scholarly journals International Law in a Post-Post-Cold War World-Can It Survive?

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 362-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Pert
AJIL Unbound ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 108 ◽  
pp. 208-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jure Vidmar

In the 1990s, international legal scholarship was marked by democratic idealism and the belief that democracy had become the only legitimate political system. The more radical proposals even speculated about legality of pro-democratic intervention. Such re-conceptualizations of international law were met with determined criticism. However, even skeptical voices were willing to admit that democracy nevertheless did have some limited normative force in post-Cold War international law. While it would be an exaggeration to say that nondemocratic governments are illegitimate per se, a consensus started to emerge that international law prohibited at least a coup against a democratic government. In the absence of a workable definition of substantive democracy for international law purposes, a democratic government was understood as an authority which comes to power in an electoral process that is reasonably free and fair.


Author(s):  
Franchini Daniel ◽  
Tzanakopoulos Antonios

This contribution discusses the forcible intervention by NATO against Serbia in 1999 in response to the situation in Kosovo. It sets out the facts and background of the crisis, along with the legal positions of the main protagonists and the reactions of the international community. It then proceeds to survey the debates surrounding the legality of the intervention and to assess the soundness of the legal justifications put forward by states and authors. Finally, it discusses the precedential value of the intervention, especially in view of claims of the existence or emergence of a rule or principle of international law permitting the unilateral use of force in response to humanitarian crises. The contribution concludes that the NATO intervention has significant precedential value in that it confirms the unlawfulness of forcible unilateral humanitarian intervention.


AJIL Unbound ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 115 ◽  
pp. 289-293
Author(s):  
Mark Goodale

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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Sakwa

A revisionist state would seek to challenge the existing balance of power in the system and threaten the foundations of the system itself. This does not apply to contemporary Russia. It seeks to enhance its status within the existing framework of international society. Russian neo-revisionism does not attempt to create new rules or to advance an alternative model of the international system but to ensure the universal and consistent application of existing norms. Russia’s neo-revisionism represents a critique of western practices in defense of the universal proclaimed principles. It is not the principles of international law and governance that Russia condemns but the practices that accompany their implementation. This reflected Russia’s broader perception in the post-Cold War era that it was locked into a strategic stalemate, and that the country was forced into a politics of resistance. This has taken many forms, including the creation of an anti-hegemonic alignment with China and others. For Moscow, it was the West that had become revisionist, not Russia. Although the implementation of applicable norms was patchy, Russia did not repudiate them. In its relations with the European Union, Russia’s neo-revisionist stance means that it was unable to become simply the passive recipient of eu norms, and instead tried to become a co-creator of Europe’s destiny. The struggle is not only over contested norms, but also over who has the prerogative to claim their norms as universal. However, it was precisely at the level of practices that there was least room for compromise, and thus Russian neo-revisionism became another form of the impasse, and only intensified tensions between Russia and the Atlantic system.


Author(s):  
Metodi Hadji-Janev

The post-Cold War reality has brought many changes that challenge political leaders, planners and operators. Using cyberspace to accomplish their political objectives, non-state actors and states have opened serious legal debates over the applicability of the international law of armed conflict principles in cyberspace. In this context, the article explores how the basic principles of International law of armed conflict will apply to the protection of the civilian population from the future cyber conflict. To accomplish this article addresses the ius ad bellum and the ius in bello aspects of cyber conflict.


2012 ◽  
Vol 94 (885) ◽  
pp. 237-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory H. Fox

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.


2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 451-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Nicholson

This Article reads the work of Martti Koskenniemi—arguably the most significant international legal thinker of the post-Cold War era—as an exercise in (Lacanian) psychoanalysis. Excavating the links between Koskenniemi and French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and analyzing the origins of those links in Koskenniemi's debt to the Harvard branch of the American Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement, it argues that over almost thirty years Koskenniemi has employed psychoanalytic techniques to rebuild the self-confidence of international law(yers). The success of this confidence-building project explains the acclaim Koskenniemi's work enjoys. As international law's psychoanalyst he has defined the identity of the international lawyer and mapped the structure of international legal argument, stabilizing international law's present reality by synchronizing it with narratives of its past. Any attempt to destabilize that reality or depart from present structures into an alternative future must start from an analysis of Koskenniemi's methods and it is in this sense, and not out of a more pure interest in Koskenniemi's work, that this Article deconstructs Koskenniemi'soeuvre.It situates his method, reveals his choices, and explores their limits in an effort to develop (tentative) proposals for a “new” international law(yer) and an international legal future outside the structure that Koskenniemi has mapped so effectively and affectively.


2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 195-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Scott

This essay is an exploration of the contemporary normative conditions of thinking about the problem of sovereignty. Specifically it is a consideration of some aspects of the way in which the problem of Third World sovereignty has been taken up and argued out in international relations theory and international law on the legal-political terrain of self-determination. The essay traces the transformation of the norm of self-determination as an anti-colonial standard to its post-Cold War re-composition as a norm of democratic governance.


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