Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe Anthropocene rupture refers to the beginning of our current geological epoch in which humans constitute a collective geological force that alters the trajectory of the Earth system. An increased engagement with this notion of a rupture has prompted a lively debate on the inherent anthropocentrism of International Relations (IR), and whether it is possible to transform it into something new that embraces diverse forms of existence, human as well as non-human. This article challenges that possibility. It shows how much of the current debate rests on the idea fulfilling future desirable ideals, which are pushed perpetually beyond a horizon of human thought, making them unreachable. As an alternative, the article turns to Jacques Derrida's understanding of the future to come (l'avenir), highlighting the significance of unpredictability and unexpected events. This understanding of the future shows how life within and of the international rests on encounters with the future as something radically other. On this basis, it is argued that responding to our current predicament should proceed not by seeking to fulfil future ideals but by encountering the future as incalculable and other, whose arrival represents an opportunity as much as a threat to established forms of international life.

TheAmerican Journal of International Law(AJIL) stands in dialectical tension between itsAmerican and its internationalidentities. At its founding, and in periodic reassessments on the occasion of anniversaries or changes of leadership, its editors in chief have offered their understandings of the place for thisJournalat the intersection of American and international life. One of our predecessors wrote in theJournal'ssixth decade of "a dual function, both that of laying international law material before American readers, and that of placing American viewpoints on international law before the rest of the world." Poised at the threshold of a new century, we can take this opportunity for reflection in the image of Janus on both our American (internationalist) origins and our increasingly international (yet in some senses still American) future.

At its 1994 session, the International Law Commission (ILC) completed the final adoption ("second reading") of a complete set of thirty-three draft articles on the law of the non-navigational uses of international watercourses, together with a resolution on transboundary confined ground water. The Commission submitted the draft articles and the resolution to the General Assembly and recommended that a convention on international watercourses be elaborated by the Assembly or by an international conference of plenipotentiaries on the basis of the Commission's draft.