The ‘Question of Palestine’: From liminality to emancipation

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-127
Author(s):  
Victoria Mason
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Significant Potential ◽  
Inherent Vulnerability ◽  
State Of Affairs

AbstractWhile the gravity of the injustice and inequality experienced by Palestinians is now widely documented, evidenced, and acknowledged, when it comes to action the situation appears ‘impervious’ to international law and norms of global politics, with Israel largely enjoying impunity. This article argues that this state of affairs can be most coherently understood through a critical interdisciplinary emancipatory framework centred on ‘liminality’. Referring to situations and actors ‘betwixt and between’, the framework of liminality offers significant potential for understanding how particular actors and spaces are intentionally marginalised, disempowered, and silenced within global politics and international law. Furthermore, in revealing the root causes of liminality, and the inherent vulnerability of such spaces to contestation and subversion, the framework also opens up potential pathways of transformative emancipation. Applying the lens of liminality to Palestine, it is demonstrated that Palestinians have been deliberately corralled to a liminal space within international law and global politics in order to enable an expansionist Zionist/Israeli settler colonial enterprise. After exploring how Palestinian liminality manifests in global politics and international law, the article turns to a range of efforts to subvert Palestinian liminality and assesses prospects for a teleological emancipation for Palestinians.

Beyond Religious Freedom

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Religious Tolerance ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
Religious Difference ◽  
Power Difference ◽  
Ways Of Being

In recent years, North American and European nations have sought to legally remake religion in other countries through an unprecedented array of international initiatives. Policymakers have rallied around the notion that the fostering of religious freedom, interfaith dialogue, religious tolerance, and protections for religious minorities are the keys to combating persecution and discrimination. This book argues that these initiatives create the very social tensions and divisions they are meant to overcome. It looks at three critical channels of state-sponsored intervention: international religious freedom advocacy, development assistance and nation building, and international law. It shows how these initiatives make religious difference a matter of law, resulting in a divide that favors forms of religion authorized by those in power and excludes other ways of being and belonging. In exploring the dizzying power dynamics and blurred boundaries that characterize relations between “expert religion,” “governed religion,” and “lived religion,” the book charts new territory in the study of religion in global politics. The book provides new insights into today's most pressing dilemmas of power, difference, and governance.

The International Legal Personality of the Individual

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Astrid Kjeldgaard-Pedersen
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Legal Personality ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The Individual ◽  
International Legal Personality ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second World

This book scrutinizes the relationship between the concept of international legal personality as a theoretical construct and the position of the individual as a matter of positive international law. By testing four main theoretical conceptions of international legal personality against historical and existing international legal norms that govern individuals, the book argues that the common narrative about the development of the role of the individual in international law is flawed. Contrary to conventional wisdom, international law did not apply to States alone until the Second World War, only to transform during the second half of the twentieth century to include individuals as its subjects. Rather, the answer to the question of individual rights and obligations under international law is—and always was—solely contingent upon the interpretation of international legal norms. It follows, of course, that the entities governed by a particular norm tell us nothing about the legal system to which that norm belongs. Instead, the distinction between international and national legal norms turns exclusively on the nature of their respective sources. Against the background of these insights, the book shows how present-day international lawyers continue to allow an idea, which was never more than a scholarly invention of the nineteenth century, to influence the interpretation and application of contemporary international law. This state of affairs has significant real-world ramifications as international legal rights and obligations of individuals (and other non-State entities) are frequently applied more restrictively than interpretation without presumptions regarding ‘personality’ would merit.

Separatism in the Comoros: Some Legal Aspects

1998 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gino J. Naldi
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Legal Aspects ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Small Island ◽  
African Unity ◽  
Island State ◽  
Organization Of African Unity ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Small Island State ◽  
The Relationship

Since its founding in 1963, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) has placed special emphasis on the preservation of the territorial integrity of African states. It has actively contributed to the development of relevant rules of international law, such as that of uti possidetis. Its opposition to the fragmentation of states has been absolute. However, the small island state of Comoros has challenged this state of affairs. The seemingly successful secession of ‘Anjouan’ has threatened the cherished principles of the OAU. This article critically analyzes the relationship between the principles at the heart of the dispute, those of self-determination and uti possidetis, and concludes that there is no legal proscription on the secession of ‘Anjouan’.

scholarly journals Choice and (the Awareness of) its Consequences: The ICJ's “Structural Bias” Strikes Again in the Marshall Islands Case

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 81-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Bianchi
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Marshall Islands ◽  
Young Researcher ◽  
International Treaty ◽  
Rubber Stamp ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
State Of Affairs

My very first publication, admittedly written in a language that many AJIL Unbound readers might be unable or unwilling to read, was an essay on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and its effects vis-à-vis third parties. Already back then, I found it difficult to justify how an international treaty could rubber-stamp such a highly uneven state of affairs. The overt acknowledgement of the discrimination between nuclear and nonnuclear states, the hypocrisy about “unofficial” nuclear states, and the Article VI obligation for nuclear states to negotiate effective measures of disarmament, largely ignored in the first twenty years of the treaty, were all elements that contributed to my perception of unfairness, if not blatant injustice. As a young researcher approaching international law with the enthusiasm of the neophyte, however, this looked like a little anomaly in an otherwise fair and equitable international legal order. It did not set off warning bells about the system as such. After all, international law was geared, at least in my eyes, towards enhancing the wellbeing of humanity. It must have been so. And it is not that I leaned particularly on the idealistic side; it seemed normal to me … at the time.

Contingency in International Law

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
International Law ◽  
Present State ◽  
Foreign Investment ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Present Volume ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The Way

This volume asks a question that is deceptive in its simplicity: Could international law have been otherwise? In other words, what were the past possibilities, if any, for a different law? The search for contingency in international law is often motivated, including in the present volume, by the refusal to accept the present state of affairs and by the hope that recovering possibilities of the past will facilitate a different future. The volume situates the search for contingency theoretically and within many fields of international law, such as human rights and armed conflict, migrants and refugees, the sea and natural resources, and foreign investment and trade. Today there is hardly a serious account that would consider the path of international law to be necessary and that would deny the possibility of a different law altogether. At the same time, however, behind every possibility of the past stands a reason – or reasons – why the law developed as it did. Those who embark in search of contingency soon encounter tensions when they want to recover past possibilities without downplaying patterns of determination and domination. Nevertheless, while warring critical sensibilities may point in different directions, only a keen sense of why things turned out the way they did makes it possible to argue about how they could plausibly have turned out differently.

Resistance through Utopia: Reflections on the Niyamgiri Anti-Mining Movement and International Law

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 393-421
Author(s):  
Radhika Jagtap
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
International Law ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Supreme Court Of India ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Theoretical Assessment

There is some significance attached to the role that local-level collective action plays in reimagining global structures like international law. A theoretical assessment of this idea could be done through a merger between the utopian analysis of international law and critical approaches to the discipline which now identify categories like social movements as contemporary modes of transformation. Social movements like the ‘Save Niyamgiri’ movement in India could be seen as a local level catalyst for rethinking, restructuring, and resisting mainstream international law. The paper intends to place the Dongria peoples’ narratives as a utopia of resistance. This utopia is a collective of epistemologies that emanate from their imagination and spirituality, making critical statements on the global politics that favour dystopian versions of domestic and international law. The paper looks into the way the Dongria peoples’ imagination was received and recognised by institutions including the Supreme Court of India and other civil society actors which led to the successful internationalisation of the movement. It develops a sense of the need for international law to look into the local mobilisations surrounding anti-mining resistance and politics of forest rights and concludes with the contention that a transformation of international law also means the redefining of the human condition.

scholarly journals The liminality of Palestinian refugees: betwixt and between global politics and international law

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Mason
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Hegemonic Discourse ◽  
Palestinian Refugees ◽  
Refugee Law ◽  
Basic Rights ◽  
High Commissioner ◽  
Political Negotiation

Numbering over 5 million people, Palestinians comprise one of the longest-standing refugee populations in modern history. This article argues that the ongoing dispossession of Palestinian refugees is the result of the liminality they have been accorded within international law and global politics. This liminality includes Palestinians being the only refugee cohort not explicitly protected by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) mandate; and their right to return to their homeland – one of the most widely recognised basic rights under refugee law – occluded and reframed as a matter for political negotiation with Israel. The liminality of Palestinian refugees, this article demonstrates, results from the dominant narrative concerning the displacement of Palestinians from their homeland in 1947–8; the role this narrative plays in the hegemonic discourse shaping Israeli-Palestinian relations more widely; and how this narrative and wider discourse are mutually reproducing, resulting in significant intergenerational injustice for Palestinian refugees.

scholarly journals Of Broken Seals and Broken Promises: Attributing Intention at the IAEA

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Weichselbraun
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Nuclear Safeguards ◽  
Nuclear Facilities ◽  
Energy Agency ◽  
International Crisis ◽  
Negotiated Agreements ◽  
Binary Signal ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship

In the world of global politics, talk is cheap. States sign negotiated agreements, but a treaty without an enforcement mechanism is considered weak, because states are not expected to adhere to commitments whose materiality is merely that of ink and paper. To verify the terms of state commitments to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in 1970, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) nuclear safeguards inspectors place tamper-evident seals in nuclear facilities. While seals appear to work simply as a binary signal, their meanings are multivalent. This article draws on fieldwork at the IAEA, and on broken seals in Iran between 2004 and 2006 that escalated into an international crisis, to examine the relationship between the material properties of the seal and its signifying potentialities. Bringing the perspective of semiotic ontology to the question of materiality, this essay argues that seals constitute a semiotic infrastructure of nuclear governance that materializes international law.

scholarly journals HOW THE KOSOVO CASE CAN INFLUENCE A CURRENT UKRAINIAN CRISIS

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Vladislav B. Sotirovic
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Research Topic ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Ukrainian Crisis ◽  
A Current ◽  
Fundamental Conclusion

The research topic of this article is the “Ukrainian Question” in perspective of “Kosovo precedent” within the framework of the international law, international relations and global politics. The aim of the article is to investigate the possible solutions for the current Ukrainian political crisis through the prism of “Kosovo precedent”. The article is composed by five sections dealing with the Ukrainian identity, historical background of the Ukrainian statehood, the 2014 Euromaidan coup and the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis, “Kosovo precedent” and the “Ukrainian Question” and finally with the possible political solution of the current Ukrainian crisis founded on the example of “Kosovo precedent”. The fundamental conclusion of the research is that “Kosovo precedent” already serves and will further serve in the recent future as the foundation for the territorial decomposition of Ukraine by neighbouring Russia

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