International Territorial Administration and the Limits of Law

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 437-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
SIMON CHESTERMAN
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
State Building ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
East Timor ◽  
Independent State ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Timor Leste ◽  
Mandate System ◽  
Building Project ◽  
The Great War

The year 2009 was one of many anniversaries for the state-building project. It marked ten years since the United Nations began its bold experiments of state-building in East Timor and Kosovo, now the independent state of Timor-Leste and the embryonic Republic of Kosovo respectively. It was twenty years since Namibia held elections in the course of becoming independent, heralding a new post-Cold War activism. It was also ninety years since the League of Nations established the mandate system, which – even though it applied only to the colonies of enemy states defeated in the Great War – marked the beginning of the end of colonialism.

scholarly journals Status Seeking in the Steppe

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Contessi
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
External Action ◽  
State Building ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Independent State ◽  
Middle Power ◽  
Status Seeking ◽  
Building Project

In its 25 years of existence as an independent state, Kazakhstan has had to invent an entire foreign policy. The process was driven by multiple objectives, for a large part aimed at ensuring the success of the broader state-building project: the preservation of national sovereignty, political stability, economic growth, and taking on international responsibilities. This strategy, shaped at once by the nature of the political regime and the constraints of the regional system, was inspired by the convergence of economic, political, and geopolitical considerations. Taking stock of Kazakhstan’s external action, this article finds unexpected correspondence with the key tenets of middle power doctrine, pointing to a widely unacknowledged reading of the country’s external action.

scholarly journals Psychoanalyzing International Law(yers)

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 451-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Nicholson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
The Self ◽  
Lacanian Psychoanalysis ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
Alternative Future ◽  
Building Project

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.

scholarly journals The Dominion model of transitional constitutionalism

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 1283-1300
Author(s):  
Mara Malagodi ◽  
Luke McDonagh ◽  
Thomas Poole
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
British Empire ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Legal Basis ◽  
Political Transitions ◽  
Independent State ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Design And Practice ◽  
Transitional Constitutionalism

Abstract This symposium has explored New Dominion constitutionalism inductively and contextually, placing the phenomenon within a historically nested set of ideas and practices from the Old (Settler) Dominions, through the “Bridge Dominion” of Ireland, before giving detailed attention to the South Asian New Dominions of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The articles collectively form a basis from which to analyze the legal configuration of New Dominion status and its legacy by exploring links between New Dominion constitutional framing and post-independence design and practice. Building on the case studies, the principal contention of this summative contribution is that New Dominion constitutionalism should be understood as the first constitutional model of note designed to manage political transitions on a global scale. A product of the twilight of the British Empire, New Dominion constitutionalism represents a model for decolonizing nations and an important antecedent to later post-Cold War transitions. Both transitional and transnational, New Dominion status offered an interim frame of government for political transitions, the fuzzy center of which derived from Westminster-style conventions of political constitutionalism, as well as a template establishing the legal basis for constituting the fully independent state.

scholarly journals State Building Interventions in Post Cold War Period: A Critique of ‘Responsibility to Protect’ and ‘Humanitarianism’

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-103
Author(s):  
Shahida Aman
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Conflict Resolution ◽  
Human Security ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
State Building ◽  
State System ◽  
Responsibility To Protect ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Moral Ground ◽  
Major Powers

This paper explores the concepts of humanitarianism and responsibility to protect, which have most influentially guided state building interventions in the post Cold War period. With more than fifty states intervened in the guise of ‘responsibility to protect,’ this paper attempts to analyze why interventionist state building has developed as a major concern for the international state system. It further delves into the impacts of such interventionist rationale on the nature and functioning of the international state system. This paper argues the rise of sovereignty as responsibility and humanitarianism challenged the inviolable sovereignty of states by making it conditional on the government’s exercise of monopoly over violence within its territory and extension of protection to its citizens against war, crimes, violence and bloodshed. The paper further argues that the selective application of the principle of human security and non-intervention by major powers in crucial conflicts makes the moral ground of this principle very dubious. It also highlights that in post 9/11 period, the mixed successes of these concepts in practice, resulting form a large number of political, institutional and operational challenges, underlie the need to use non-military diplomatic, political and economic means for conflict resolution.

Scelle, Schmitt, Kelsen, Lauterpacht, and the Continuing Relevance of their Inter-War Debate on Normativity

2014 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Alexander Orakhelashvili
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
International System ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
Global History ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Major Powers ◽  
Major Significance ◽  
The Difference

The inter-war period of European and global history (1919–1939) fascinates by virtue of its uniqueness, the intensity of its developments, and the strategies of crisis managements it has witnessed within the League of Nations framework and beyond. The uniqueness of this period was mainly due to the fact that the identity and interests of major powers were split to a greater extent than held in common. In this time of major strategic and ideological divisions the uniform and consistent operation of positive international law as a major instrument for the preservation of peace was obviously challenged. The legal and political discourse of four major scholars of international law – Scelle, Schmitt, Kelsen and Lauterpacht – had to analytically tackle this challenge to the very viability of international law, the essence of its normativity, and its ability to make the difference in international affairs. As this contribution demonstrates, the complexity of this issue was not always given the similarly required complex attention, and grave implications followed both in legal and political terms. Viability of law in times of division is what requires that continuous attention is paid to the inter-war jurisprudential debate. The issues the four inter-war authors have focused upon retain their major significance in terms of the viability of international law in the post-Cold War international system. Three modern case-studies consequently illustrate the continuing relevance of the inter-war debate.

scholarly journals A genealogy of mediation in international relations: From ‘analogue’ to ‘digital’ forms of global justice or managed war?

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver P Richmond
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
International Mediation ◽  
Timor Leste ◽  
New States ◽  
Analogue To Digital ◽  
The Cold War

What does it mean to mediate in the contemporary world? During the Cold War, and since, various forms of international intervention have maintained a fragile strategic and territorially sovereign balance between states and their elite leaders, as in Cyprus or the Middle East, or built new states and inculcated new norms. In the post-Cold War era intervention and mediation shifted beyond the balance of power and towards the liberal peace, as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Timor Leste. In the case of Northern Ireland, identity, territorial sovereignty, and the nature of governance also began to be mediated, leading to hints of complex, post-liberal formulations. This article offers and evaluates a genealogy of the evolution of international mediation.

scholarly journals The Limits of Foreign Authority: Publicity and the Political Logic of Ambivalence in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina

2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 415-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Independent State ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Comparative Study

AbstractThis article explores the ambivalent forms of authority and legitimacy articulated by the Office of the High Representative of the international community in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. The High Representative exercised quasi-sovereign powers that placed his position at the center of two contradictions: a democratization paradox of “imposing democracy,” that is, promoting democracy through undemocratic means, and a state-building paradox of building an independent state by violating the principle of popular sovereignty. I analyze the Office's use of mass-mediated publicity to show how the High Representative sought to legitimize his actions in ways that both sustained the norms of democracy and statehood he advocated and suspended the contradictions behind how he promoted them. In doing so, he claimed that Bosnia was caught in a temporary state of exception to the normal nation-state order of things. This claim obliged him to show that he was working to end the state of exception. By focusing on one failed attempt by the OHR to orchestrate an enactment of “local ownership” that was aimed at demonstrating that Bosnia no longer required foreign supervision, this article identifies important limits to internationally instigated political transformation. It offers a view of international intervention that is more volatile, open-ended, and unpredictable than either the ordered representations of the technocratic vision or the confident assertions that critique international intervention as a form of (neo)imperial domination. It also demonstrates the analytic importance of publicity for the comparative study of international nation-building and democratization in the post-Cold War era.

scholarly journals Sergiu Musteață, Rolul anului 1991 în destinul Republicii Moldova / 1991: A Chronology of Moldova’s Independence

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-140
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Independent State ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Annus Mirabilis ◽  
Former Soviet Republics

The year 1991 proved to be crucial for the Soviet republics, including for Moldova, and in result of incremental democratic transformations and the collapse of the USSR, the Republic of Moldova became an independent state. The year 1991 was the common starting point of independence for most of Soviet Union republics. After the events of August 1991, most of the world believed that the collapse of the Soviet Union meant a departure from the totalitarian past for the former Soviet territories, but the reality proved to be different for most of the former Soviet republics. However, the transition from a totalitarian to a democratic regime proved to be different for each postSoviet state. If the 1989 year is considered the annus mirabilis or the collapse of a utopia, then the year 1991 is the beginning of the post-Cold War era. This paper highlights the most important events of the year 1991 and their impact on the Moldovan society.

Kurdish Politics in the Global Context

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serhun Al
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Engineering ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Independent State ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Political Opportunities ◽  
Nation States ◽  
American Hegemony

Kurds are considered to be one of the largest ethnic groups in the world—with a population of more than 30 million people—who do not have their own independent state. In the Middle East, they are the fourth largest ethnic group after Arabs, Persians, and Turks. The statelessness of such a major group with an increasing ethnic and national consciousness in the post-Ottoman world led to their traumatic insecurities in the hands of majority-led nation-states that used modern technologies of social engineering including displacement, dehumanization, assimilation, and genocidal acts throughout the 20th century. With the memory of such traumatic insecurities, the driving force of contemporary Kurdish nationalism in the Middle East has primarily been the question of state or state-like entities. Yet, Kurds are not a homogeneous group with a collective understanding of security and self-government. Rather, there are political-organizational rivalries within Kurds across Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran. Thus, it is important to understand the multifaceted Kurdish politics in the Middle East within a global-historical perspective where global power rivalries, regional geopolitics, and intra-Kurdish organizational competition are interwoven together. While the opportunities for Kurdish self-determination were missed in the early 20th century, resilient Kurdish political organizations emerged within the bipolar international context of the Cold War. The American hegemony in the post–Cold War era transformed the Kurdish political status in the geopolitics of the Middle East, where the 1991 Gulf War, the 2003 Iraq War, and the broader war on terror provided the Kurds with many political opportunities. Finally, the shifting regional and global alliances in the post–Arab Spring era—where the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has become the global nemesis—created new political opportunities as well as significant threats for the Kurds.

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