‘State failure’ and the extraterritorial use of force in self-defence against non-state actors

The thesis is first and foremost the examination of the notion and consequences of ‘state failure’ in international law. The disputes surrounding criteria for creation and recognition of states pertain to efforts to analyse legal and factual issues unravelling throughout the continuing existence of states, as best evidenced by the ‘state failure’ phenomenon. It is argued that although the ‘statehood’ of failed states remains uncontested, their sovereignty is increasingly considered to be dependent on the existence of effective governments. The second part of this thesis focuses on the examinations of the legal consequences of the continuing existence of failed states in the context of jus ad bellum. Since the creation of the United Nations the ability of states to resort to armed force without violating what might be considered as the single most important norm of international law, has been considerably limited. State failure and increasing importance of non-state actors has become a greatly topical issue within recent years in both scholarship and the popular imagination. There have been important legal developments within international law, which have provoked much academic, and in particular, legal commentary. On one level, the thesis contributes to this commentary. Despite the fact that the international community continues to perpetuate a notion of ‘statehood’ which allows the state-centric system of international law to exist, when dealing with practical and political realities of state failure, international law may no longer consider external sovereignty of states as an undeniable entitlement to statehood. Accordingly, the main research question of this thesis is whether the implicit and explicit invocation of the state failure provides sufficient legal basis for the intervention in self-defence against non-state actors in located in failed states. It has been argued that state failure has a profound impact, the extent of which is yet to be fully explored, on the modern landscape of peace and security.

Is there any room for the doctrine of fundamental rights of states in today's international law?

This article serves as a general substantive introduction to the special issue on the fundamental rights of states in international law. It introduces the concept in theoretical and doctrinal terms, and lays out the questions that will be addressed by the contributions to the special issue. These questions include: 1) What do attributes like ‘inherent’, ‘inalienable’ and ‘permanent’ mean with regard to state rights?; 2) Do they lead to identifying a unitary distinct category of fundamental rights of states?; 3) If so, what is their source and legal character?; 4) What are their legal implications, eg, when they come into conflict with other obligations of the right holder or with the actions of other states and international organisations?; and ultimately, 5) Is there still room in today’s international law for a doctrine of ‘fundamental’ rights of states? The article reviews the fundamental rights of states in positive law sources and in international legal scholarship, and identifies the reasons for a renaissance of attention for this doctrine.

Evaluating the use of an urban consolidation centre and electric vehicles in central London

The paper focuses on the role that can be played by urban consolidation centres (UCCs) in reducing freight traffic and its environmental impacts in towns and cities. It is based on the before and after evaluation of a trial led by a major stationery and office supplies company in which urban freight deliveries in central London made from a depot in the suburbs using diesel vehicles were replaced with the use of an urban micro-consolidation centre located in the delivery area together with the use of electrically-assisted cargo tricycles and electric vans. The results show that the total distance travelled and the CO2eq emissions per parcel delivered fell by 20% and 54% respectively as a result of this delivery system. However, the evaluation has also indicated that the distance travelled per parcel rose substantially in the City of London delivery area as a result of the electric vehicles having far smaller load limits in both weight and volume compared with diesel vans. But, at the same time, the trial system was able to virtually eliminate CO2eq emissions per parcel delivered in the City of London. The trial proved successful from the company's perspective in transport, environmental and financial terms. The company therefore decided to continue the operation beyond the end of the trial with it being officially launched during 2010.

Increasing the variability of centre frequency locations in multiple-band sigma-delta modulators via the use of fractional delay filters

This paper presents the design analysis of novel tunable narrow-band bandpass sigma-delta modulators, that can achieve concurrent multiple noise-shaping for multi-tone input signals. This approach utilises conventional comb filters in conjunction with FIR, or allpass IIR fractional delay filters, to deliver the desired nulls for the quantisation noise transfer function. Detailed simulation results show that FIR fractional delay comb filter based sigma-delta modulators tune accurately to most centre frequencies, but suffer from degraded resolution at frequencies close to Nyquist. However, superior accuracies are obtained from their allpass IIR fractional delay counterpart at the expense of a slight shift in noise-shaping bands at very high frequencies.