International Law and International Order

1972 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 583-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hedley Bull
2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 205316802095678
Author(s):  
Melissa M. Lee ◽  
Lauren Prather

International law enforcement is an understudied but indispensable factor for maintaining the international order. We study the effectiveness of elite justifications in building coalitions supporting the enforcement of violations of the law against territorial seizures. Using survey experiments fielded in the USA and Australia, we find that the effectiveness of two common justifications for enforcement—the illegality of a country’s actions, and the consequences of those actions for international order—increase support for enforcement and do so independently of two key public values: ideology and interpersonal norm enforcement. These results imply elites can build a broad coalition of support by using multiple justifications. Our results, however, highlight the tepidness of public support, suggesting limits to elite rhetoric. This study contributes to the scholarship on international law by showing how the public, typically considered a mechanism for generating compliance within states, can impede or facilitate third-party enforcement of the law between states.


Author(s):  
Jörn Axel Kämmerer

The article is an introduction to subsequent articles touching upon the relevance of colonialism to the evolution of public international law. This was the topic of a transdisciplinary research project conducted by German scholars and of an international workshop, with this issue as a yield. Imperial colonialism may be perceived as a period of transition from a parallelism of mostly unconnected ‘trans-communitarian’ systems toward today’s universal international order. A paradox is inherent in decolonisation because the price of independence consisted in non-European systems being ultimately and definitely superseded by a public international law shaped almost exclusively by European powers. This ‘birth defect’ of universality explains many persisting tensions in international legal relations. It is worthwhile to assess whether public international law could draw some inspiration from approaches in the constitutional law of selected states with a colonial heritage in view of mitigating conflicts without, however, compromising the benefits inherent in universality.


The history of war is also a history of its justification. The contributions to this book argue that the justification of war rarely happens as empty propaganda. While it is directed at mobilizing support and reducing resistance, it is not purely instrumental. Rather, the justification of force is part of an incessant struggle over what is to count as justifiable behaviour in a given historical constellation of power, interests, and norms. This way, the justification of specific wars interacts with international order as a normative frame of reference for dealing with conflict. The justification of war shapes this order and is being shaped by it. As the justification of specific wars entails a critique of war in general, the use of force in international relations has always been accompanied by political and scholarly discourses on its appropriateness. In much of the pertinent literature the dominating focus is on theoretical or conceptual debates as a mirror of how international normative orders evolve. In contrast, the focus of the present volume is on theory and political practice as sources for the re- and de-construction of the way in which the justification of war and international order interact. The book offers a unique collection of papers exploring the continuities and changes in war discourses as they respond to and shape normative orders from early modern times to the present. It comprises contributions from International Law, History and International Relations and from Western and non-Western perspectives.


2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-104
Author(s):  
Shruti Rana

Abstract The Covid-19 pandemic and related shutdowns created seismic shifts in the boundaries between public and private life, with lasting implications for human rights and international law. Arriving just as the international legal order was wobbling in the wake of a populist backlash and other great challenges, the pandemic intensified fault lines of marginalisation and state action, amplifying the forces that had already left the liberal international order in crisis and retreat. This article examines the pandemic’s impacts on the international legal order through a gendered lens. It argues that in the short-term, the pandemic has reinforced public-private divides in international law, reinvigorating previous debates over the role of the state in protecting its people from harm. It argues that in the long-term, these developments threaten to unravel the most recent gains in international law and global governance that have supported and expanded the recognition of human rights to marginalised groups. Left unaddressed, this unraveling will further entrench such divides and contribute to the further retreat of the liberal international order. Examining these fault lines and their implications can help us re-imagine a post-pandemic international legal order that offers more protection for human rights, even as multilateral institutions and cooperation sputter or fail.


Author(s):  
Adom Getachew

This chapter sketches a political theory of decolonization that rethinks how anticolonial nationalism posed the problem of empire to expand our sense of its aims and trajectories. Drawing on recent histories of international law as well as the political thought of Black Atlantic worldmakers, it reconceives empire as processes of unequal international integration that took an increasingly racialized form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Confronted with a racialized international order, anticolonial nationalists turned to projects of worldmaking that would secure the conditions of international nondomination. It argues that attention to the specificity of political projects that emerged out of the legacy of imperialism provides a postcolonial approach to contemporary cosmopolitanism. A postcolonial cosmopolitanism entails a critical diagnosis of the persistence of empire and a normative orientation that retains the anti-imperial aspiration for a domination-free international order.


Author(s):  
Christopher Daase ◽  
Nicole Deitelhoff

The present chapter turns from the justification of war (the use of force) to the justification of coercion. It proceeds on the assumption that to stabilize the current international order requires less ‘legitimate force’ and more ‘legitimate coercion’ since in most institutions the enforcement of norms—as the very basis of order—does not only or even primarily rely on physical force but on various forms of political and economic coercion. The chapter distinguishes various forms of coercion and reconstructs debates in International Law and International Relations with regard to their legality, legitimacy, and effectiveness. Doing so, Christopher Daase and Nicole Deitelhoff intend to broaden the debate on world order by redirecting the focus from the use of force to the use of less violent coercive measures. Specifically, the chapter introduces a concept of sanction as a means of communicating normative expectations to the normative community rather than executing punishments.


Author(s):  
Nicole Scicluna

This chapter draws together the key themes of this book, using contemporary debates over the nature and future of international order, and explores likely sources of continuity and change in the politics of international law. It begins by expanding on the concept of international order and, more specifically, the so-called liberal international order that has framed international politics in the postwar period. The chapter asks whether and why the liberal international order is in crisis and how it is likely to evolve. It then turns to the rise of non-Western powers, a phenomenon that many observers have argued is contributing to the crisis of the current order. The focus is on what the changing balance of material power may reveal about the present and future of international law. Finally, the chapter offers some tentative conclusions about the politics of international law two decades into the twenty-first century.


2000 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 23-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Caplan

States have long taken exception to the notion of humanitarian intervention because it threatens to undermine a bedrock principle of international order: national sovereignty. In the case of Kosovo, however, NATO's nineteen member states chose not only to put aside their concerns for national sovereignty in favor of humanitarian considerations, but also to act without UN authorization. This essay examines the ways in which states – European states in particular – are rethinking historic prohibitions against humanitarian intervention in the wake of the Kosovo war. It focuses on two approaches:Efforts to reinterpret international law so as to demonstrate the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention andEfforts to build a political consensus regarding when and how states may use force for humanitarian endsWhile efforts to weaken prohibitions may succeed, thereby facilitating future interventions, resolution of the tension between legitimacy and effectiveness in defense of human rights will continue to elude the international community unless a political consensus can be achieved.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document