Volume 12 presents a symposium entitled After the Empire. International Law and the Post-Soviet Space edited by Lauri Mälksoo and Ineta Ziemele. It contains selected papers presented at the 4th Research Forum of the European Society of International Law that took place in Tallinn, Estonia, on 26-28 May 2011. The general theme of the Forum was formulated widely: “International Law and Power Politics: Great Powers, Peripheries and Claims to Spheres of Influence in International Normative Order”. With 180 participants from different countries the Forum in Tallinn was the biggest event in the field of international law to take place in the Baltic States to date.

The papers selected for this volume build in particular on the idea of a panel that was titled “Russia’s Contemporary Understanding of International Law: Identical to Western Approaches?” The main questions presented within this theme are clear: after the USSR has collapsed in 1991, what is the new Russian concept of international law and human rights? What international legal developments are currently significant in the post-Soviet space?

The following authors have been selected to participate in the symposium: R. Tkatova, S. Marochkin, B.Tuzmukhamedov, L. Aleksidze, M.Sterio, A.Douhan, M. Starita, J. Sweeney, Ch.Cerna, A.Burkov, J.Grigorova, K. Guliyev and A.Marhold.

The Baltic Yearbook of International Law is the first legal journal in the field of international law published under the auspices of the Baltic Editorial Board that attempts to bring to the international debate the issues that are of importance in the Baltic States and provides a forum for the views of, among others, Baltic international law scholars on various topical themes of international law. The first volume appeared in 2001 with the symposium on the question of International Legal States of the Baltic States. The Yearbook contains State practice reports from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and thus it serves as an important source of information that is not available elsewhere. On several occasions the Yearbook has offered articles discussing the history of international law and current issues in Eastern Europe and the Russian Federation thus making more accessible a regional discourse to a wider audience in the world.