Towards a Critique of the Concept of the Right to Self-Determination in Africa : A Conceptual Examination and the Cases of Western Sahara, Southern Sudan and Eritrea

This thesis examines the right to self-determination which is a norm used for numerous purposes by multiple actors in the field of international relations, with relatively little clarity or agreement on the actual and potential meaning of the right. In international practice, however, the main focus in applying the right has been in the context of decolonization as set by the United Nations in its early decades. Thus, in Africa the right to self-determination has traditionally implied that the colonial territories, and particularly the populations within these territories, were to constitute the people who were entitled to the right. That is, self-determination by decolonization provided a framework for the construction of independent nation-states in Africa whilst other dimensions of the right remained largely or totally neglected. With the objective of assessing the scope, content, developments and interpretations of the right to self-determination in Africa, particularly with regard to the relevance of the right today, the thesis proceeds on two fundamental hypotheses. The first is that Mervyn Frost s theory of settled norms, among which he lists the right to self-determination, assumes too much. Even if the right to self-determination is a human right belonging to all peoples stipulated, inter alia, in the first Article of the 1966 International Human Rights Covenants, it is a highly politicized and context-bound right instead of being settled and observed in a way that its denial would need special justification. Still, the suggested inconsistency or non-compliance with the norm of self-determination is not intended to prove the uselessness or inappropriateness of the norm, but, on the contrary, to invite and encourage debate on the potential use and coverage of the right to self-determination. The second hypothesis is that within the concept of self-determination there are two normative dimensions. One is to do with the idea and practice of statehood, the nation and collectivity that may decide to conduct itself as an independent state. The other one is to do with self-determination as a human right, as a normative condition, to be enjoyed by people and peoples within states that supersedes state authority. These external and internal dimensions need to be seen as complementary and co-terminous, not as mutually exclusive alternatives. The thesis proceeds on the assumption that the internal dimension of the right, with human rights and democracy at its core, has not been considered as important as the external. In turn, this unbalanced and selective interpretation has managed to put the true normative purpose of the right making the world better and bringing more just polity models into a somewhat peculiar light. The right to self-determination in the African context is assessed through case studies of Western Sahara, Southern Sudan and Eritrea. The study asks what these cases say about the right to self-determination in Africa and what their lessons learnt could contribute to the understanding and relevance of the right in today s Africa. The study demonstrates that even in the context of decolonization, the application of the right to self-determination has been far from the consistent approach supposedly followed by the international community: in many respects similar colonial histories have easily led to rather different destinies. While Eritrea secured internationally recognized right to self-determination in the form of retroactive independence in 1993, international recognition of distinct Western Sahara and Southern Sudan entities is contingent on complex and problematic conditions being satisfied. Overall, it is a considerable challenge for international legality to meet empirical political reality in a meaningful way, so that the universal values attached to the norm of self-determination are not overlooked or compromised but rather reinforced in the process of implementing the right. Consequently, this thesis seeks a more comprehensive understanding of the right to self-determination with particular reference to post-colonial Africa and with an emphasis on the internal, human rights and democracy dimensions of the norm. It is considered that the right to self-determination cannot be perceived only as an inter-state issue as it is also very much an intra-state issue, including the possibility of different sub-state arrangements exercised under the right, for example, in the form of autonomy. At the same time, the option of independent statehood achieved through secession remains a mode of exercising and part of the right to self-determination. But in whatever form or way applied, the right to self-determination, as a normative instrument, should constitute and work as a norm that comprehensively brings more added value in terms of the objectives of human rights and democracy. From a normative perspective, a peoples right should not be allowed to transform and convert itself into a right of states. Finally, in light of the case studies of Western Sahara, Southern Sudan and Eritrea, the thesis suggests that our understanding of the right to self-determination should now reach beyond the post-colonial context in Africa. It appears that both the questions and answers to the most pertinent issues of self-determination in the cases studied must be increasingly sought within the postcolonial African state rather than solely in colonial history. In this vein, the right to self-determination can be seen not only as a tool for creating states but also as a way to transform the state itself from within. Any such genuinely post-colonial approach may imply a judicious reconsideration, adaptation or up-dating of the right and our understanding of it in order to render it meaningful in Africa today.

Blue army : paramilitary policing in Australia

Examination of how Victoria's Special Operations Group and their tactics have contributed to the extraordinary number of police shootings in Victoria. Looks at how these tactics have been passed on to the ordinary police. Based on author's research into the paramilitarisation of the police. Exposes the risks of allowing Australia's police forces to move away from their original charter of keeping the peace with the use of minimum force. Author lectures in Police Studies at Deakin University. She has represented the families of several men shot and killed by police in the late 1980s in her work as a community lawyer.

Soft condensed matter -A special issue of solid state communications -Foreword

It is a policy of Solid State Communications’ Executive Editorial Board to organize special issues from time to time on topics of current interests. The present issue focuses on soft condensed matter, a rapidly developing and diverse area of importance not only for the basic science, but also for its potential applications. The ten articles in this issue are intended to give the readers a snapshot of some latest developments in soft condensed matter, mainly from the point of view of basic science. As the special issues are intended for a broad audience, most articles are short reviews that introduce the readers to the relevant topics. Hence this special issue can be especially helpful to readers who might not be specialists in this area but would like to have a quick grasp on some of the interesting research directions.

Introduction to the BASIN Special Issue: State of art, past present a view to the future

Marine ecosystems are complex networks of organisms interacting either directly or indirectly while under the influence of the physical and chemical properties of the medium they inhabit. The interplay between these biological agents and their abiotic environment results in complex non-linear responses to individual and multiple stressors, influenced by feedbacks between these organisms and their environment. These ecosystems provide key services that benefit humanity such as food provisioning via the transfer of energy to exploited fish populations or climate regulation via the sinking, subsequent mineralization and ultimately storage of carbon in the ocean interior. These key characteristics or emergent features of marine ecosystems are subject to rapid change (e.g. regime shifts; Alheit et al., 2005 and Scheffer et al., 2009), with outcomes that are largely unpredictable in a deterministic sense. The North Atlantic Ocean is host to a number of such systems which are collectively being influenced by the unique physical and chemical features of this ocean basin, such as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the basin’s ventilation with the Arctic Ocean, the dynamics of heat transport via the Gulf Stream and the formation of deep water at high latitudes. These features drive the solubility and biological pumps and support the production and environments that results in large exploited fish stocks. Our knowledge of its functioning as a coupled system, and in particular how it will respond to change, is still limited despite the scientific effort exerted over more than 100 years. This is due in part to the difficulty of providing synoptic overviews of a vast area, and to the fact that most fieldwork provides only snapshots of the complex physical, chemical and biological processes and their interactions. These constraints have in the past limited the development of a mechanistic understanding of the basin as a whole, and thus of the services it provides.

Humanitarian intervention and the issue of state sovereignty in the discourse of legal experts between the 1830s and the First World War

This article discusses the tensions between the principle of state sovereignty and the idea of a "humanitarian intervention" (or a intervention on humanitarian grounds) as they resulted from the debate of leading legal scholars in the 19th and early 20th century. While prominent scholars such as Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Gustave Rolin Jaequemyns or Aegidius Arntz spoke out in favour of a form of "humanitarian interventions", others such as August Wilhelm Heffter or Pasquale Fiore were much more critical and in many cases spoke out in favour of absolute state sovereignty.

State of the Union and key challenges for Europe's future. CHALLENGE EUROPE Issue 22 - Challenges and new beginnings: Priorities for the EU's new leadership, September 2014.

In the last five years deep cracks have appeared in the European project. The 'euro-area crisis' triggered by a severe global financial and economic crisis has put European integration to a major test, more profound than ever before. The experience of recent years has revealed and exacerbated significant deficiencies in the European Union's (EU) economic and political construction. At time it has cast doubt on fundamentals of the European project and raised questions about whether Europe will be able to deal effectively not only with the immediate crisis, but also with the many other serious socio-economic, politico-institutional, societal and global challenges that Europe is and will be confronted with. At the start of a new institutional-political cycle (2014-2019) and while the crisis situation has for a number of reasons improved significantly since the summer of 2012, at least in systemic terms, the Union's new leadership and Member States will now have to take strategic decisions about the future of European integration.

Investor-State Dispute Resolution as an Issue in Transatlantic Trade Negotiations: Lessons from NAFTA. Jean Monnet/Robert Schuman Paper Series Vol. 15 No. 3, August 2015

A major issue in the ongoing Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations is investor-state dispute resolution as it relates to foreign investments. The United States would like to have strong investor protections similar to those of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) included in the TTIP agreement. Civil society groups on both sides of the Atlantic object to binding arbitration of investment disputes, fearing that arbitration awards could endanger environmental and other types of regulations. This paper examines the experience with investor-state dispute resolution under NAFTA to determine whether judgments rendered in these cases have had adverse effects.