“No Exit at Nuremberg: The Postwar Order as Stage for 21st-Century Global Insecurity” is the title of the keynote address that University of Georgia School of Law Professor Diane Marie Amann delivered Thursday at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, thus opening the 2022 Research Forum of the European Society of International Law. Her topic dovetailed with the forum’s overall theme, “International Law an Global Security: Regulating an Illusion?”

Introducing Amann – who is Regents’ Professor of International Law, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center – was Glasgow Law Professor Christian J. Tams, Director of the Glasgow Centre for International Law & Security.

Amann framed her talk around two artefacts of the period immediately after World War II, when the 1945-46 Trial of Major War Criminals was unfolding before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany: the play that Jean-Paul Sartre entitled Huis Clos but that is known in English as Vicious Circle or No Exit; and the front page of a French newspaper that referred not only to that play, but also to food shortages, the East-West threat spurred by the advent of nuclear weapons, and the IMT trial. She then linked the military, economic, political, and human security threads these artefacts raised to current events including conflicts in Ukraine and elsewhere.