Showing papers on "Sovereignty published in 2004"

Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Abstract: Written after September 11, 2001, in response to the conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression that have prevailed since then, Judith Butler critiques the use of violence and argues for a response in which violence might be minimized, and interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for global political community. Following the expressions of public mourning post-September 11, Butler asks why it's acceptable, even necessary to grieve some lives, while others are not valued or are even incomprehensible as lives at all. Questions of sovereignty, patriotism and censorship are all examined, especially in light of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Finally she investigates the way in which any criticism of the Israeli state is automatically labelled anti-semitic, thus rendering all criticism of Israel a political taboo in the US and the UK. She counters that we have a responsibility to speak out against both Israeli injustices and anti-semitism, and argues against the rhetorical use of the charge of anti-semitism to quell public debate.

State of Exception

Abstract: Two months after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration, in the midst of what it perceived to be a state of emergency, authorized the indefinite detention of noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities and their subsequent trials by a military commission. Here, distinguished Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses such circumstances to argue that this unusual extension of power, or "state of exception," has historically been an underexamined and powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states. The sequel to Agamben's "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception" is the first book to theorize the state of exception in historical and philosophical context. In Agamben's view, the majority of legal scholars and policymakers in Europe as well as the United States have wrongly rejected the necessity of such a theory, claiming instead that the state of exception is a pragmatic question. Agamben argues here that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, became in the course of the twentieth century a normal paradigm of government. Writing nothing less than the history of the state of exception in its various national contexts throughout Western Europe and the United States, Agamben uses the work of Carl Schmitt as a foil for his reflections as well as that of Derrida, Benjamin, and Arendt. In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.

Anthropology in the Margins of the State

Abstract: The very form and reach of the modern state are changing radically under the pressure of globalization. Featuring nine of the leading scholars in the field, this innovative exploration of these transformations develops an ethnographic methodology and theoretical apparatus to assess perceptions of power in three regions where state reform and violence have been particularly dramatic: Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. Rather than a geographic border, the term "margin" describes areas far from the centers of state sovereignty in which states are unable to ensure implementation of their programs and policies. Understanding how people perceive and experience the agency of the state; who is of, and not of, the state; and how practices at the margins shape the state itself are central themes. Drawing on fieldwork in Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Peru, Guatemala, India, Chad, Colombia, and South Africa, the contributors examine official documentary practices and their forms and falsifications; the problems that highly mobile mercenaries, currency, goods, arms, and diamonds pose to the state; emerging non-state regulatory authorities; and the role language plays as cultures struggle to articulate their situation. These case studies provide wide-ranging analyses of the relationship between states and peoples on the edges of state power's effective reign.

The green state : rethinking democracy and sovereignty

Abstract: What would constitute a definitively "green" state? In this important new book, Robyn Eckersley explores what it might take to create a green democratic state as an alternative to the classical liberal democratic state, the indiscriminate growth-dependent welfare state, and the neoliberal market-focused state -- seeking, she writes, "to navigate between undisciplined political imagination and pessimistic resignation to the status quo." In recent years, most environmental scholars and environmentalists have characterized the sovereign state as ineffectual and have criticized nations for perpetuating ecological destruction. Going consciously against the grain of much current thinking, this book argues that the state is still the preeminent political institution for addressing environmental problems. States remain the gatekeepers of the global order, and greening the state is a necessary step, Eckersley argues, toward greening domestic and international policy and law. The Green State seeks to connect the moral and practical concerns of the environmental movement with contemporary theories about the state, democracy, and justice. Eckersley's proposed "critical political ecology" expands the boundaries of the moral community to include the natural environment in which the human community is embedded. This is the first book to make the vision of a "good" green state explicit, to explore the obstacles to its achievement, and to suggest practical constitutional and multilateral arrangements that could help transform the liberal democratic state into a postliberal green democratic state. Rethinking the state in light of the principles of ecological democracy ultimately casts it in a new role: that of an ecological steward and facilitator of transboundary democracy rather than a selfish actor jealously protecting its territory.

Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought

Abstract: Chapter 1 Mapping the Terrain of Struggle: From Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance to Red Power and Red Pedagogy Chapter 2 Competing Moral Visions: At the Crossroads of Democracy and Sovereignty Chapter 3 Red Land, White Power Chapter 4 American Indian Geographies of Identity and Power Chapter 5 Whitestream Feminism and the Colonialist Project: Toward a Theory of Indigenista Chapter 6 Better Red than Dead: Toward a Nation-Peoples and a Peoples Nation

Sharing Sovereignty: New Institutions for Collapsed and Failing States

Abstract: eignty assumes a world of autonomous, internationally recognized, and wellgoverned states. Although frequently violated in practice, the fundamental rules of conventional sovereignty—recognition of juridically independent territorial entities and nonintervention in the internal affairs of other states—have rarely been challenged in principle. But these rules no longer work, and their inadequacies have had deleterious consequences for the strong as well as the weak. The policy tools that powerful and well-governed states have available to “ax” badly governed or collapsed states—principally governance assistance and transitional administration (whether formally authorized by the United Nations or engaged in by a coalition of the willing led by the United States)— are inadequate. In the future, better domestic governance in badly governed, failed, and occupied polities will require the transcendence of accepted rules, including the creation of shared sovereignty in speciac areas. In some cases, decent governance may require some new form of trusteeship, almost certainly de facto rather than de jure.1 Many countries suffer under failed, weak, incompetent, or abusive national authority structures. The best that people living in such countries can hope for is marginal improvement in their material well-being; limited access to social services, including health care and education; and a moderate degree of individual physical security. At worst they will confront endemic violence, exploitative political leaders, falling life expectancy, declining per capita income, and even state-sponsored genocide. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), for example, civil wars that have persisted for more than two decades have resulted in millions of deaths. In Zimbabwe the policies of President RobSharing Sovereignty

Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus

Abstract: Figures, Boxes and Tables. Preface. Acknowledgements. Abbreviations. Introduction. PART I: ECONOMICS. 1. Economic Globalization. 2. Globalization, Stratification and Inequality. 3. The Regulation of Economic Globalization: A New Policy Mix. PART II: POLITICS. 4. Political Globalization. 5. Globalization and the Challenges to Governance. 6. The Reform of Global Governance. PART III: LAW. 7. Sovereignty and the Changing Structure of International Law. 8. Liberal International Sovereignty: Achievements and Limitations. 9. The Development of Global Rules. PART IV: THE NEW AGENDA. 10. Toward a Global Covenant: Global Social Democracy. Appendix: The Basis of a New Internationalism: Cosmopolitan Principles. References. Index

The World Bank and Africa : The Construction of Governance States

Abstract: Shortlisted for the Inaugural International Political Economy Group annual book prize, 2006.An incisive exploration of the interventions of the World Bank in severely indebted African states. Understanding sovereignty as a frontier rather than a boundary, this key study develops a vision of a powerful international organization reconciling a global political economy with its own designs and a specific set of challenges posed by the African region. This analysis details the nature of the World Bank intervention in the sovereign frontier, investigating institutional development, discursive intervention, and political stabilization. It tackles the methods by which the World Bank has led a project to re-shape certain African states according to a governance template, leading to the presentation of 'success stories' in a continent associated with reform failure.This conceptually innovative book details a political economy of the World Bank in Africa that is both globally contextualized and attentive to individual states. It is the only volume to look at the bank's relations with Africa and will interest all students and researchers of African politics and the World Bank.

The responsibility to protect? Imposing the ‘Liberal Peace’

Abstract: Since the end of the Cold War, debate over international peacekeeping has been dominated by the question of the so-called ‘right of humanitarian intervention’. Advocates of the right of intervention, largely Western states, have tended to uphold liberal internationalist claims that new international norms prioritizing individual rights to protection promise a framework of liberal peace and that the Realist framework of the Cold War period when state security was viewed as paramount has been superseded. In an attempt to codify and win broader international legitimacy for new interventionist norms, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty released a two-volume report, The Responsibility to Protect, in December 2001. In the light of this report and broader developments in international security in the wake of September 11, this essay suggests that rather than a moral shift away from the rights of sovereignty, the dominance of the liberal peace thesis, in fact, reflects the new balan...

The end of the post-colonial state in Africa? Reflections on changing African political dynamics

Abstract: Examination of the political trajectory of African states since the terminal colonial period suggests that, by the 1990s, the 'post-colonial' label still widely employed was losing its pertinence. The term acquired widespread currency not long after independence in acknowledgment of the importation into new states of the practices, routines and mentalities of the colonial state. These served as a platform for a more ambitious form of political monopoly, whose legitimating discourse was developmentalism. The colonial state legacy decanted into a patrimonial autocracy which decayed into crisis by the 1980s, bringing external and internal pressures for economic and political state reconfiguration. But the serious erosion of the stateness of many African polities by the 1990s limited the scope for effective reform and opened the door for a complex web of novel civil conflicts; there was also a renewed saliency of informal politics, as local societies adapted to diminished state presence and service provision. Perhaps the post-colonial moment has passed. AT THE MOMENT OF THE GRAND ENTRY OF AFRICAN STATES into the world consort of nations in 1960 (17 out of 53 achieved sovereignty that year), the primary discursive referent for the new polities was 'post-independent'. From an African nationalist perspective, widely shared in the academic community, the achievement of independence was a defining historical moment, the culmination of an epic struggle. Incorporating visions of liberation, transformation and uplift, the independent African state was a newborn polity. As 'new states', African polities appeared to shed the colonial chrysalis. By subtle metamorphosis, over time the routine descriptor for African states became 'post-colonial'. This semantic shift was not innocent of meaning. Formal sovereignty and anti-colonial struggle gradually became less salient as defining attributes than the colonial origins of the African state; more crucially the wholesale importation of the routines, practices, Crawford Young is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of WisconsinMadison. An early version of this paper served as a keynote address for a conference on 'Beyond the Post-Colonial State in Central Africa?' organized by the Centre of African Studies of the University of Copenhagen in December 2001.

Democracy Promotion as a World Value

Abstract: Although norms protecting the sovereignty of states still trump norms protecting the rights of individuals, the balance is shifting. Democracy promotion has become increasingly acceptable as a fore...

Disaggregated Sovereignty: Towards the Public Accountability of Global Government Networks

Abstract: Networks of government officials – police investigators, financial regulators, even judges and legislators – are a key feature of world order in the twenty-first century. Yet, these networks present significant accountability and legitimacy concerns. This article identifies and responds to the potential problems of government networks by suggesting means to increase their accountability and proposing norms to govern the relations of members of government networks with one another. Finally, the article develops the concept of disaggregated sovereignty, arguing that government networks have the capacity to enter into international regulatory regimes of various types and thereby are independently bound by the existing corpus of international law.

The strange triumph of human rights, 1933–1950

Abstract: This article explores the origins of the UN's commitment to human rights and links this to the wartime decision to abandon the interwar system of an international regime for the protection of minority rights. After 1918, the League of Nations developed a comprehensive machinery for guaranteeing the national minorities of eastern Europe. But by 1940 the League's policies were widely regarded as a failure and the coalition of forces which had supported them after the First World War had disintegrated. German abuse of the system after 1933, and the Third Reich's use of ethnic German groups as fifth columns to undermine the Versailles settlement were cited by east European politicians as sufficient justification for a new approach which would combine mass expulsion, on the one hand, with a new international doctrine of individual human rights on the other. The Great Powers supported this because they thereby escaped the specific commitments which the previous arrangements had imposed on them, and which Russian control over post-war eastern Europe rendered no longer practicable. But they also supported it because the new rights regime had no binding legal force. In respect, therefore, of the degree to which the principle of absolute state sovereignty was threatened by these arrangements, the rights regime of the new UN represented a considerable weakening of international will compared with the interwar League. But acquiescing in a weaker international organization was probably the price necessary for US and Soviet participation.

Will Asia's Past Be Its Future?

Abstract: Post–Cold War debates about Asian security have been dominated by Aaron Friedberg’s inouential image of a region seemingly “ripe for rivalry.”1 Friedberg stressed Asia’s lack of stability-enhancing mechanisms of the kind that sustains peace in Europe, such as its high levels of regional economic integration and regional institutions to mitigate and manage conoict. Other pessimists foresaw regional disorder stemming from Asian states’ attempts to balance a rising China. Taken together, such views have shaped a decade of thinking about Asian security in academic and policy circles. Now, in a recent article in International Security entitled “Getting Asia Wrong: The Need for New Analytical Frameworks,” David Kang offers an alternative view that is both timely and provocative. Kang ands that “Asian states do not appear to be balancing against . . . China. Rather they seem to be bandwagoning” (p. 58). He then presents an indigenous Asian tradition that could sustain regional order: the region’s historical acceptance of a “hierarchical” interstate order with China at its core. “Historically,” Kang suggests, “it has been Chinese weakness that has led to chaos in Asia. When China has been strong and stable, order has been preserved. East Asian regional relations have historically been hierarchic, more peaceful, and more stable than those in the West” (p. 66). After faulting Western scholarship for taking an essentially Eurocentric approach to Asian security, Kang calls for bringing international relations theory more in tune with Asian realities. He also asserts that scholars should strive for a better match between their theoretical tools and the evidence on the ground. Taking cognizance of Asia’s different pathway to national sovereignty and regional order, Kang argues, would open the door to new and exciting adWill Asia’s Past Be Its Future?

Whose Sovereignty? Empire versus International Law

Abstract: This article focuses on the impact of globalization on international law and the discourse of sovereignty. It challenges the claim that we have entered into a new world order characterized by transnational governance and decentered global law, which have replaced “traditional” international law and rendered the concepts of state sovereignty and international society anachronistic. We are indeed in the presence of something new. But if we drop the concept of sovereignty and buy into the idea that transnational governance has upstaged international treaty organizations, we will misconstrue the nature of contemporary international society and the political choices facing us. In the contemporary context where there is a powerful imperial project afoot (on the part of the United States) that seeks to develop a useful version of global (cosmopolitan) right to justify its self-interested interventions, proposals to abandon the default position of sovereignty and its corollary, the principle of nonintervention in international law, are both premature and dangerous. Instead, we should rethink the normative dimensions of the concept of sovereignty in light of the new principle of sovereign equality articulated in the UN Charter, and show how it can complement cosmopolitan principles such as human rights and collective security. The task is to strengthen, not abandon, international law and supranational institutions, and to foster a global rule of law that protects both the sovereign equality of states, based on a revised conception of sovereignty, and human rights.

A Duty to Prevent

Abstract: The unprecedented threat posed by terrorists and rogue states armed with weapons of mass destruction cannot be handled by an outdated and poorly enforced nonproliferation regime. The international community has a duty to prevent security disasters as well as humanitarian ones -- even at the price of violating sovereignty

The Sunset of Humanitarian Intervention? The Responsibility to Protect in a Unipolar Era:

Abstract: In spite of the current preoccupations, in the United States and in the United Nations, with the wars on terrorism and the occupation in Iraq, humanitarian intervention remains an important policy option. Future debates and action are framed by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, whose report entitled The Responsibility To Protect and an accompanying research volume were published in December 2001. Future humanitarian crises will arise in conjunction with the need for military force to protect human beings, and so four shortcomings of the report are evident. First, the report is not as forward-looking as the commissioners thought or as many opponents feared. Second, the concerns of the most vehement critics, especially developing countries, are misplaced because the problem is too little humanitarian intervention, not too much. Third, the purported danger that the concept of the responsibility to protect might become a Trojan Horse to be used by the great powers to interven...

Empire's New Clothes : Reading Hardt and Negri

Abstract: Introduction: Postmodern Republicanism Paul A. Passavant Immanence 1. Can Immanence Explain Social Struggles? Ernesto Laclau Transcendence 2. The Immanence of Empire Peter Fitzpatrick Market 3. On Divine Markets and the Problem of Justice Bill Maurer Law 4. Legal Imperialism: Empire's Invisible Hand? Ruth Buchanan and Sundhya Pahuja Representation 5. From Empire's Law to the Multitude's Rights: Law, Representation, Revolution Paul A. Passavant Sovereignty 6. Representing the International: Sovereignty after Modernity? Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes Global 7. Africa's Ambiguous Relation to Empire and Empire Kevin C. Dunn Intermezzo: The Theory & Event Interview Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy A Discussion between Michael Hardt and Thomas Dumm Space 8. The Repositioning of Citizenship: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics Saskia Sassen Place 9. The Irrepressible Lightness of Joy and of Being Green: Empire and Environmentalism William Chaloupka Migration 10. Smooth Politics Malcolm Bull Generation 11. Taking the Millennialist Pulse of Empire's Multitude: A Genealogical Feminist Analysis Lee Quinby Capitalism 12. The Ideology of Empire and Its Traps Slavoj Zizek Communication 13. The Networked Empire: Communicative Capitalism and the Hope for Politics Jodi Dean Revolution 14. The Myth of the Multitude Kam Shapiro Event 15. Representation and the Event Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean Contributors

Great Powers and Outlaw States

Abstract: The history of the international system is a history of inequality par excellence . [T]he sovereignty and equality of states represent the basic constitutional doctrine of the law of nations. In 1602, Spain and The Netherlands were embroiled in a long running war in Europe and this conflict carried over into hostilities between Dutch trading companies and Portuguese and Spanish maritime interests in East Asia. During one of many engagements on the high seas, an affiliate of the Dutch East Indies Company had captured a Portuguese vessel named ‘The Catherine’. On 9 September 1604, a Prize Court in Amsterdam declared the capture lawful and held that the vessel belonged to the Dutch company. The matter probably would have rested there were it not for the fact that among the company shareholders were members of a Mennonite sect who disapproved of war, refused to accept their share of the profits and threatened to establish a competing company in France. In the same year, Hugo Grotius was about to turn twenty-one. He took a keen interest in the Catherine case and spent the remainder of the year composing his first major work, De jure praedae (Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty), a defence of the Dutch seizure and a sketch of a theory of international law to be fully realised in his classic De jure belli et pacis (The Law of War and Peace). De jure praedae begins with the words: A situation has arisen that is truly novel and scarcely credible … namely: that those men who have been so long at war with the Spaniards … are debating as to whether or not, in a just war and with public authorisation, they can rightfully despoil an exceedingly cruel enemy …

De facto states: the quest for sovereignty

Abstract: 1. Introduction: The Quest for Sovereignty 2. Political Realities and Legal Anomalies: Revisiting the Politics of International Recognition 3. Can Clans Form Nations?: Somaliland in the Making 4. Bougainville: The Quest for Self-Determination 5. Sovereign Law vs Sovereign Nation: The Case of Kosovo 6. Montenegro and Serbia: Disassociation, Negotiation, Resolution? 7. Chechnya 8. From Frozen Conflict to Frozen Agreement: The Unrecognized State of Transnistria 9. Palestine 2003: The Perils of De Facto Statehood 10. The Abkhazians: A National Minority in their Own Homeland 11. Republika Srpska 12. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus: Striving for International Acceptance under Turkey's Wings 13. Conclusion: States in Waiting, Nations Tired of Waiting

Judicial Lawmaking at the WTO: Discursive, Constitutional, and Political Constraints

Abstract: Judicial lawmaking in the WTO is marked by elastic interpretive discourse and constitutional rules that do not serve as a meaningful restraint. Politics, however, constrains both discursive and constitutional latitude, which should alleviate concerns that WTO judicial lawmaking is so expansive as to undermine the sovereignty of powerful states, create a serious democratic deficit for their citizens, or catalyze withdrawal of their support for the organization.

European Integration and the Nationalities Question

Abstract: 1. Introduction: European Integration and the Nationalities Question Section A. Theoretical and Comparative Approaches 2. Europe, the State and the Nation 3. The Evolving Basis of European Norms of Minority Rights: Rights to Culture, Participation and Autonomy 4. National Minorities and EU Enlargement: External or Domestic Incentives for Accommodation? 5. Autonomy, Power-Sharing and Common Citizenship -- Principles for Accommodating National Minorities in Europe 6. Kin-States Protecting National Minorities: Positive Trend or Dangerous Precedent? 7. Minorities, Violence, and Statehood on the European Periphery 8. The Impact of Post-Communist Regime Change and European Integration on Ethnic Minorities: The 'Special' Case of Ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe 9. Cross-border Minorities and European Integration in Southeast Europe: The Hungarians and Serbs Compared Section B. Case-Studies 10. From 'Full National Status' to 'Independence' in Europe -- The Case of Plaid Cymru - The Party of Wales 11. Nations Without States in the EU: the Catalan Case 12. Scottish Autonomy and European Integration: The Response of Scotland's Political Parties 13. Basque Nationalism: Sovereignty, Independence and European Integration 14. Liberalising Estonia's Citizenship Policy: The Role of the European Union, OSCE and Council of Europe 15. Europe's Limits: European Integration and Conflict Management in Northern Ireland 16. Breton Identity Highlighted by European Integration 17. Baltic Identities and Interests in a European Setting: A Bottom-Up Perspective 18. EU Accession and Conflict Resolution in Theory and Practice: the Case of Cyprus

When production and consumption meet: cultural contradictions and the enchanting myth of customer sovereignty

Abstract: The central cultural contradiction of capitalism, argued Bell some 25 years ago, was the existence of rationalized, disciplined production alongside free and hedonistic consumption. This paper argues that this thesis, although overstated, has resonance within contemporary capitalism. The paper then considers the question of how this contradiction is managed when production and consumption meet directly within the service interaction. On the production-side rationalization is joined by customer-orientation, and on the consumption-side management promotes consumption of the enchanting myth of sovereignty. Here the customer is meant to experience a sense of being sovereign. At the same time the space is created for the customer to be, potentially, substantively directed and influenced to follow the requirements that flow from the rationalized elements of production. Key aspects of the service interaction, including the menu and its presentation, the display of empathy and aesthetic labour, and the use of naming within the service interaction, are analysed in terms of the promotion of the enchanting myth of sovereignty. Consumption, however, is a fragile process, and remains, to an important degree, ‘unmanageable’. The analysis, therefore, also examines how the promotion of the enchanting myth of sovereignty systematically creates the conditions for the myth's negation.

Post-Sovereign Environmental Governance

Abstract: This article examines a mode of hybrid governance in which sovereign states and nonstate parties collaborate as equal partners to address complex problems that are beyond the problem-solving capacities of states acting alone. Under conventional state-centric approaches, environmental policy is the exclusive province of territorially delimited sovereign states, subject only to such obligations as states incur through voluntary inter-sovereign agreements. In contrast, “post-sovereign” governance is non-exclusive, non-hierarchical, and post-territorial. These arrangements emerge from recognition of the limitations of top-down domestic regulation and rules of inter-sovereign obligation as means to address such complex environmental problems as ecosystem management. Examples are drawn from the US experience in the Chesapeake Bay region, and the joint US-Canadian Great Lakes ecosystem management effort.

International Law Immunities and the International Criminal Court

Abstract: The tension between the protection of human rights and the demands of state sovereignty is reflected in the debate on whether state officials should be held responsible in external fora for international crimes committed while in office. This debate involves the interplay between two branches of international law. Firstly, there is the well-established law according immunities to the state and its agents from the jurisdiction of other states (state and diplomatic immunities). This law proceeds from notions of sovereign equality and is aimed at ensuring that states do not unduly interfere with other states and their agents. On the other hand, there are those newer principles of international law that are based on humanitarian values and define certain types of conduct as crimes under international law (international criminal law). One of the challenges in this latter area has been to develop international and national mechanisms by which individuals who commit these crimes may be held responsible. Since states often fail to institute domestic prosecution of their own officials and agents alleged to have committed international crimes, renewed attention has been paid to the possibility of subjecting state agents to prosecution in foreign domestic courts or in international courts. For such prosecution in foreign domestic courts to take place, it will usually have to be shown (1) that those courts have jurisdiction over crimes committed abroad by foreigners against foreigners (i.e..universalorquasi-universal jurisdiction),and (2) that such jurisdiction extends to state agents (i.e., that international law immunities are unavailable). Recent years have seen a significant increase in attempts to institute prosecutions for alleged international crimes in the national courts of states other than that where the acts occurred. However, it has not proved easy to establish the two propositions identified above. Indeed, it has become apparent that the views that states possess universal jurisdiction over international crimes committed abroad and that incumbent and former state officials are subject to foreign domestic prosecution for such crimes are by no means universally held.

Explaining government preferences for institutional change in EU foreign and security policy

Abstract: Some member-states of the European Union (EU) want a supranational foreign and security policy, while other member-states oppose any significant limitation of national sovereignty in this domain. What explains this variation? Answering this question could help us to better understand not only the trajectory of European unification, but also the conditions and prospects of consensual political integration in other regional contexts and territorial scales. The main research traditions in international relations theory suggest different explanations. I examine the roles of relative power capabilities, foreign policy interests, Europeanized identities, and domestic multilevel governance in determining the preferences of the fifteen EU member governments concerning the institutional depth of their foreign and security policy cooperation. I find that power capabilities and collective identities have a significant influence, but the effect of ideas about the nature and locus of sovereignty, as reflected in the domestic constitution of each country, is particularly remarkable.

Sovereignty, Migration and the Rule of Law in Global Times

Abstract: This article argues that in the present era of globalisation, control over the movement of people has become the last bastion of sovereignty. This is important both to theoretical accounts of globalisation and to policy decisions by governments. Nation states threatened with loss of control in other realms are implementing a variety of 'crackdown' measures in questions of immigration. Issues of refugee law, illegal migration and skilled migration each challenge sovereignty in specific ways. While international human rights standards have made few inroads in questions of migration, recent decisions in England and Australia suggest that the rule of law may be emerging as a counter to traditional executive free reign in matters of migration law.

The european union: a politically incorrect view

Abstract: to the United States, the "United States of Europe?" The answer is no. As Article 1 of the recent European Constitution states, Europe is, and will remain, a union of independent countries. Nevertheless, an unresolved tension between those who would like the European Union to evolve into a supernational entity (the federalists or supernationalists) and those who would like it to stay a union of independent governments (the intergovernmentalists) has shaped much of the history of European institutions. The natural starting point for a U.S. scholar studying the process of European integration would be the notion of "division of powers." Europe has developed instead a system of "institutional balance" based on overlapping jurisdictions: the legislative, executive and regulatory powers are shared by many institutions, so much so that the distinction itself between legislative and executive acts is blurred?something that would make James Madison turn in his grave. It could hardly be otherwise. The European Union has been created gradually by a group of established countries with different secular histories, including dozens of internecine wars, and different institutions. The European countries were understandably wary that a single European institution would absorb too much of their own sovereignty; hence the emphasis on balance. But institutional balance and overlapping jurisdictions also lead to turf wars between institutions, to

Crimes against Humanity: A Normative Account

Abstract: This book was the first booklength treatment of the philosophical foundations of international criminal law. The focus is on the moral, legal, and political questions that arise when individuals who commit collective crimes, such as crimes against humanity, are held accountable by international criminal tribunals. These tribunals challenge one of the most sacred prerogatives of states - sovereignty - and breaches to this sovereignty can be justified in limited circumstances, following what the author calls a minimalist account of the justification of international prosecution. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book should appeal to anyone with an interest in international law, political philosophy, international relations, and human rights theory.