Suchergebnisse

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol deferred negotiations on emissions from aviation to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).[1] Also within this specialised body, agreement on how to deal with emissions from aviation has been difficult to reach.[2] Frustrated by the lack of progress, the European Union (EU) decided to act unilaterally to reduce emission from aviation, by including aviation within its Emission Trading System (ETS). Initially, the EU set out to include in the ETS emissions from all major aircraft flying to or from European airports, even when these fly over the high seas or foreign territory.[3] Many States, however, viewed the EU's initiative as a unilateral act in violation of their sovereignty. The EU has since suspended the application of the ETS to foreign aircraft.[4] Even so, this incident raises important questions concerning the legality of unilateral acts under international law. This note considers when and how a State or a regional organisation may legitimately take unilateral measures to protect the environment. The note will not consider the legality of including foreign aircraft within the ETS, which has been dealt with elsewhere.[5] Instead, it will focus on the legality and importance of unilateral acts for the development of international law.

When reform negotiations in international organizations (IOs) produce limited substantive progress, the diagnosis is typically a lack of political will. We identify a different dynamic: in protracted negotiations, international policy paradigms can emerge that enshrine a politically realistic but incomplete issue definition and thereby focus the debate on a subset of policy instruments that do not fully address the underlying problem. We draw on the multilateral negotiations literature to show how policy paradigms—which are widely explored in Comparative Politics, but largely neglected in International Relations—can emerge even in heterogenous IOs, where deep cognitive cohesion is unlikely. The risk of negotiation failure incentivizes negotiators to adopt and maintain "achievable" issue and goal definitions, which over time are accepted as axiomatic by diplomats, IO officials, and policy experts. The resulting international policy paradigms help avoid institutional paralysis, but can also impede more ambitious reforms. To establish the empirical plausibility of this argument, we highlight the contemporary international policy paradigm of rapid deployment in UN peacekeeping, which focuses more on establishing an initial brigade-sized presence than on rapid deployment of the full peacekeeping force. Drawing on primary documents and interviews, we identify the roots of this First Brigade policy paradigm in reactions to the UN's failure to respond to the 1994 Rwandan genocide and trace its consolidation during UN reform negotiations in the 2000s and early 2010s. We also demonstrate that an alternative explanation of the paradigm as reflecting operational lessons-learned does not hold: a brigade-sized initial presence is rarely sufficient for mandate implementation, does not reliably speed up full deployment, and creates risks for peacekeepers. By highlighting the existence and impact of international policy paradigms, our study adds to scholarship on the role of ideas in International Relations and provides a novel perspective on reform negotiations in IOs.

AbstractWhen reform negotiations in international organizations (IOs) produce limited substantive progress, the diagnosis is typically a lack of political will. We identify a different dynamic: in protracted negotiations, international policy paradigms can emerge that enshrine a politically realistic but incomplete issue definition and thereby focus the debate on a subset of policy instruments that do not fully address the underlying problem. We draw on the multilateral negotiations literature to show how policy paradigms—which are widely explored in Comparative Politics, but largely neglected in International Relations—can emerge even in heterogenous IOs, where deep cognitive cohesion is unlikely. The risk of negotiation failure incentivizes negotiators to adopt and maintain "achievable" issue and goal definitions, which over time are accepted as axiomatic by diplomats, IO officials, and policy experts. The resulting international policy paradigms help avoid institutional paralysis, but can also impede more ambitious reforms. To establish the empirical plausibility of this argument, we highlight the contemporary international policy paradigm of rapid deployment in UN peacekeeping, which focuses more on establishing an initial brigade-sized presence than on rapid deployment of the full peacekeeping force. Drawing on primary documents and interviews, we identify the roots of this First Brigade policy paradigm in reactions to the UN's failure to respond to the 1994 Rwandan genocide and trace its consolidation during UN reform negotiations in the 2000s and early 2010s. We also demonstrate that an alternative explanation of the paradigm as reflecting operational lessons-learned does not hold: a brigade-sized initial presence is rarely sufficient for mandate implementation, does not reliably speed up full deployment, and creates risks for peacekeepers. By highlighting the existence and impact of international policy paradigms, our study adds to scholarship on the role of ideas in International Relations and provides a novel perspective on reform negotiations in IOs.

Over the last decade in the United States, there has been a rapid intensification of the criminalization of immigration. At the nexus of this criminalization is a new institution with potentially profound consequences for transnational migrants, an especially vulnerable population now receiving increased attention from the social work profession. This article explores this phenomenon and its relevance for international social work.

In economic research, much attention is traditionally paid to the issues of trade and economic cooperation between states and the development of international trade. This kind of research is based on the materials of official statistics of countries and international organizations, which are not always published on a comparable basis, making it difficult, and sometimes impossible to do an objective analysis of processes taking place both in bilateral economic relations and in international trade in general. The article deals with this important problem of comparability of statistical sources.Using a large amount of factual and statistical material, the authors trace the changes that have occurred in world trade relations of the 21st century, paying special attention to the post-crisis period, they reveal the main features of the geographical and commodity structure of trade, they present a comparative analysis of the rates of development of world exports and imports by groups of countries, assess Russia's participation in international trade, and also demonstrate the methodological content of the main statistical indicators that are used to characterize foreign economic relations.For many decades, international cooperation in the field of statistics has focused on the problem of unifying information on the foreign economic activity of countries. Solving this problem, the UN Statistical Commission has drawn up methodological documents, which are usually called "international statistical standards". Based on the study of these documents, as well as materials of official statistics of countries and other primary sources, the authors characterize the process of international standardization of information on foreign economic relations of countries. The article presents a critical analysis of the key provisions of the latest methodological standards of statistics, considers the practice of their application in countries, including the Russian Federation, identifies the main achievements and problems in this area.

AbstractCommunication has long been accepted as integral to the conduct of international affairs. The role that discourses, ideas, norms, and narratives play at the systemic level of world politics has been examined extensively. Scholarly interest has now turned to how international actors use political communication tools to create and counter threats, such as propaganda, hybrid warfare, fake news, and election tampering, and it is often taken for granted that states are inferior to their challengers in these domains. To address this, 'Strategic Communications' has emerged as a mode of thought and practice promising to enhance state communication; encompassing long-established activities including public diplomacy, public relations, nation branding, and information operations. In this developing field, private sector professionals are increasingly being called on to support and advise governments. Particular attention has been paid to the 'Big Data' private companies may have access to, but there has been little IR research examining the experts seeking changes in how strategic communications is practised. Informed by elite interviews with communication professionals across the public-private space, this article sets out a research agenda to fill this gap, enhancing understanding of the expert relationships that shape international strategic communications.