Suchergebnisse

In the aftermath of the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, the categories of "good" and "evil" have come to dominate the rhetorical response of the U.S. government. This article investigates the implications of using the concept of "evil" as a major public policy rationale. The article focuses on the Bush Administration's attempts to frame its policy around this term in the current campaign against terrorism, but also considers recent uses of the term in the growing literature on war crimes, genocide, and domestic repression. Because the concept of evil has deep roots in various theological understandings, we examine its religious meanings (largely within the Christian tradition) and the problems that arise when applying it in the secular context of government policy. In assessing these problems, we focus on Hannah Arendt's efforts to comprehend the evils of totalitarianism within a secular perspective.We argue that in contemporary policy discourse, "evil" is mostly invoked as a term of condemnation rather than an analytical concept, and that this usage tends to inhibit rather than encourage the search for explanation. It facilitates evasion of accountability within a secular framework of justice based on positive law. The alternative is to approach terrorism in the language of secular law, which rests on fixed criteria to regulate the use of force (in situations of war) and to prosecute and punish (in matters of crime). Such an approach complements and should encourage parallel efforts to comprehend events by examining their causes and historical context.

This research explores the intensity of the relationship between municipal advisors and underwriters, as well as their quality and location, to assess the resulting impact on borrowing costs for negotiated debt. The findings from this research have practical policy implications related to the proper composition of a local government's debt financing team. In addition, the empirical findings shed light on central aspects in debt management networks as determined by the round‐trip transaction (RTT) theory, which point at new levers that subnational policy makers may use to gain efficiencies when accessing the municipal debt market.

This Essay discusses the merits of the dispute settlement provisions found in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and calls for recognition and utilization of the provisions in all manner of disputes arising within the international legal community. Professor Kindt notes that despite the fact that the Convention's dispute settlement provisions represent the first time all major interest blocs of states have agreed upon a standard set of provisions for dispute settlement, the provisions have not received the attention they deserve. After analyzing the reasons for this lack of consideration, he urges that the dispute settlement provisions serve as quasi-boilerplate language in multilateral treaties, especially in the area of international environmental law. In part H of this Essay, Professor Kindt examines the application of these provisions in relation to particular law of the sea issues and argues that more extensive use of the dispute settlement provisions would better serve the goal of maintaining a favorable legal order. He cites specific recent examples in which the application of these provisions would have fostered the resolution of disputes. In part III, Professor Kindt analyzes the three major divisions of the dispute settlement provisions: 1) the general provisions; 2) the compulsory procedures leading to binding decisions; and 3) the limitations and exceptions to compulsory procedures. He then explains their application in a variety of situations and concludes that the provisions offer a stable and efficient means of handling international disputes, especially with regard to environmental issues. Since a large number of countries representing a wide array of political, economic, and ideological views agreed to the substance of the dispute settlement provisions, Professor Kindt argues that the provisions represent customary international law and should be utilized to the fullest extent possible.

In 2016, Azim Premji University, Bangalore launched an LL.M. program with a specialisation in Law and Development. A course called 'Law and Development' is taught as a mandatory core course in the first semester of the program. Across a period of six years, the two of us have taught this core course either individually or in collaboration with each other. As the LL.M. enters its seventh year, we reflect on the experience of teaching the course, by taking stock of its strengths and weaknesses. In this article, we present an account of the motivations of the program and the course, the challenges we faced, how we engaged with these challenges, and our reflections on the experience of teaching the course. In this recounting, we focus specifically on three aspects: (a) the interdisciplinary character of Law and Development and the consequent difficulty in ascertaining its boundaries, given the vast scope of the subject; (b) building an Indian context to the subject of Law and Development while preserving its comparative aspects; and (c) our reflections on teaching the subject from our individual vantage points of a private and a public lawyer respectively.

Toward an international environmental jurisprudence : problems and prospects -- Political realism : how realist, how realistic? -- "Dewey defeats Truman" : pragmatism versus pluralism in deliberative democracy -- International environmental jurisprudence : conceptual elements and options -- International environmental law and jurisprudence : institutionalizing rule-governed behavior -- Adjudication among peoples : a deliberative democratic approach -- Juristic democracy and international law : diversity, disadvantage, and deliberation -- Nature's regime : think locally, act globally -- Democracy and the environment : fruitful symbiosis or uneasy truce?

This innovative edited collection uncovers the invisible frames which form our understanding of international law. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it investigates how social cognition and knowledge production processes affect decision-making, and inform unquestioned beliefs about what international law is, and how it works.

Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: Precarity and the Nexus of Governmentality and Sovereignty -- Chapter 3: Biopolitics of Precarity -- Chapter 4: Notes on Abandonement -- Chapter 5: The Internationalization of Precarity? -- Chapter 6: Irregular Labor and the 'Life of the State' -- Chapter 7: Urban Informality and Precarity in the Modern International -- Chapter 8: Financing Precarity -- Chapter 9: Within the Factory of Mobility -- Chapter 10: Fashioning and Contesting Precariousness -- Chapter 11: Disability Counter-Communities -- Chapter 12: Perceptual Precarity and Butler's Ambivalent Social Bond -- Chapter 13: Precarity and the Struggle against Alienated Work -- Chapter 14: Conclusion.

The Court of Appeal, Civil Division, Longmore LJ, on 24 January 2007 handed down a decision in Fiona Trust v Privalov which clarifies the relation between sections 9 and 72 of the Arbitration Act 1996; affirms, again, in strong terms the separability (or severability) of an arbitration clause from the contract in which it is included; and, apparently for the first time in English courts, establishes that allegations of bribery may be subject to the jurisdiction of an arbitrator. The decision therefore holds interest in relation to the enforcement in the United Kingdom of agreements to arbitrate and, more generally, supports the position that arbitration has a role to play in international efforts to combat corruption.

Transdisciplinary research and collaboration is widely acknowledged as a critical success factor for solution-oriented approaches that can tackle complex sustainability challenges, such as biodiversity loss, pollution, and climate-related hazards. In this context, city governments' engagement in transdisciplinarity is generally seen as a key condition for societal transformation towards sustainability. However, empirical evidence is rare. This paper presents a self-assessment of a joint research project on ecosystem services and climate adaptation planning (ECOSIMP) undertaken by four universities and seven Swedish municipalities. We apply a set of design principles and guiding questions for transdisciplinary sustainability projects and, on this basis, identify key aspects for supporting university-municipality collaboration. We show that: (1) selecting the number and type of project stakeholders requires more explicit consideration of the purpose of societal actors' participation; (2) concrete, interim benefits for participating practitioners and organisations need to be continuously discussed; (3) promoting the 'inter', i.e., interdisciplinary and inter-city learning, can support transdisciplinarity and, ultimately, urban sustainability and long-term change. In this context, we found that design principles for transdisciplinarity have the potential to (4) mitigate project shortcomings, even when transdisciplinarity is not an explicit aim, and (5) address differences and allow new voices to be heard. We propose additional guiding questions to address shortcomings and inspire reflexivity in transdisciplinary projects.

International criminal courts (icts) frequently refer to the European Convention on Human Rights and the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). While this practice is often regarded as cross-fertilisation, in this paper cross-fertilisation is used in a more demanding way and refers to the "transmission of meaning from one (legal) context to another". For such a cross-fertilisation to ensue legal norms or concepts need to be translated from original to the borrowing legal system without losing its normative meaning. However, a translation from ECtHR-language into ict-language is problematic because of the specific contexts in which both courts operate. Since those obstacles primarily affect the outcome and not the method of the translation process, this paper concludes with an attempt to develop a coherent and transparent method of translating human rights into ict-language taking the frequent characterisation of ECtHR jurisprudence as "persuasive authority" as a starting point.

This book investigates how sustainability informs the universal principles used in domestic and international law. It contributes to a theory of global law by discussing whether, as a universally shared concern, environmental protection and the principle of sustainability should contribute to the 'greening' of the fundamental principles of law and governance

This study is an exploration of the logic of hegemony in one of the most significant policy areas of international relations: international security. I argue that despite huge international opposition during the Court's early years of existence as well as the fact that 3 out of 5 permanent United Nations Security Council (UNSC) members are not Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, UNSC decision-making between 2002 and 2010 was framed by the hegemonic Justice discourse. The result of intense lobbying by international criminal law experts, NGO human rights activists, policymakers, journalists, and state representatives acting within the United Nations Security Council, the International Criminal Court Assembly of States Parties and the media, Justice was the new ideology of international security. In order to empirically analyze this process of hegemonization, I developed a hermeneutic conceptual framework based on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Poststructuralist Discourse Theory (PDT) and an inductive qualitative research strategy that can be applied to concrete international policy discourses. I defined hegemony as a process of hegemonization that takes place under specific historical circumstances in a particular international policy area. In order to reveal its workings I relied on a comprehensive list of PDT concepts operationalized as meso-level Discursive Mechanisms. Through the linking of various political demands, the creation of a collective identity, the gripping of the floating signifiers "Peace", "Security", "Sovereingty", "Protection", "Accountability", and "Rule of Law", and institution of a new political imaginary, Justice became one of the most successful discourses in early 21st century international relations. The new security ideology withstood challenges from three major counterdiscourses: the homegrown American version of "Politicization", the African Union's institutional discourse, and the ongoing normative attack from the loose network of actors defending ...

On 10 October 1980, the "United Nations Conference on Prohibitions or Restrictions of Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May be Deemed to be Excessively Injurious or to have Indiscriminate Effects" ended with the adoption by consensus of the following instruments:– Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons,– Protocol on Non-Detectable Fragments (Protocol I),– Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices (Protocol II),– Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons (Protocol III).