scholarly journals The Resolution of International Commercial Disputes – What Role (if any) for Continental Europe?

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 115 ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
Giesela Rühl

The past sixteen years have witnessed the proliferation of international commercial courts around the world. However, up until recently, this was largely an Asian and a Middle Eastern phenomenon. Only during the past decade have Continental European countries, notably Germany, France and the Netherlands, joined the bandwagon and started to create new judicial bodies for international commercial cases. Driven by the desire to attract high-volume commercial litigation, these bodies try to offer international businesses a better dispute settlement framework. But what are their chances of success? Will more international litigants decide to settle their disputes in these countries? In this essay, I argue that, despite its recently displayed activism, Continental Europe lags behind on international commercial courts. In fact, although the various European initiatives are laudable, most cannot compete with the traditional market leaders, especially the London Commercial Court, or with new rivals in Asia and the Middle East. If Continental Europe wants a role in the international litigation market, it must embrace more radical change. And this change will most likely have to happen on the European––not the national––level.

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 270-293
Author(s):  
Lotte Jensen

Abstract Singing about fires, ship wrecks and major international catastrophes between 1755 and 1918 Local, national and international solidarity This article focuses on Dutch songs about three different kind of disasters in the period 1755-1918: fires (which occurred in Dutch villages and cities), ship wrecks (both in the Netherlands and abroad) and other foreign catastrophes, such as the earthquake on Martinique (1839) or the floods in Mexico (1888). This popular genre is an important source to understand how people coped with disasters in the past. They were not only used to spread the news, but also to make sense of the events by offering moral and religious lessons. This article investigates how these different types of disaster songs could shape a shared sense of community on the local, national and international level. While songs about fires were often directed at the local community, ballads about shipwrecks appealed to the imagined Dutch community. Songs about big disasters in foreign places, sometimes aimed at raising international solidarity, but they were more often used to strengthen communal feelings at the national level.


Author(s):  
Samuel Cohn

The author of this book asks us to prepare for the inevitable. Our society is going to die. What are you going to do about it? But the author also wants us to know that there's still reason for hope. In an immersive and mesmerizing discussion, this book considers what makes societies (throughout history) collapse. It points us to the historical examples of the Byzantine empire, the collapse of Somalia, the rise of Middle Eastern terrorism, the rise of drug cartels in Latin America, and the French Revolution, to explain how societal decline has common features and themes. While unveiling the past, the message to us about the present is searing. Through an assessment of past and current societies, the book offers us a new way of looking at societal growth and decline. With a broad panorama of bloody stories, unexpected historical riches, crime waves, corruption, and disasters, the reader is shown that although our society will, inevitably, die at some point, there's still a lot we can do to make it better and live a little longer. This inventive approach to an “end-of-the-world” scenario should be a warning. We're not there yet. The book concludes with a strategy of preserving and rebuilding so that we don't have to give a eulogy anytime soon.


Author(s):  
Cheryl Colopy

From a remote outpost of global warming, a summons crackles over a two-way radio several times a week: . . . Kathmandu, Tsho Rolpa! Babar Mahal, Tsho Rolpa! Kathmandu, Tsho Rolpa! Babar Mahal, Tsho Rolpa! . . . In a little brick building on the lip of a frigid gray lake fifteen thousand feet above sea level, Ram Bahadur Khadka tries to rouse someone at Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology in the Babar Mahal district of Kathmandu far below. When he finally succeeds and a voice crackles back to him, he reads off a series of measurements: lake levels, amounts of precipitation. A father and a farmer, Ram Bahadur is up here at this frigid outpost because the world is getting warmer. He and two colleagues rotate duty; usually two of them live here at any given time, in unkempt bachelor quarters near the roof of the world. Mount Everest is three valleys to the east, only about twenty miles as the crow flies. The Tibetan plateau is just over the mountains to the north. The men stay for four months at a stretch before walking down several days to reach a road and board a bus to go home and visit their families. For the past six years each has received five thousand rupees per month from the government—about $70—for his labors. The cold, murky lake some fifty yards away from the post used to be solid ice. Called Tsho Rolpa, it’s at the bottom of the Trakarding Glacier on the border between Tibet and Nepal. The Trakarding has been receding since at least 1960, leaving the lake at its foot. It’s retreating about 200 feet each year. Tsho Rolpa was once just a pond atop the glacier. Now it’s half a kilometer wide and three and a half kilometers long; upward of a hundred million cubic meters of icy water are trapped behind a heap of rock the glacier deposited as it flowed down and then retreated. The Netherlands helped Nepal carve out a trench through that heap of rock to allow some of the lake’s water to drain into the Rolwaling River.


Author(s):  
A. М. Bocharnikova

The article contains information on all general-purpose linguistic museums that are currently functioning in the world, functioned in the past, or are at the project stage. In cases where this is possible, the structure of museum’s exposition is examined. Criteria that have played a key role in the division of museums’ content into structural elements are defined. The accuracy of exposition authors’ compliance of their approaches has also been analyzed. The first linguistic museum in the world that opened its doors to visitors was Taras Shevchenko university of Kyiv’s Linguistic Educational Museum founded in 1992 by the order of the university’s rector. During next sixteen years it was world’s only linguistic museum till the year 2008 when National Museum of Language in the US was opened. In 2013 a new linguistic museum named Mundolingua was established in Paris. After 2014 when the museum in USA was closed and till now it continues to be the only linguistic museum in the world except Linguistic Educational Museum in Ukraine that is functioning. At present times there are several big projects of establishing a comprehensive linguistic museum in different countries. Among them is Planet Word in Washington, Museum der Sprachen der Welt in Berlin, Museum of Language in London. The work upon these projects is in progress and hasn’t reached the stage of completeness. There are also two websites available on the Internet that have the name of museum but does not contain any traces of the exposition content. These are the website of the above mentioned National Museum of Language and Taalmuseum in the Netherlands. Both of these websites are portals for announcements concerning exhibitions, lectures and meetings in different places that are somehow referred to language topics. In this article the structure of the museums content has also been analyzed. Linguistic Educational Museum in Kyiv was established for academic purposes therefore its content has the same structure as the Introductory Linguistics course. At the same time it reveals the principles of the museum exposition author’s Doctor of Science thesis named the Metatheory of Linguisics.


2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Ion ◽  
John C. Barrett

Contemporary archaeology seems to be marked by a questioning of the limits of interpretation, pushing for a radical change in the way we conceptualize our engagement with the past, the material and the world we live in: from archaeologies of affect, to new materialist approaches or calls to political engagement, practitioners seem to experiment with new questions and theoretical tools. As Artur Ribeiro points out in his contribution to the following collection of papers, ‘“new” has become the new normal’. But the question is, what are we trying to do with these experiments and what do we expect from archaeology in a world that is undergoing major changes and challenges?


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 71-85
Author(s):  
Ewa Górecka

Olga Tokarczuk’s writings are preoccupied with the entropy-ridden world. Tokarczuk renders this world in polyphonic images, and her protagonists seek to establish their identities by redefining their relation to it. In Flights, a prominent place on this world’s map is ascribed to Holland, whose image, when studied through the lens of imagology, turns out to be a space of knowledge and cognitive receptivity. Organised within the framework of selective attention, the representation of Holland is focused on perception of the narrator and of the protagonists, which conveys the attitude to the world identified with the text. Examination of the literary vision of the Netherlands and Dutch culture reveals Tokarczuk’s strategy of foregrounding selected enclosed spaces (interiors) which serve as the loci of knowledge (Verheyen’s study, De Waag and Ruysch’s home). Such a portrayal of Holland is underpinned by self-images exemplified in ideas developed by philosophers linked to this country (Descartes and Spinoza) and in art, with which the writer engages in dialogue. Explored in imagological terms, the representation of the Netherlands is a non-stereotypical vision constructed through references to an array of cultural expressions produced by the Dutch, in which the past co-generates a palimpsestic picture of the present.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 973-988
Author(s):  
N Jansen Calamita

ABSTRACT Since 2017, World Trade Organization members have been engaged in Structured Discussions aimed at agreeing on a multilateral framework on investment facilitation for development. The negotiations focus on establishing binding disciplines for investment facilitation, which will likely be made subject to the World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement Understanding. Investment facilitation, however, is that something states already do. Over the past decade, states have adopted record numbers of reforms at the domestic, regional, and international levels to facilitate foreign investment. These reforms show no signs of slowing. This begs an important question regarding the World Trade Organization initiative: given all the attention that investment facilitation already receives from states and international organizations, how, if at all, would the conclusion of a World Trade Organization Framework bring added value to states, i.e. value that cannot be achieved by ongoing efforts? Examining this question is the focus of this paper.


Author(s):  
Mohd Abbas

History indicates that before the coming of modern globalization, the Muslims had their own version of globalization. During the Muslim era of globalization which coincides with the Golden Age of the Muslims, the West benefited immensely from the scholastic works produced by Muslim scientists and scholars.  Modern globalization which started during the era of Western colonization of the East has now gone to every nook and cranny of the world. The usage of internet and other modern electronic media directly or indirectly has speeded up the process of transporting modern globalization to the world community. Modern globalization has brought about radical change in aims of education; it has marginalized local culture and language; it has caused brain drain everywhere in the world. Muslims, it seems, are perceiving globalization as identical to re-colonization. This paper intends to explore and investigate how modern globalization heralded by the west is different from Muslim globalization in the past.


2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 352-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ka Zeng

Abstract This paper examines US-China trade disputes under the World Trade Organization (WTO) and argues that Chinese leaders are increasingly resorting to the WTO’s dispute settlement mechanism to target issues of most critical concern to domestic constituencies. The following overview of the WTO disputes initiated by China suggests that China’s WTO disputes tend to be dominated by cases involving anti-dumping duties (ADs) and countervailing duties (CVDs). The disproportionate share of such trade remedy cases in China’s WTO cases needs to be viewed in light of the fact that China has become the leading target of such cases worldwide in the past decades. The above pattern of China’s WTO initiation is explicable within the leader cost-benefit analysis, which would lead us to expect Chinese leaders to use the WTO DSM either to open foreign markets for Chinese businesses or to shield domestic firms from perceived unfair foreign trade practices. This paper further argues that the significant expansion of bilateral trade relations in the past decades has provided opportunities for Chinese leaders to identify or threaten retaliation against anti-protectionist groups in the other country in order to mobilise them against the disputed measure.


Filomat ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (15) ◽  
pp. 4953-4966
Author(s):  
Ameer Khan ◽  
Shuai Li ◽  
Dechao Chen ◽  
Yangming Li

Open-Source has not only removed the monopoly of the few technological companies, but has also distributed the knowledge, at no cost. With knowledge moves on from person to person, and each person adds his/her contribution to the past work, a knowledge production chain keeps rolling, greatly reducing the effort to re-invent wheels. It allows the public availability of data and enables the addition, modification, and edition of data more efficiently at a faster pace. Robots, considered as a replacement of man-power are of meticulous interests for researchers in the past few decades. Their immunity to walk and talk more or less like a human is worth praising, but this radical change was not so obvious a decade or two ago before the wide propagation of open-source, the continuous spread of research work around the world allows the brilliant minds to add their pieces to incrementally growing joint efforts. It has revolutionized the robotics from the simple remote-control cars to the self-driven cars. This survey summarizes main stream open source projects emerging in recent years and expects to increase the exposure of existing open source projects and increase the popularity of them, with an intention to further reduce unnecessary effort to re-invent existing systems.


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