling that the US colonial government installed in the zone, the icc, the Isthmian Canal Commission, actually sets up and administers a series of international arbitration tribunals to in theory award market value compensation for any property taken for the purposes of canal construction and maintenance. So I assumed going into these records that this was just going to be like large landowners who are seeking monetary compensation for land taken for canal construction. But it turns out the maintenance piece was the most crucial piece of this because the US government ended up using not just one instance of eminent domain, one taking of land, but ongoing expropriations, land takings, what the ICC actually explicitly called depopulation of the Canal Zone. Not to take land required for canal construction, but as itself a tool of colonial governance by producing kind of legally manufactured modes of precarity that prevented or were crafted to prevent design, to prevent canal residents of many different positions and positionalities from challenging colonial governance or seeking redress for the kinds of violence they experienced at the hands of canal administrators, police, land agents. So it was really striking to me that. Back to your question of numbers. How many people are bringing claims for these tribunals? We have thousands of claims for compensation, not just brought by landowners, but by at times multiracial coalitions, multiple positioned coalitions of U.S. citizens in the zone, British and French colonial subjects from the Caribbean, Panamanians, really trying to challenge the kinds of violence they were experiencing in their everyday lives around land agents threatening to burn down their homes if they didn't sign over their property rights for pennies or being relocated to make space for the profits of oil corporations rather than any kind of what they viewed as legitimate canal maintenance. And this is a story too of on the one hand, these are really, really powerful critiques of the kinds of colonial power that we see emerging in the zone. But at the same time, the ways in which Panamanian diplomats used and wielded and manipulated these claims to renegotiate the treaty with the US during the 1920s and 30s really ended up erasing and disavowing some of the visions and ideas of freedom and justice and redress that we see through the testimony of the Canal Zone residents that brought these claims and made this kind of diplomatic repositioning possible, particularly around the kind of xenophobic and racist restrictions on immigration and citizenship that we see in Panama during the same decades. I'm thinking of the work of Keisha Carneali, Rebecca Herman and many others, Joanne Flores, who've shown us these histories. So, yeah, this is a moment of real disjuncture between the demands being made by claimants themselves and the uses to which their claims are put by diplomats.

[B]

Yeah, that's really interesting to think about. Kind of, as you said, the gap between what was meant to happen and then the sorts of things that do actually happen and the, as you said, disjunctures right, between the different sort of people involved here. And of course we see that, or at least I think we see that maybe most clearly. Looking at the U.S. mexico Claims Commission, which you mentioned earlier, can we get into that a little bit more to further illuminate kind of what was supposed to happen with this and then what actually did?

[A]

Yes, absolutely. So the last arbitral tribunal that I write about in the book is formed in 1923, and this is a moment when the US and Mexico return to mass claim settlement, really in the aftermath of Mexico's revolution. And it's not a coincidence that that's the year that the U.S. and Mexico returned to arbitration because the Harding administration in fact refused point blank to extend diplomatic recognition to Mexico's post revolutionary government unless President Obregon agreed to submit all outstanding claims of US nationals against Mexico to this new arbitration tribunal. So what's the purpose here? State Department confidently predicts that this arbitration will effectively take the teeth out of any redistributive mandate of the recently enacted 1917 Constitution. So, Constitution calling for land redistribution, social rights. State Department thinks, okay, you can have that on paper, but in practice, we're going to make it effectively impossible for you to enact any kind of these redistributed visions. How by really bankrupting Mexico's treasury, should the executive or Congress attempt to enact any mass land or resource nationalizations? So that's the plan. Honor sovereign equality, honor a constitution promising social rights and land distribution in practice by making it impossible, or in theory, while making it impossible in practice, by wielding this, at this point, long standing strategy of arbitration. But what's so striking is that a mere decade and a half later, this claims commission has collapsed into a privately negotiated settlement, the vast majority of cases filed before it left unresolved. So what happened? If we look at just the published exchange of diplomatic notes to which we often term for Answers right. The reasons seem clear. FDR administration's good neighbor policy prompted a retraction of these previously aggressive interventionisms that we see with the United States in Mexican Affairs 1933 at the Pan American Conference in Montevideo, US signs on to the Declaration of Rights and Duties of States. This is committing to respect principles of sovereign equality in the hemisphere. Or perhaps just the outbreak of World War II produced new military exigencies. But what really was striking to me is that from the vantage point of the pleadings process of close to 800 outstanding claims brought against the US government before this very same arbitration, the minutes of the final commissioners appointed to resolve them, a somewhat different explanation comes into view, and this is that the Claims Commission fell apart and with it a strategy of imperial intervention that the US had wielded for the better part of a century. In large part because the State Department wanted desperately to insulate the federal government from the international legal claims brought by Mexican citizens against the us so if they predicted that this was going to be a tribunal that was really just going to be about US landowners and oil corporations getting compensation for any nationalized property, it quickly becomes a fora in which close to 800Americans with Mexican nationality citizenship turn to the tribunal to hold the US accountable for the kinds of everyday violence they experience at the hands of police, rangers, politicians, white supremacist mobs. So these claims concern lynching, land theft, murder, racist judges and juries. And they're increasingly difficult for the State Department to ignore when they've been brought into view, brought into focus in this way. And when faced with these international legal claims, the US government ultimately chooses to abandon the tribunal rather than risk being held legally and financially liable for racist state violence. So in 1940, the US and Mexico agreed to a privately negotiated settlement to replace the Tribunal's mandate to consider the merits of individual claims. And then the claimants themselves really see nothing. They receive nothing, not any monetary compensation, not even any published record of their legal challenges and critiques of US state violence.

[B]

That's really interesting to start to see, kind of how this gets written out. I think of the history and also obviously part of the reason that it gets written out is that at some point these arbitration stop. So when and why does that happen?

[A]

Yeah, so the U.S. mexico Claims Commission is one of the last big state to state mass claim settlement arbitrations. This had been really the one of the primary modes of international dispute resolution. After the 1940s, it all but disappears. There are still some state to state arbitrations, but other forms of dispute Resolution Lucian, like investor state arbitration, really eclipse what had been principle framework through which these kind of questions had been asked and answered. So why does this kind of state to state arbitration disappear after the 40s? The traditional answer is because it became too inefficient and unwieldy, particularly in an era of mass resource nationalizations and decolonization across the globe. My argument though, is that this kind of forum disappeared from the international legal order not necessarily because of their inefficiency, but instead because of their surprising efficacy in exposing and challenging denials of justice in and across borders claimed by the United States. So yes, the 1923 U.S. mexico Claims Commission was not able to finish its work. Yes, the lawyers, the judges, the agents got completely stalled and it took way longer than they thought it would. And there were way more cases than they anticipated. But if we look at the kinds of cases that the US Agency refused to allow through, and the reasons why over and over again, the workings of the trade funeral were delayed or, or shut down or, or reworked, the cases that scared the State Department the most, the cases that the two final commissioners were the most hung up on and could not really come to a sense of resolution about, were the very same charges that were brought by Mexican citizens against the US Government. And these concerned denial of justice. They concerned murder, they concerned lynching, they concerned racist judges and juries, they concerned labor exploitation. And that's why the minutes of these final commissioners debates over how the Claims Commission should or should not proceed are so telling and so striking to me that wait, this isn't simply a question of too much paper, too many claims, not enough time, not enough money. That narrative itself sort of obscures what was really at stake for the commissioners of this tribunal and also more importantly, for the claimants that brought arguments before it. And I also do want to really flag that although these kind of claims were, as you say, written out of, erased from the international legal record because the tribunal didn't publish opinions on them, those opinions weren't reproduced in, for example, the American Journal of International Law. They weren't cited, they were kind of shielded from the public eye. These cases and these claims and this violence were not forgotten by the families or communities of petitioners. And as Monica Munoz Martinez's brilliant book has shown us, the histories and memories of these kinds of organizing against injustice were not forgotten and also continue to shape challenges to state violence in the years and decades to come. So there is this real difference between what is published through official international legal record keeping channels and what is remembered and kept alive and transmitted across generations.

[B]

Yeah, that's a really interesting aspect of this, of kind of which record gets lost and what kinds of things do we count as records? Right. Because, you know, what's officially in the legal code is one part of it, but as you've mentioned, kind of not the only one. But why then have they been so eradicated? Is it simply like, because they're not published in the law code, therefore everyone forgets? Or is it kind of more on purpose, I suppose, than that, that it's not just not in the historiography, but also not in the precedence of international law, which I find weird. Like, doesn't international law love a precedent? You know, where does that come out here?

[A]

Yeah. So I really came to the conclusion that these claims were not forgotten so much as they were actively erased and distorted with the goal of making. With the goal of the State Department of really making this kind of international legal critique not just impossible, but unthinkable. And to this day, if you look at the published records of international law, so the exhaustive, seemingly exhaustive digest and treatises of early 20th century jurists like John Massett Moore, Elihu Rood, Edwin Borchardt, they make almost no mention of these claims. And when they do, they're actually sort of misrepresented. If we turn to the minutes of the international codification conferences at the Hague, at Versailles, in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, we see no transcripts of their testimonies. And because we tend to look to these kind of sources in the field of US foreign relations, the scholarship can offer similar silences. And it may seem reasonable to assume that these cases remained absent from the canon, what we consider the canon of international law, because they ultimately proved inconsequential to the field of state responsibility. But if we follow these kinds of denial of justice charges, from cotton fields to consoles, from mutual aid societies to metropolitan capitals, a very different picture comes into view. And it said these claims disappeared from the international legal record not because they mattered too little, but instead because the State Department worried they mattered too much. We have colonial bureaucrats really warning Washington that claimants who bring case after case after case, exposing quite clearly US violations of international law in ways that are increasingly hard to ignore. That these cases had the potential of really halting the machinery of empire building and puncturing the stories of legal exemplarity that the US so often told about itself. So I end the book really thinking, you know, what might hundreds or even thousands of arbitral decisions, finding the everyday workings of the US Legal system to represent violations of international law might have meant for this emerging mid 20th century the global order. And of course it's impossible to know, but I do think it's telling that the State Department didn't want to find out.

[B]

Yeah, I think it's very telling. Right. Just asking that question is already like, oh, hang on a second.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And the fact that you're asking that question, like you're clearly not the first one to come up with it, because if the State Department hadn't asked that question, they wouldn't have gone to this effort to make sure that no one could ever answer it. So they definitely something very intriguing there and worth remembering as a takeaway from this book. Are there any other key things you hope readers take from all of this?

[A]

Well, I do also really want to emphasize that while histories of international law and US Foreign relations don't tend to consider these histories or these sources, generations of ethnic studies scholarship and field defining research and books have exposed and theorized and understood them. I see the history and historiography of international law as needing to engage that scholarship as well.

[B]

Yeah, no, definitely. Always a fan of interdisciplinarity over here. So lovely note, I think, to end our discussion on the book with is there anything you're currently working on that you want to give us a sneak PE preview of?

[A]

Oh, sure. Yeah. So my new book project is on sovereign debt and corporate power. It's sort of rethinking sovereign debt away from histories of lending and borrowing and toward the production of novel forms of indebtedness around international disputes over labor and meanings of freedom beginning in the late 19th century. So I'm working on that. I do have an edited volume project with a historian, Edward Jones Coredera, that's looking at sovereign debt disputes in the global 1860s, and then some work on kind of histories of the Monroe Doctrine, connecting to present day US Colonialism and interventions and violences, and then another project on debt for nature swaps and corporate governance in the Americas starting much later in the 1980s, 1990s. So yeah, new research.

[B]

Plenty to keep you busy then. And of course, while you are pursuing all of those projects, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Arbitrating United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law, published by Oxford University Press in 2024. Alison, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[A]

Thank you so much, Miranda.