Suchergebnisse

International standards have assumed special legal significance in the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade ('TBT Agreement'). This article conceptualizes international standards as global public goods and argues for applying global administrative law principles to vet international standards before they are afforded quasi-legislative status in the WTO law. We traced how the WTO Appellate Body has changed its original hands-off approach in EC – Sardines in 2002 to a more intrusive approach in US – Tuna II in 2012.We submit that the WTO Appellate Body's new approach to international standards marks a distinctive pathway for the development of global administrative law in producing global public goods. The compliance with global administrative law principles set out in the TBT Committee Decision in turn provides international standardizing bodies with additional legitimacy and accountability. However, contrary to popular opinion, we submit that adoption by consensus is not a necessary condition for a standard to be recognized as an international standard in the world trading system.

An issue has recently arisen in international criminal law concerning the gravity of the offences listed in the Statutes of the International Tribunals: Should offences be ranked according to their seriousness and, hence, as entailing heavier or lighter punishment? Should the same act when charged as a crime against humanity or genocide be punished more severely than when charged as a war crime?

The international system is not only an expression of domestic structures, but a cause of them. Two schools of analysis exploring the impact of the international system upon domestic politics (regime types, institutions, coalitions, policies) may be distinguished: those which stress the international economy, and those which stress political-military rivalry, or war. Among the former are such arguments as: late industrialization (associated with Gershenkron); dependencia or core-periphery arguments (Wallerstein); liberal development model (much American writing in the 50s and 60s); transnational relation-modernization (Nye, Keohane, Morse); neo-mercantilists (Gilpin); state-centered Marxists (Schurmann). Arguments stressing the role of war include those which focus on the organizational requirements of providing security (Hintze, Anderson), the special nature of foreign relations (classical political theory), territorial compensation (diplomatic history), and strains of foreign involvement (analysis of revolutions). These arguments provide the basis for criticism of much of the literature which uses domestic structure as an explanation of foreign policy, in particular those which (such as the strong-state weak-state distinction) tend, by excessive focus on forms, to obscure the connection between structures and interests, and the role of politics. These arguments also permit criticism of the notion of a recent fundamental discontinuity in the nature of international relations.

This monograph examines and analyses the phenomenon of non-binding instruments (also known as 'soft law') in the law of armed conflict, or international humanitarian law. It covers the benefits and drawbacks for States and non-States actors as well as their effectiveness and development in the context of armed conflict.

The right of States to use force extraterritorially is conditioned by requirements of necessity and proportionality. This book provides a detailed analysis of those requirements, and a coherent and up-to-date account of the applicable contemporary international law in this field.

China has a large and expansive network of actors working on Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) activities. This report maps the foremost key Chinese actors and institutions with an orientation towards international activities. ; publishedVersion

Most would agree that the recent emergence of the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics in Ukraine, and perhaps the Islamic State, will soon find their place in the already growing literature on contested states. Yet, despite the historical and present importance of these entities for the study of alternative forms of political authority, sovereignty, statehood, international legitimacy, as well as wars within and between states, there is very little agreement in the existing literature on what constitutes a contested state. After illustrating some of the theoretical and empirical shortcomings of the current conceptual approaches in the treatment of these entities, this article proposes and adopts an ontological approach to conceptualizing and studying contested states in international relations. I argue that the contested state's internal nature can be understood through four constitutive dimensions, which accentuate the phenomenon's distinct interaction with its environment when compared to other phenomena. The article also provides a way to resolve the discord that currently exists on what the theoretical concept of contested state ought to capture empirically, by introducing an explicit and systematic procedure when applying the concept to the empirical world.

It has been asserted that little relationship exists between national attributes, foreign conflict, & cooperation behavior. If the assertion were true, attribute theory would be of minor consequence & deliberate attribute manipulation would be a waste of time as a means of controlling international conflict & cooperation. To explore the assertion in attribute theory terms, A-space (144 variable base) & conflict & cooperation vectors (WEIS data) were generated & correlated. The assertion can be challenged in the sense that several A-space dimensions predict conflict &/or cooperation & the overall results are improbable, assuming a random model. Speculations were then generated, assuming causal linkages, as to possible policy prescriptions. One set was based on an absolute level & the other on a relative position model. For example, employing the absolute level model, reductions in a state's Power Base level should (hypothetically) result in reduced conflict exportations. Given such policy prescription possibilities, additional investigations appear both rational & needed. Through this kind of research, deliberate attribute manipulation, which may be a large component of a state's foreign behavior, may be given theoretical guidance as to the likely impact of such manipulation on conflict & cooperation in the international relations system. 1 Table. AA.