In: Contested Justice: The Politics and Practice of International Criminal Court Interventions (Ed. De Vos, Kendall, Stahn, Cambridge University Press, 2015)
In: Revue juridique et politique: indépendance et coopération ; organe de l'Institut de Droit ; organe de l'Institut International de Droit d'Expression Français, Band 35, Heft 4, S. 883-897
No human institution is perfect and the International Committee of the Red Cross is no exception. The criticism most frequently levelled at this venerable body is its silence concerning some of its activities. How can it have a claim to eminence, how can it call powerful governments to account, without seeking the support of men of goodwill through divulgence of full information to the public?
The field of International Relations (IR) is being spun around by a seemingly endless number of 'turns'. Existing analyses of turning are few in number and predominantly concerned with the most prominent recent turns. By excavating the forgotten history of IR's earliest turns from the 1980s and tracing the evolution of turn-talk over time, this article reveals a crucial yet overlooked internalist driver behind the phenomenon: the rise of reflexivity. Rather than emerging in the 21st century, turn-talk began at the end of the 1980s as a series of turns away from positivism and towards reflexivity. Cumulatively, this first wave of turns would denaturalise IR's state-centric ontology while enshrining reflexivity as a canonical good among critical scholars. By the mid-1990s, however, these metatheoretical critiques of positivism had produced a substantial backlash. Charged with fostering an esoteric deconstructivism, a new generation of reflexivists set out to demonstrate the feasibility of post-positivist empirical research. As a result, IR's turning also took on a different form from the 2000s: whereas the first wave of turns had mounted an epistemological and methodological attack against the positivist mainstream, the second wave set about bringing new ontological objects under the scrutiny of reflexivist scholars. This shift from anti-positivist to mostly intra-reflexivist turning was facilitated by the institutionalisation of critical IR as a major subfield of the discipline. It is the privileged position of reflexivity among critical IR scholars that is the condition of possibility for endless turning, accentuated by mounting pressures to demonstrate novelty in an increasingly competitive environment.
We examine how analogy-based collective decision-making of member states contributes to the endogenous emergence of informal rules and the incremental change of international organizations (IOs). Decision-making by analogy is an important characteristic of day-to-day decision-making in IOs. Relating current decisions to previous ones through analogies drives incremental change and simultaneously reinforces organizational resilience. Whereas the foreign policy analysis literature shows that analogies can be used as cognitive shortcuts in fuzzy and complex foreign policy situations, we focus on their use to overcome social ambiguity (indeterminacy) of coordination situations in IOs. Drawing on psychological conceptions, we develop two micro-level mechanisms that elucidate the effects of analogy-based collective decision-making in member-driven IOs. Analogy-based collective decisions emphasizing similarity between a current situation and previous ones follow an established problem schema and produce expansive and increasingly well-established informal rules. Collective decisions that are analogy-based but emphasize a crucial difference follow different problem schemas and trigger the emergence of additional informal rules that apply to new classes of cases. The result is an increasingly fine-grained web of distinct organizational solutions for a growing number of problems. Accordingly, an IO can increasingly facilitate collective decision-making and gains resilience. Empirically, we probe these propositions with a documentary analysis of decision-making in the Yugoslavia sanctions committee, established by the United Nations Security Council to deal with a stream of requests for exempting certain goods or services from the comprehensive economic embargo imposed on Yugoslavia in response to the War in the Balkans.
In our January 1976 issue, we announced the publication of an index to the French edition of International Review covering the years 1962 to 1974. It gives us pleasure to inform our English-speaking readers that the analytical index to the English edition is now available.
Could trade sanctions improve environmental cooperation by reducing countries' incentives to free ride? While carbon tariffs are a widely debated environmental policy, their ability to facilitate climate cooperation remains unclear. We examine game-theoretic models of environmental cooperation with and without trade sanctions. While trade sanctions prevent free riders from obtaining unfair competitive advantages, we show that they can also impede environmental cooperation. Most importantly, since trade sanctions reduce the cost of unilateral policy, they prevent environmentally inclined countries from credibly threatening to suspend cooperation if other countries defect. We use these findings to illuminate outcomes in normatively important cases such as ozone depletion and overfishing, and discuss how they cast a shadow of doubt on the use of carbon tariffs to enforce climate cooperation.