THE CONCEPT OF INTERNATIONAL MUNICIPAL LAW IN MODERN MUNICIPAL LAW RE- SEARCH

The article is devoted to the problem of the formation of international municipal law as a branch of current international public law. There is a focus on studying the international aspects of local self- determination in foreign legal sciences, with an emphasis on exploring the problems of the new role of cities in international relations, as well as managerial problems of the municipal self-government between national powers. Participation of cities in global political structures and international rule- making, according to foreign experts, will provide the basis for the emergence of international municipal law. For the development of the concept of international municipal law, an important role was played by the work of the research group “The Role of Сities in International Law”, created by the International Law Association (ILA), as well as the academic publication “Research Handbook on International Law and Cities”, which brought together a great international team of scholars. A comprehensive analysis of the impact of international law on cities, which act as leading units of local self-government, sheds light on the growing global role of cities and argues for a new understanding of international law in light of the urban turn. The materials of this collection allow us to identify the components of the concept of international municipal law, or international local government law, formed in Western legal thought. In domestic jurisprudence, the concept of international municipal law was formed primarily in the works of M.O. Baymuratov, who was a pioneer in this area and remains a leading researcher of international legal aspects of local self-government to this day. Unlike the Western doctrine, which emphasizes the development and involvement of cities in international activities, M.O. Baymuratov and his scholars link the emergence of international municipal law with the processes of constitutionalization of international public law and the internationalization of the constitutional legal order of states. These processes are accompanied by growing international recognition of the institution of local self-government, primarily through its international legal regulation and contextualization of relevant aspects of the activities of local self-government bodies, taking into account their international activities, in particular through the development and adoption of a number of international multilateral intergovernmental treaties and the preparation at the UN level of a draft World Charter of Local Self-Government. In the field of municipal law, significant processes of borrowing international legal standards of local self-government by national constitutional law are taking place, primarily through the system of international legal treaties of the UN and the Council of Europe. These “external” factors are associated with legal globalization, which is aimed at the standardization and unification of the most important social-state relations, which are of significant importance not only for the nation-state, but also for the entire international community of states. Local self-government is also included in the circle of such priority-most important relations.