https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2926&context=ndlr

Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties

This book suggests a new explanation for why international peace interventions often fail to reach their full potential. Based on several years of ethnographic research in conflict zones around the world, it demonstrates that everyday elements - such as the expatriates' social habits and usual approaches to understanding their areas of operation - strongly influence peacebuilding effectiveness. Individuals from all over the world and all walks of life share numerous practices, habits, and narratives when they serve as interveners in conflict zones. These common attitudes and actions enable foreign peacebuilders to function in the field, but they also result in unintended consequences that thwart international efforts. Certain expatriates follow alternative modes of thinking and acting, often with notable results, but they remain in the minority. Through an in-depth analysis of the interveners' everyday life and work, this book proposes innovative ways to better help host populations build a sustainable peace.

Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention

Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Raphaël Lemkin

This is a moment of repudiation of international law and of reckoning with racial injustice and committing to anti-racism. Some of the leading States that have shaped international law are not only exiting treaties, but also openly declaring and operating outside its rules. This lecture argues that one important way to trace the promise of international law at this moment of difficulty is to go outside the beltway of our discipline to places often unfamiliar in our textbooks and the locations where we practice and teach international law. To do that, this lecture will take you to places like Arusha, Tanzania, the seat of three international courts. 

In doing so, the lecture will bring into our conversation the voices of international lawyers from the Third World and the everyday issues that drive their practice and scholarship often under very difficult political circumstances. To appreciate fully the promise of international law, it is important to go beyond the usual debates, places and canons of our discipline in two ways.

First, this lecture challenges the limited geography of places and ideas that dominate the beltway of our discipline. This limited geography and set of ideas is characterized by the law of Geneva, the law of Strasbourg, the law of New York and that of Washington DC. These are the places that our discipline celebrates as producers of the type of international law which in turn becomes the benchmark for the efficacy of international law produced elsewhere. These are also the locations where the bulk of international legal practice is produced and which influences and reinforces our understandings not only of international practice but also of international law more generally. 

My second major point in this lecture, which proceeds from a Third Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) perspective, is that TWAIL speaks from a subaltern epistemic location. This means that TWAIL questions international law’s presumed universality. TWAIL contests the idea that international law is applicable everywhere and that we should therefore regard it as a view from nowhere. Third World States and TWAIL scholars have contested this non−situated, universal status of international law in a variety of ways. Ultimately, this lecture defends the claim that the Third World is an epistemic site of production and not merely a site of reception of international legal knowledge. Recognizing and grounding the Third World as a site knowledge production and of the practice of international law disrupts the assumptions that international legal knowledge is exclusively produced in the West for consumption and governance of the Third World. This lecture therefore argues that what is at stake is not an issue of inclusion or exclusion of non-western peoples, states within Western international law. Rather, it involves considerations of the very terms of the constitutional order of 'post-Enlightenment social knowledge, its structures of thought, and related constructions of political subjectivity'.

A bibliography of TWAIL scholarship from 1996 to 2019 is appended to this lecture.

The Promise of International Law: A Third World View

Existing research on war and peace lacks analysis of what allows peacebuilding to succeed at the subnational level. Instead, most scholars focus on peacebuilding failure and macro-level dynamics. This is unfortunate because the obstacles to peacebuilding are such that the most puzzling question is why international efforts sometimes succeed, rather than why they fail. The lack of focus on success is also problematic because it results in ambiguous findings. On the one hand, there is an emerging consensus that local conflict resolution is crucial to building peace. There is also an agreement that, all else being equal, international support tends to increase the chances of successful peacebuilding. On the other hand, when international actors have tried to back local initiatives, they have often generated counterproductive consequences and worsened the situation. Should international actors support local peacebuilding processes? If so, how can they actually do this? Drawing on in-depth interviews, field and participant observations in nine different conflict zones, and document analysis, this article takes the first step in explaining whether, how, why, and under what conditions international interveners (including donors, diplomats, peacekeepers, and the foreign staff of international and non-governmental organizations) can contribute to successful local and bottom-up peace efforts. It makes three central contributions. First, it shows that the policy and scholarly literatures suffer from a dearth of findings on successful international support to local conflict resolution. Second, it emphasizes the critical—and under-researched—role of assumptions in shaping peacebuilding initiatives. Third, it develops a theoretical framework to analyze how assumptions influence international peace efforts. By way of illustration, the article analyzes three widespread assumptions about peacebuilding and the role of peacebuilders. In each case, it challenges assumptions that international interveners take for granted but that are actually unfounded and detrimental, while identifying assumptions that promote peacebuilding effectiveness.

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International Peacebuilding and Local Success: Assumptions and Effectiveness

Gabrielle Simm's critical re-evaluation of sex between international personnel and local people examines the zero tolerance policy on sexual exploitation and abuse and its international legal framework. Whereas most preceding studies of the issue have focused exclusively on military peacekeepers, Sex in Peace Operations also covers the private military contractors and humanitarian NGO workers who play increasingly important roles in peace operations. Informed by socio-legal studies, Simm uses three case studies (Bosnia, West Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo) to illustrate the extent of the problem and demonstrate that the problems of impunity for sexual crimes are not just a failure of political will but the result of the structural weaknesses of international law in addressing non-state actors. Combining the insights of feminist critique with a regulatory approach to international law, her conclusions will interest scholars of international law, peace and conflict studies, gender and sexuality, and development.

/pdf/sex-in-peace-operations-4i101b7mdh.pdf

Sex in Peace Operations

Southeast Asia includes some of the states at greatest risk of disasters worldwide, and ASEAN has been at the forefront of using international law to attempt to co-operate in disaster risk reduction and response. The ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response (AADMER) is a regional treaty that has been hailed as among the world’s best practice: progressive, comprehensive, and, unusually for a disaster instrument, legally binding. This paper evaluates ASEAN’s responses to two mega-disasters: Cyclone Nargis that hit Myanmar in May 2008 and Super-typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda that hit the Philippines in November 2013. The paper aims further to investigate the role of non-state actors, such as civil society and the private sector, in institutionalizing and implementing AADMER.

Disaster Response in Southeast Asia: The ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Response and Emergency Management

Book Reviews: Edited by Ryszard Piotrowicz 203 The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960 Martti Koskenniemi (Ian Clark) 203 The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court: A Commentary Antonio Cassese, Paola Gaeta and John RWD Jones (eds) (Ben Olbourne) 206 Refugee Law in Australia Ros Germov and Francesco Motta (David Palmer) 212 The Charter of the United Nations: A Commentary Bruno Simma (ed) (Chester Brown) 215 Conflict of Laws in Australia Michael Tilbury, Gary Davis and Brian Opeskin (Uta Kohl) 218 Harris – Cases and Materials on International Law: An Australian Supplement Jean-Pierre L Fonteyne, Anne McNaughton and James Stephen Stellios (Ryszard Piotrowicz) 221

Negotiating the United Nations Trafficking Protocol: Feminist Debates

Since the 1960s, over eighty international peoples’ tribunals have been established outside formal state and international structures. Many have drawn on the forms and procedures of state-sponsored international tribunals and investigated whether states, international organizations, and transnational corporations have violated established norms of international law, while also seeking to infuse it with more progressive values. This paper first provides an overview of the history of international peoples’ tribunals in Asia, then examines three tribunals that have focused on situations in Asia. We argue that not only do peoples’ tribunals respond to a perceived gap in official structures of accountability, but they also perform other functions. These include building solidarity and networks, and recording and memorializing otherwise unacknowledged experiences. Further, such tribunals not only engage in holding states and others accountable informally but also articulate claims about the right of civil society to “own”, interpret, and develop international law.

International peoples' tribunals in Asia: Political theatre, juridical farce, or meaningful intervention?

The decisions of international courts and tribunals affect how we read history. Alternative tribunals, such as peoples’ tribunals, attempt to write alternative histories to counter the official versions. This article locates controversies over the Armenian genocide in debates about the relationship between history and international law. It considers ways of reading archives and the role of archives in informing those debates. It compares the Istanbul war crimes trials held in 1919–1920 before the Ottoman Military Tribunals with the Paris session of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal held in 1984 that dealt with questions of history and memory through the juridical format of a hearing. A century after the events of 1915, the contested historiography of the Armenian genocide influences how international lawyers and historians seek to pass judgment on the past.

Gabrielle Simm

Papers

Sex in Peace Operations

Disaster Response in Southeast Asia: The ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Response and Emergency Management

Negotiating the United Nations Trafficking Protocol: Feminist Debates

International peoples' tribunals in Asia: Political theatre, juridical farce, or meaningful intervention?

The Paris Peoples' Tribunal and the Istanbul Trials: Archives of the Armenian Genocide