Acknowledgments
The present volume is the outcome of a sustained editorial effort, during which three academic conferences and numerous passionate intellectual debates were successfully held. The first of these conferences took place at San Pablo ceu University in Madrid in 2021, an international hub for contemporary efforts to shed new light on the rich legacy of Francisco de Vitoria in international law. The second international workshop was held at the University of Salamanca in 2022 – the cradle of the globally celebrated sixteenth- and seventeenth-century School of moral and legal Spanish theologians known as the School of Salamanca. Finally, the third of our international conferences was generously hosted by María Cristina College at El Escorial, a unesco World Heritage Site built by order of King Philip ii in the sixteenth century near Madrid, in the summer of 2024.
Parts of Chapter 3 were previously published as Jochen von Bernstorff, ‘Governing Hegemonic Spaces in Carl Schmitt: Colonialism, Anti-imperialism and the Grossraum Theory’, 14 Humanity (2023), 369–384. Chapter 19 partly draws on materials previously published as Ignacio de la Rasilla, ‘Looking Forward Through and Beyond the Western Classics of International Law’, 13 Asian Journal of International Law (2023), 146–168.
The editors are deeply grateful to the Royal Institute of European Studies at San Pablo ceu University in Madrid for its institutional support, as well as to its dedicated staff for their personal commitment to this book project, and in particular to Dr. Sandra Galimberti Diaz-Faes, who graciously served as editorial manager in its inception. The editors are also very grateful to Prof. Randall Lesaffer, series editor of Studies in the History of International Law – the pioneering book series in the burgeoning field of the history of international law – for providing this volume with an excellent home at Brill/Nijhoff.
Last, but by no means least, the editors wish to once again express their gratitude to all the contributing authors – originating from academic institutions across Europe (including Spain, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway, Italy, and Finland), as well as North America, South America, China, and Australia – for the excellence of their collective efforts to unravel the many concealed mysteries and conceptual paradoxes surrounding the Vitoria–Schmitt nexus in the history and theory of international law.
Ignacio de la Rasilla and José María Beneyto Wuhan and Madrid, September 2025