Book Review: Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan, The Protection of Intellectual Property in International Law
| Date | 01 May 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929917695828 |
| Published date | 01 May 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsInternational Relations |
286 Political Studies Review 15(2)
the main events from the perspective of the par-
ticular Polish or Russian historian. A few of the
chapters, however, do analyse the way in which
historical research and mutual perceptions have
served to influence the historical debate.
Andrzej Przewóznik, for instance, gives a
detailed account of persistent Polish efforts to
uncover the truth behind the Katyn massacre.
Natalia Lebedeva, in turn, describes Russian
historians’ attempts (including her own) to gain
access to evidence relating to the massacre in
the years before and after the disintegration of
the Soviet Union. This serves as an important
reminder that there are Russian historians who
have been anxious to reveal the truth behind
Stalin’s crimes. As the editors note, the accounts
of the various Polish and Russian contributors
often heavily overlap, suggesting that among
both countries’ professional historians, at least,
there is a large measure of consensus regarding
these difficult issues.
Unfortunately, in recent years, other ‘dif-
ficult matters’ have arisen which have served
to strain Polish–Russian relations, including
the plane crash in Smolensk in 2010. These
and other events demonstrate that there is still
a long way to go before a complete reconcili-
ation between these two nations can be
effected.
Christopher Reeves
(Jagiellonian University, Cracow)
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929917692353
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
The Protection of Intellectual Property in
International Law by Henning Grosse Ruse-
Khan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
504pp., £125.00 (h/b), ISBN 9780199663392
For over a century, intellectual property has
been part of the system of international law,
starting with the Paris and Bern Conventions
in the early 1880s. But despite such an illus-
trious history, the nature of intellectual prop-
erty protection within international law has
been poorly addressed, and as a result, intel-
lectual property has always been on the
defensive – justifying its existence. But in
this resourceful and authoritative work,
Henning Ruse-Khan has provided a grand
and inclusionary narrative of intellectual
property protection within the politically
laced system of public international law.
Ruse-Khan’s robust arguments emerge from
two fronts: a conflict of norms approach and a
conflict of rules approach. The former exposes
the ‘norm relations’ which intellectual property
has with states, while the latter decodes the ‘tech-
nical legal rules’ that intellectual property must
deploy as it competes in the fragmented world of
international law and its special regimes.
As a result of the competition of norms and
rules regarding global intellectual property,
Ruse-Khan examines regimes such as environ-
mental law, human rights, trade and invest-
ments, and outsiders such as private international
law. The examination of these different rule
systems and intellectual property law represents
an elaborate attempt to find a solution to the
politics of rules concerning intellectual property
and its relationship with international law.
Building on the (in)famous proposals of the
International Law Commission’s Fragmentation
Report (2006), Ruse-Khan sets himself the task
of finding ‘new approaches to address relations
between rules in international law’ (p. 4) amid
the often colliding norms for hegemonic strug-
gle of special interests (p. 6). Ruse-Khan power-
fully argues that intellectual property internal
rules can happily embrace external rules.
The book depicts intellectual property in
the international system as representing conti-
nuity and providing a resilient system (pp.
145–148) and suggests that the various
regimes it interfaces with are a form of ‘meta
rule of integration’ (p. 54). However, one major
critique is that there are too many spare parts in
the decoding tool box. In other words, Ruse-
Khan attempts too hard to fuse together a num-
ber of familiar arguments exposed in previous
scholarly works with the result that this some-
times almost drowns out his own intuitive
insights. Furthermore, the title could have also
reflected its fundamental doctrinal and norma-
tive approach: ‘conflict of norms and rules’.
Nevertheless, the potency of this book is that
it can streamline a rescue process of intellectual
property from the negative criticisms it has
received over the years from both the political
and legal spectrum. It is perhaps one of the few
books that will legitimise the legal relations of
intellectual property in the system of interna-
tional law – which so many have misunderstood
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