International tribunals and legal scholars have been considering the relationship between International Humanitarian Law ('IHL') and International Human Rights Law ('IHRL') for a number of years.1The International Court of Justice famously or infamously (depending on your perspective) considered their relationship in itsNuclear Weapons Advisory Opinionin 1996.2The Court concluded that while IHRL did apply in times of armed conflict, when it came to the prohibition of arbitrarily taking human life in Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966, the content of that prohibition had to be found in thelex specialisof IHL.
The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is one of the World Trade Organization's most important agreements. This accord is the first and only set of multilateral rules covering international trade in services. It is a framework for international trade in services and a legal basis for resolving conflicting national interests. For the past two decades, trade in services has grown faster than merchandise trade. Currently, they represent more than two thirds of the World Gross Domestic Product. As the term services covers a wide range of intangible and heterogeneous products and activities, there has been an increasing demand for detailed, relevant and internationally comparable statistical information on trade in services. In the last ten years, the share of transportation services in international trade in commercial services was steady and amounted to about one quarter.
In traditional power analysis, `the international' is a characteristic of the states system — an anarchic realm, qualitatively different from the domestic. To traditional norms analysis, the international is increasingly a realm of shared value allocation, akin to other political realms. Given this bifurcation in the literature, privileging power incurs the cost of not being able to study systemic change of the international, whereas privileging norms incurs the cost of not being able to study power. We argue that extant conceptualisations of the international hail from Weber via Morgenthau, for whom international politics was an ideal type applied to the realm between states. Building on Mike Williams's work, we perform a new reading of these two scholars. We find that Morgenthau's identification of the political as an ideal-typical sphere has room for social theoretical insights as found in constructivist theory. Indeed, by his own Weberian lights, Morgenthau's specific ideal type of international politics is in need of updating. We try to rise to the challenge by drawing on Michel Foucault's work in order to forge an understanding of the international as governmentality. The result is a conceptualisation of the international as a socially embedded realm of governmentality. It is a structure (defined by relations of power) that generates different and changing practices of political rule (defined as governmental rationality) and agencies (for example, polities).
The `international' today should be approached in an evolutionary way. The fixed categories of neo-realism that served well in the past for analysis of the Cold War are no longer adequate in the fluidity of change today. Nor does the Cartesian perspective of an objective world observed by the analyst correspond to reality. In the evolution of world order, the self-organization of social and political power relations has to be understood as a process of evolving consciousness — the ways in which people understand the world they live in and communicate with each other about it. The greatest danger in this process of transformation of mentalities lies in the absolutist thinking encouraged in the extreme versions of monotheistic religion. The evolving historical structures of (American) `Empire', the pluralism of civilizations in the surviving state system and the movement in civil society towards the creation of new forms of structuring social power compete in the process of self-organization of global governance. Legitimacy is the weak point. Efforts at imposing order through `passive revolution' are doomed to fail for lack of legitimacy. A legitimate world order would have to achieve consensus on stopping the destruction of the material, ecological basis of human life; it would have to be based on acceptance of the fact that different world views can coexist; and to gain legitimacy it would have to work towards moderating the existing disparities in life opportunities among peoples so as to give a material basis for coexistence in diversity.
In: International journal of legal information: IJLI ; the official journal of the International Association of Law Libraries, Band 35, Heft 1, S. 214-228
In: International journal of legal information: IJLI ; the official journal of the International Association of Law Libraries, Band 35, Heft 2, S. 341-354