Suchergebnisse

Internationale Organisationen greifen insbesondere seit dem Ende des Ost-West-Konflikts verstärkt in innergesellschaftliche Prozesse ein und treten immer öfter in direkte Herrschaftsbeziehungen mit Individuen. Die Einsätze zum Aufbau politischer Strukturen in Nachkriegsgesellschaften sind hierfür das augenfälligste Beispiel. Im Zuge dieser Entwicklung kam es zur Verletzung von Menschenrechten direkt durch internationale Organisationen. Als besonders gravierende Beispiele gelten die Fälle sexuellen Missbrauchs im Kontext von Friedensmissionen der UNO. Es wird zudem behauptet, dass es auch im Rahmen der Strukturanpassungsprogramme des IWF und der Weltbank zu Menschenrechtsverletzungen gekommen sei. Direkte Herrschaftsbeziehungen führen freilich auch umgekehrt dazu, dass normative Ansprüche hinsichtlich des Schutzes grundlegender Rechte direkt an internationale Organisationen herangetragen werden. In dem geplanten Projekt wollen wir deshalb der Frage nachgehen, wann internationale Organisationen diese Ansprüche anerkennen und Verfahren einrichten, mit denen der Schutz von Menschenrechten gewährleistet werden kann. Konkret soll untersucht werden, unter welchen Bedingungen internationale Organisationen auf den Vorwurf, eine ihrer Politiken verletze Menschenrechte, mit der Einrichtung entsprechender Verfahren reagieren. Dabei soll es vor allem darum gehen, Kausalmechanismen und deren Rahmenbedingungen zu identifizieren und zu gewichten. Außerdem wollen wir Erkenntnisse darüber gewinnen, ob entsprechende Reformen internationaler Organisationen als Ausdruck der Etablierung einer neuen generellen Norm angesehen werden können. Das Projekt soll einen Beitrag zur Forschung über die neuen Funktionsweisen internationaler Institutionen im Zeitalter der Globalisierung leisten. Zudem soll es zur Weiterentwicklung der Forschung zur Diffusion von Normen im Allgemeinen und von Menschenrechts- und rule of law-Normen im Speziellen beitragen, indem die Möglichkeit sowohl einer vertikalen Diffusion von Normen auf die internationale Ebene als auch der horizontalen Diffusion von Normen auf der internationalen Ebene diskutiert wird.

A major puzzle in international relations is why states privilege negative over positive information. States tend to inflate threats, exhibit loss aversion, and learn more from failures than from successes. Rationalist accounts fail to explain this phenomenon, because systematically overweighting bad over good may in fact undermine state interests. New research in psychology, however, offers an explanation. The "negativity bias" has emerged as a fundamental principle of the human mind, in which people's response to positive and negative information is asymmetric. Negative factors have greater effects than positive factors across a wide range of psychological phenomena, including cognition, motivation, emotion, information processing, decision-making, learning, and memory. Put simply, bad is stronger than good. Scholars have long pointed to the role of positive biases, such as overconfidence, in causing war, but negative biases are actually more pervasive and may represent a core explanation for patterns of conflict. Positive and negative dispositions apply in different contexts. People privilege negative information about the external environment and other actors, but positive information about themselves. The coexistence of biases can increase the potential for conflict. Decisionmakers simultaneously exaggerate the severity of threats and exhibit overconfidence about their capacity to deal with them. Overall, the negativity bias is a potent force in human judgment and decisionmaking, with important implications for international relations theory and practice.

Resolved, That the committee adopts as the basis for consideration of the subject referred to it, the Acts and Resolutions of the Second Peace Conference at The Hague in the year 1907.That the provisions of the several plans for an International Court of Justice already elaborated by representative jurists of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, be laid before the committee and considered as the subjects to which they respectively relate, are taken up for consideration.

This paper is about public sector pensions, an issue that has become increasingly contentious in a number of countries in recent years, including in the United Kingdom. In the UK the public debate has focussed on the perceived generosity of these pensions, which, it is often claimed, contrasts with the pension promises made in the private sector. This paper does not attempt to answer whether public sector pension promises are relatively generous in the UK or elsewhere but instead aims to provide the bigger picture against which a discussion of public sector pension provision could be held. The origin of today's public sector pensions can be traced back at least to Ancient Rome, which offered pensions to its military personnel. Pensions to public sector workers can also be traced back several centuries even though their provision remained on an ad-hoc basis for longer, while universal pension provision for all is a creation of the modern welfare state. The issue of public sector pensions is intrinsically linked to the role of the state in society. Beyond the provision of pure public goods such as defence, the role of the state varies widely across countries, for example in the provision (and funding) of health or long-term care. The role of the state has also changed over time, for example in the telecommunications sector, reflecting technological progress and ideological changes. In most countries working for the state comes with a number of privileges (e.g. job security) but also with certain responsibilities (e.g. relinquishing the right to strike). An international comparison reveals that in a number of countries the state is also a special employer in the sense that it offers more generous pensions than the private sector. This is, however, not the case in all countries. The paper argues that the government might pursue a number of objectives going beyond poverty alleviation by offering more generous pensions but also stresses that more generally the objectives of efficiency, equity and sustainability remain desirable even in the context of public sector pensions.

Report on investment opportunities in Vietnam. Issued covered include: the political structure, the governmental framework, Vietnam's international relations, US-Vietnamese relations, the Vietnamese economy, the infrastructure, banking and finance, the investment environment, and operating in Vietnam. Statistics, 1975-88. (Economische Voorlichtingsdienst)

States use formal international organizations (IOs) to manage both their everyday interactions and more dramatic episodes, including international conflicts. Yet, contemporary international theory does not explain the existence or form of IOs. This article addresses the question of why states use formal organizations by investigating the functions IOs perform and the properties that enable them to perform those functions. Starting with a rational-institutionalist perspective that sees IOs as enabling states to achieve their ends, the authors examine power and distributive questions and the role of IOs in creating norms and understanding. Centralization and independence are identified as the key properties of formal organizations, and their importance is illustrated with a wide array of examples. IOs as community representatives further allow states to create and implement community values and enforce international commitments.

In a world in which barriers to trade at all levels - international and internal - are mostly a by-product of the implementation by governments of different regulatory policies to deal with domestic or local problems, the mechanisms that are set in motion by the operation of competition among the governments inhabiting the different jurisdictional tiers of federal countries lead to outcomes that are different from those generated by the 'agreed-upon' rules that govern the relations of national governments with each other in matters of international trade. A model is used to compare two ways of dealing with the external damages that are consequent on the pursuit of beneficial domestic regulatory policies. It assumes that at the international level the methods used can be synthesized by what is known as the least-restrictive means principle, while in the context of competitive federalism the methods lead to what can be called a proper balancing of benefits and costs of domestic policies, including the spillover costs inflicted on others. With the help of this model, the paper shows that one or the other of the two sets of methods could be more restrictive, depending on the magnitude of spillovers and the relation between the instrument used and the achievement of the domestic objective. It includes also a discussion of the case of the European Union, which falls between these two polar extremes.