Of Law, Lawlessness, and Sovereignty : Multinational Peacekeeping and International Law

Laws of war have been carefully defined by individual nations’ own codes of law as well as by supranational bodies. Yet the international scene has seen an increasing movement away from traditionally declared war toward multinational peacekeeping missions geared at containing local conflicts when perceived as potential threats to their respective regions’ political stability. While individual nations’ laws governing warfare presuppose national sovereignty, the multinational nature of peacekeeping scenarios can blur the lines of command structures, soldiers’ national loyalties, occupational jurisdiction, and raise profound questions as to which countries’ moral sense/governmental system is to be the one upheld. Historically increasingly complex international relations have driven increasingly detailed internationally drafted guidelines for countries’ interactions while at war, yet there are operational, legislative, and moral issues arising in multinational peacekeeping situations which these laws do not address at all. The author analyzes three unique peacekeeping operations in light of these legislative voids and suggests systematic points to consider to the end of protecting the peacekeepers, the national interests of the countries involved, operational matters, and clearly delineating both the objective and logical boundaries of a given multinational peacekeeping mission.

Is there a ‚Depth versus Participation‘ Dilemma in International Cooperation?

Much of the International Relations literature assumes that there is a “depth versus participation” dilemma in international politics: shallower international agreements attract more countries and greater depth is associated with less participation. We argue that this conjecture is too simple and probably misleading because the depth of any given cooperative effort is in fact multidimensional. This multidimensionality manifests itself in the design characteristics of international agreements: in particular, the specificity of obligations, monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, dispute settlement mechanisms, positive incentives (assistance), and organizational structures (secretariats). We theorize that the first three of these design characteristics have negative and the latter three have positive effects on participation in international cooperative efforts. Our empirical testing of these claims relies on a dataset that covers more than 200 global environmental treaties. We find a participation-limiting effect for the specificity of obligations, but not for monitoring and enforcement. In contrast, we observe that assistance provisions in treaties have a significant and substantial positive effect on participation. Similarly, dispute settlement mechanisms tend to promote treaty participation. The main implication of our study is that countries do not appear to stay away from agreements with monitoring and enforcement provisions, but that the inclusion of positive incentives and dispute settlement mechanisms can promote international cooperation. In other words, our findings suggest that policymakers do not necessarily need to water down global treaties in order to obtain more participation.

Agents, Trustees, and International Courts: Nomination and Appointment of Judicial Candidates in the WTO Appellate Body

Scholars have increasingly theorized, and debated, the decision by states to create and delegate authority to international courts, as well as the subsequent autonomy and behavior of those courts, with principal–agent and trusteeship models disagreeing on the nature and extent of states’ influence on international judges. This article formulates and tests a set of principal–agent hypotheses about the ways in which, and the conditions under which, member states are able use their powers of judicial nomination and appointment to influence the endogenous preferences of international judges. The empirical analysis surveys the record of all judicial appointments to the Appellate Body (AB) of the World Trade Organization over a 15-year period. We present a view of an AB appointment process that, far from representing a pure search for expertise, is deeply politicized and offers member-state principals opportunities to influence AB members ex ante and possibly ex post. We further demonstrate that the AB nomination process has become progressively more politicized over time as member states, responding to earlier and controversial AB decisions, became far more concerned about judicial activism and more interested in the substantive opinions of AB candidates, systematically championing candidates whose views on key issues most closely approached their own, and opposing candidates perceived to be activist or biased against their substantive preferences. Although specific to the WTO, our theory and findings have implications for the judicial politics of a large variety of global and regional international courts and tribunals.

The Design of International Trade Agreements: Introducing a New Dataset

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have been proliferating for the last twenty years. A large literature has studied various aspects of this phenomenon. Until recently, however, many large-N studies have paid only scant attention to variation across PTAs in terms of content and design. Our contribution to this literature is a new dataset on the design of trade agreements that is the most comprehensive in terms of both variables coded and agreements covered. We illustrate the dataset’s usefulness in re-visiting the questions if and to what extent PTAs impact trade flows. The analysis shows that on average PTAs increase trade flows, but that this effect is largely driven by deep agreements. In addition, we provide evidence that provisions that tackle behind-the-border regulation matter for trade flows. The dataset’s contribution is not limited to the PTA literature, however. Broader debates on topics such as institutional design and the legalization of international relations will also benefit from the novel data.

Political dictionary; forming a work of universal reference, both constitutional and legal; and embracing the terms of civil administration, of political economy and social relations, and of all the more important statistical departments of finance and commerce.

Mode of access: Internet.

American politics. Political parties and party problems in the United States; a sketch of American party history and of the development and operations of party machinery, together with a consideration of certain party problems in their relations to political morality,

Contains short bibliographies.

Is Crimea Kosovo? Fundamental Misunderstandings and Failed Diplomacy Between Russia and the West in the Post-Cold War International System

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Sovereignty, Political Economy, and Economic Development in Native American Nations

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-05

Humanitarian responsibilities and interventionist claims in international society

This article calls for a widening of the debate about humanitarian intervention to incorporate insights from constructivism, 'Welsh School' Critical Security Studies, and critical approaches to Third World International Relations. After identifying a series of problems with the contemporary debate, which is dominated by the English School, it calls for a broadening of the concept of intervention and suggests a need to rethink the meaning of humanitarianism and terms such as the 'supreme humanitarian emergency'.

Globalisation, security and international order after 11 September

This article advances the discussion of the contentious question of links between global inequalities of power and violent responses, focussing on globalisation and non-inclusive forms of governance. Drawing on international political economy, the article criticises the nationstate-centrism in much political discourse, suggesting that both authority and security need to be reconsidered - to account for less plausible national borders and controls. It suggests that human security (including issues of development and equality) ought to replace national security as the primary focus of public policy. It draws attention to the intractability of difference, insisting that the terrorism of 2001 has complex transnational antecedents. Realist approaches to international order have become part of a problem to be overcome through further intellectual debate.

Identity, difference, and the dilemmas of inter-Korean relations: Insights from northern defectors and the German precedent

Questions of identity have become increasingly central to the study of foreign policy and security, particularly in constructivist debates. But very few of the resulting insights have been applied to the Korean situation, where discussions about security and inter-Korean relations remain dominated by strategic and geopolitical issues. The main task of this article is to address this shortcoming by examining the experience of North Korean defectors in South Korea and the precedent of German unification. Both of these domains of inquiry reveal that identity differences between North and South persist far beyond the ideological and political structures that created them in the first place. Born out of death, fear, and longing for revenge, these identity patterns lie at the heart of Korea's security dilemmas. Unless taken seriously by scholars and decision makers, the respective tensions between identity and difference will continue to cause major political problems. (Key words: Inter-Korean relations, North Korean defectors, German unification)

Securing international society: Towards an English School discourse of security

English School approaches to international politics, which focus on the idea of an international society of states bound together by shared rules and norms, have not paid significant explicit attention to the study of security in international relations. This is curious given the centrality of security to the study of world politics and the recent resurgence of English School scholarship in general. This article attempts to redress this gap by locating and explicating an English School discourse of security. We argue here that there is indeed an English School discourse of security, although an important internal distinction exists here between pluralist and solidarist accounts, which focus on questions of order and justice in international society respectively. In making this argument, we also seek to explore the extent to which emerging solidarist accounts of security serve to redress the insecurity of security in international relations: the tendency of traditional security praxes to privilege the state in ways that renders individuals insecure.