scholarly journals After International Law: Anthropology Beyond the “Age of Human Rights”

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 115 ◽  
pp. 289-293
Author(s):  
Mark Goodale
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Anthropological Research ◽  
Legal Strategies ◽  
The Cold War

This essay examines the ways in which anthropologists have tracked the rise and fall of international law after the end of the Cold War. It argues that anthropological research has made important contributions to the wider understanding of international law as a mechanism for social and political change, a framework for protecting vulnerable populations, and a language through which collective identities can be expressed and valorized. Yet, over time, international law has lost many of these expansive functions, a shift that anthropologists have also studied, although with greater reluctance and difficulty. The essay explains the ways in which particular categories of international law, such as human rights and international criminal justice, grew dramatically in importance and power during the 1990s and early 2000s, a shift whose complexities anthropologists studied at the local level. As the essay also explains, anthropological research began to detect a weakening in human rights implementation and respect for international legal norms, a countervailing shift that has broader implications for the possibilities for international cooperation and the resolution of conflicts, among others. At the same time, the retreat of international law from its highpoint in the early post-Cold War years has given way to the reemergence of non-legal strategies for advancing change and accounting for past injustices, including strategies based on social confrontation, moral shaming, and even violence.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 174-188
Author(s):  
Mark S. Berlin
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
International Law ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Reform Processes ◽  
Human Rights Norms ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter summarizes the book’s findings and discuses their implications for research on atrocity justice, human rights, and international law. It highlights the importance of technocratic criminal law specialists in the spread of human rights norms and contrasts these actors with the types of civil society groups that receive much attention in the human rights literature. The chapter also discusses how the book’s findings complicate the narrative of the Cold War period as a time of “hibernation” for the advancement of international atrocity justice. Finally, the chapter highlights the importance of the book’s findings for understanding the domestication of international law more generally. The chapter then discusses how the book’s findings may generalize to explaining the spread of other legal norms that have been shown to be associated with improvements in human rights outcomes. It suggests a number of conditions under which the spread of legal norms will benefit from forms of technocratic legal borrowing inherent in large-scale reform processes.

Unilateral Economic Sanctions, International Law, and Human Rights

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Idriss Jazairy
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Economic Sanctions ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
The West ◽  
Eventual Collapse ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
United Nations Charter

AbstractAs part of the roundtable “Economic Sanctions and Their Consequences,” this essay examines unilateral coercive measures. These types of sanctions are applied outside the scope of Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, and were developed and refined in the West in the context of the Cold War. Yet the eventual collapse of the Berlin Wall did not herald the demise of unilateral sanctions; much to the contrary. While there are no incontrovertible data on the extent of these measures, one can safely say that they target in some way a full quarter of humanity. In addition to being a major attack on the principle of self-determination, unilateral measures not only adversely affect the rights to international trade and to navigation but also the basic human rights of innocent civilians. The current deterioration of the situation, with the mutation of embargoes into blockades and impositions on third parties, is a threat to peace that needs to be upgraded in strategic concern.

Transformative occupation and the unilateralist impulse

2012 ◽  
Vol 94 (885) ◽  
pp. 237-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory H. Fox
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Critical Function ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Human Rights Treaties

AbstractThe 2003 occupation of Iraq ignited an important debate among scholars over the merits of transformative occupation. An occupier has traditionally been precluded from making substantial changes in the legal or political infrastructure of the state it controls. But the Iraq experience led some to claim that this ‘conservationist principle’ had been largely ignored in practice. Moreover, transformation was said to accord with a variety of important trends in contemporary international law, including the rebuilding of post-conflict states along liberal democratic lines, the extra-territorial application of human rights treaty obligations, and the decline of abstract conceptions of territorial sovereignty. This article argues that these claims are substantially overstated. The practice of Occupying Powers does not support the view that liberal democratic transformations are widespread. Human rights treaties have never been held to require states parties to legislate in the territories of other states. More importantly, the conservationist principle serves the critical function of limiting occupiers' unilateral appropriation of the subordinate state's legislative powers. Post-conflict transformation has indeed been a common feature of post-Cold War legal order, but it has been accomplished collectively, most often via Chapter VII of the UN Charter. To grant occupiers authority to reverse this trend by disclaiming any need for collective approval of ‘reforms’ in occupied states would be to validate an anachronistic unilateralism. It would run contrary to the multilateralization of all aspects of armed conflict, evident in areas well beyond post-conflict reconstruction.

Rights and Social Inclusion

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Goodale
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Anthropological Research ◽  
The Future ◽  
Liberal Rights

Anthropological research played an important role in tracing the ethnographic contours of the rise and transformation of rights in the post-Cold War period. This chapter surveys some of the most important currents in the anthropology of rights as an enduring context for the wider field of anthropology and law. First, the chapter examines key developments in the anthropology of human rights, which served as a methodological and conceptual anchor for the post-Cold War anthropology of rights more generally. The chapter then turns to another category of rights with which anthropologists have been closely associated, both as researchers and as engaged scholars: Indigenous Peoples’ rights. Next, the chapter examines anthropological research that has revealed the importance of what might be called non-liberal categories of rights, that is, rights that are not based, historically or conceptually, in the development of liberal rights within the Western philosophical and political tradition. The chapter concludes by looking to the future: how will the anthropology of rights evolve in the coming years, both in preserving certain core concerns and in moving in new directions?

New national organization of Europe: nationalism and minority rights after the end of the Cold War

2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-41
Author(s):  
Matti Jutila
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Surface Level ◽  
National Minorities ◽  
Universal Human Rights ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Relationship

Post–Cold War Europe witnessed the resurgence of different forms of nationalism and also the re-establishment of a minority rights regime. At the surface level, rights of national minorities seem to undermine nationalism as a political organization principle, but on a closer investigation the relationship between the two is more complex. This article uses insights from the English school’s theorizing on primary and secondary institutions to investigate the relationship between the primary institution of nationalism and secondary institution of minority rights regime. After a brief discussion of nationalism as a primary institution and its influence on the implementation of universal human rights, this article presents a detailed study of the minority rights regime analysing how it challenges, transforms and reproduces nationalism as a primary institution of contemporary European society of states.

The International Rule of Law—Rise or Decline?—Approaching Current Foundational Challenges

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-30
Author(s):  
Heike Krieger ◽  
Georg Nolte
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Preliminary Assessment ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Public International Law ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
International Rule

The chapter undertakes a preliminary assessment of current developments of international law for the purpose of mapping the ground for a larger research project. The research project pursues the goal of determining whether public international law, as it has developed since the end of the Cold War, is continuing its progressive move towards a more human-rights- and multi-actor-oriented order, or whether we are seeing a renewed emphasis of more classical elements of international law. In this context the term ‘international rule of law’ is chosen to designate the more recent and ‘thicker’ understanding of international law. The chapter discusses how it can be determined whether this form of international law continues to unfold, and whether we are witnessing challenges to this order which could give rise to more fundamental reassessments.

Japan Embraces Internationalism: Explaining Japanese Security Policy Expansion through an Identity-Regime Approach

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 589-613
Author(s):  
BHUBHINDAR SINGH
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Institutional Reforms ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractThe paper examines the domestic politics explanations to Japanese security policy expansion between the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. In response to the various explanations offered in the literature, such as the implementation of administrative and institutional reforms since 1994 that resulted in the centralization of the decision-making process, changes to the balance of power of political parties within the Japanese political system, and shift in the type of politicians that dominate the LDP, opposition parties and security policymaking structure, this paper argues that it is important to incorporate collective identity into understanding Japanese security policy expansion. Two reasons highlight the importance of collective identity – first, without collective identity, it is difficult to understand the type of security policy produced as the discussion of vision is omitted; and, second, collective identity reveals the organizational make-up of the security policymaking structure that is responsible for the formulation of security policy. To explicate the collective identity–institution relationship, this paper focuses on Japanese security identity and the Japanese security policymaking regime in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. Two security identities for Japan are examined – the peace-state and international-state; and three elements of the regime are studied – the agents involved or marginalized in the security policymaking process, the decision-making structure of the security policymaking, and the role of the US. This paper aids in our understanding of how collective identities are sustained and supported within an institution, and how Japanese security policy expanded in the post-Cold War period.

Human Rights, Democracy, and the Inescapability of Politics; or, Human Dignity Thick and Thin

2005 ◽  
Vol 38 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 358-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yehudah Mirsky
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Advisory Opinion ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
The Icj ◽  
Political Idea ◽  
Human Rights Advocacy ◽  
The Cold War

The essay places the ICJ opinion in a broader legal and political context and argues that the failure to distinguish between democratic and non-democratic regimes characterizing the ICJ advisory opinion reflects broader trends with potentially ruinous consequences for the enterprise of human rights promotion itself. The ICJ opinion's willful ignoring of Israel's democratic character yielded a tendentious and inconsistent ruling. By contrast the Israel High Court of Justice's decision invalidating portions of Israel's security wall reflects a healthy understanding of a democracy's needs and limitations, as reflected in that court's proportionality standard of review. The ICJ willingly blurred crucial distinctions between democratic regimes that genuinely adhere, however imperfectly, to principles of human rights in their own governance, and those states and actors that do not, a distinction made all the more imperative by the events of September 11.The judicialization of human rights in the post-Cold War era takes place against the background of a tensile relationship between human rights advocacy and democracy promotion during the Cold War. While human rights represent an essentially legal idea, democracy a political idea. In closing, the essay lays out one basic, hopefully workable, conceptual division of labor between human rights and democracy as complementary elements of a broader project of human dignity, in which human rights represents a “thin” universal conception of human dignity, while democracy offers a process whereby that conception can be “thickened” in various political, social and cultural contexts around the globe.

scholarly journals Introduction to the AJIL Unbound Symposium on Recognition of Governments and Customary International Law

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 108 ◽  
pp. 199-200
Author(s):  
James Gathii
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
The State ◽  
Effective Control ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Customary International Law ◽  
Regime Changes ◽  
State Practice

In the lead essay in this symposium, Professor Erika de Wet contends that notwithstanding all of the post-Cold War enthusiasm for a right to democratic governance and the non-recognition of governments resulting from coups and unconstitutional changes of government, a customary international law norm on the nonrecognition of governments established anti-democratically has not emerged. De Wet’s position, primarily based on state practice in Africa, is vigorously debated by six commentators.Jure Vidmar agrees with de Wet that the representative legitimacy of governments still lies primarily in effective control over the territory of the state. Vidmar, in his contribution, examines recent collective practice when neither the incumbent government nor the insurgents control the territory exclusively, arguing that in such cases states may apply human rights considerations. Like de Wet, however, Vidmar regards state practice as ambivalent and unamenable to ideal-type distinctions between coups (against a democratically legitimate government) and regime changes (to a democratically legitimate government).

scholarly journals Harnessing Human Rights to the Olympic Games: Human Rights Watch and the 1993 ‘Stop Beijing’ Campaign

2016 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 415-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Keys
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Olympic Games ◽  
Moral Legitimacy ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Playing Field ◽  
Human Rights Organizations ◽  
Moral Claims ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Olympic Games

In 1993 Human Rights Watch, one of the two most influential human rights organizations in the world, launched a major campaign to derail Beijing's bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. This article situates this highly publicized campaign in the context of Sino–US relations, the end of the Cold War, and the ‘victory’ of human rights as a global moral lingua franca. It argues that Human Rights Watch's decision to oppose Beijing's bid stemmed from its new post-Cold War focus on China combined with the organization's search for new ways to secure media attention and the funding that flowed from publicity. The campaign most likely swayed the International Olympic Committee's close vote in favor of Sydney. It also brought Human Rights Watch a windfall of favorable publicity among new audiences. The article argues that the campaign irrevocably inserted broad-based human rights considerations into the Olympic Games, decisively moving moral claims-making around the Olympics beyond the playing field. It also linked Human Rights Watch's moral legitimacy to US power in problematic ways and triggered a powerful anti-US backlash in China.

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