Achieving human security through UN human rights law: prospects and challenges

This paper explores the prospects and challenges of achieving human security through United Nations (UN) human rights law. The paper does not aim to pronounce definitively on the achievement of human security by way of UN human rights law that is, to assess the achievement of human security per se 'as a future end state'. Rather the focus of the paper is firmly placed on the capacity of UN human rights law to achieve human security. The paper departs from the premise that if human rights define human security, international human rights law and UN human rights law in particular should have something to say about the achievement of human security.

New Narratives of International Security Governance: The Shift from Global Interventionism to Global Self-Policing

This article examines the transformation in the narratives of the international governance of security over the last two decades. It suggests that there has been a major shift from governing interventions designed to address the causes of security problems to the regulation of the effects of these problems. In rearticulating the goals of international actors, the means and mechanisms of security governance have also changed, no longer focused on the universal application of Western knowledge and resources but rather on the unique local and organic processes at work in societies that bear the brunt of these problems. This transformation takes the conceptualisation of security governance out of the traditional terminological lexicon of security expertise and universal solutions and instead articulates the problematic of security and the policing of global risks in terms of local management processes, suggesting that decentralised coping strategies and self-policing are more effective and sustainable solutions.

Digital evidence as a means of proof before the International Court of Justice

This article discusses the use of digital evidence as a means of proof before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The absence of specific Court rules and procedures for digital evidence (with the exception of Practice Direction IX bis) is not necessarily an obstacle to its production and evaluation before the ICJ, as the general evidentiary rules can also be applied to digital evidence. The article first looks at the rules on the production of documentary evidence and then examines the specific issues related to audiovisual evidence. Finally, it examines the admissibility of digital evidence unlawfully obtained by a litigant through unilateral transborder access to data. The article concludes that, even if specific regulation may be needed as to the specific way in which authenticity and accuracy of digital evidence are to be established, the particular facts of the case and the grounds of challenge can vary widely, and it is doubtful that any regulation could be sufficiently flexible to deal with this in advance.

The Concept of Transparency in International Relations: towards a critical approach

Transparency is an important concept in International Relations. The possibility of realizing transparency in practice operates as a central analytical axis defining distinct positions on core theoretical problems within the field, from the security dilemma to the function of international institutions and beyond. As a political practice the pursuit of transparent governance is a dominant feature of global politics, promoted by a wide range of actors across a vast range of issue areas, from nuclear proliferation to Internet governance to the politics of foreign aid. Yet, despite its importance, precisely what transparency means or how the concept is understood is frequently ill-defined by academics and policy-makers alike. As a result, the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of approaches to transparency in IR often sit in tension with their wider theoretical commitments. This article will examine the three primary understandings of transparency used in IR in order to unpack these commitments. It finds that while transparency is often explicitly conceptualized as a property of information, particularly within rationalist scholarship, this understanding rests upon an unarticulated set of sociological assumptions. This analysis suggests that conceptualizing ‘transparency-as-information’ without a wider sociology of knowledge production is highly problematic, potentially obscuring our ability to recognize transparent practices in global governance. Understanding transparency as dialogue, as a social practice rooted in shared cognitive capacities and epistemic frameworks, provides a firmer analytical ground from which to examine transparency in International Relations.

Securing the Anthropocene? International Policy Experiments in Digital Hacktivism: A Case Study of Jakarta

This article analyses security discourses that are beginning to self-consciously take on board the shift towards the Anthropocene. Firstly, it sets out the developing episteme of the Anthropocene, highlighting the limits of instrumentalist cause-and-effect approaches to security, increasingly becoming displaced by discursive framings of securing as a process, generated through new forms of mediation and agency, capable of grasping inter-relations in a fluid context. This approach is the methodology of hacking: creatively composing and repurposing already existing forms of agency. It elaborates on hacking as a set of experimental practices and imaginaries of securing the Anthropocene, using as a case study the field of digital policy activism with the focus on community empowerment through social-technical assemblages being developed and applied in ‘the City of the Anthropocene’: Jakarta, Indonesia. The article concludes that policy interventions today cannot readily be grasped in modernist frameworks of ‘problem solving’ but should be seen more in terms of evolving and adaptive ‘life hacks’.