The Politics of International Law

Author(s):  
Nicole Scicluna

This book is an introduction to international law for politics and international relations students. It provides a deep understanding of the possibilities and limits of international law as a tool for structuring relations in the world. The case study-driven approach helps students understand the complexities of international law, and illustrates the inextricable interaction between law and politics in the world today. In addition, it encourages students to question assumptions, such as whether international law is fit for purpose, and what that purpose is or ought to be. The book also discusses the potential of rising powers to shift the international system.

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Meryl Thiel

In response to Krasner's view, exclusively focused on geopolitical tensions and power games on the world stage, Keohane’s counter-multilateralism approach brings a solution: that of cooperation. The fact remains that the explanation delivered by international relations overlooks the fundamental role of law. Currently, the BRICS legal policy presents itself as a paradigmatic model, which shows how Krasner's and Keohane's theories complement one another, thanks to their targeted use of international law. This paper aims to demonstrate that the BRICS — in defining an innovative and independent legal policy influence normativity processes — are a post-hegemonic construction, with their own normativity, intended to fight against the organized hypocrisy of our international system. In view of the question of how the BRICS participate in the moralization of capitalism, I have considered the hypothesis of a BRICS hegemony, in the sense that the forms of cooperation promoted by the group are innovative and are not corresponding to any concept currently in force: the group uses WTO and WHO's health policies to curb world trade regulations. The main idea of this paper is to try to articulate the international relations theories with a legal analysis. In other words, my working assumption is that to be able to design its own normativity, the group diverts the WTO's political and legal mechanisms, via the WHO's health requirements, and is, therefore, rising as a new hegemonic formation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-71
Author(s):  
Devi Yusvitasari

A country needs to make contact with each other based on the national interests of each country related to each other, including among others economic, social, cultural, legal, political, and so on. With constant and continuous association between the nations of the world, it is one of the conditions for the existence of the international community. One form of cooperation between countries in the world is in the form of international relations by placing diplomatic representation in various countries. These representatives have diplomatic immunity and diplomatic immunity privileges that are in accordance with the jurisdiction of the recipient country and civil and criminal immunity for witnesses. The writing of the article entitled "The Application of the Principle of Non-Grata Persona to the Ambassador Judging from the Perspective of International Law" describes how the law on the abuse of diplomatic immunity, how a country's actions against abuse of diplomatic immunity and how to analyze a case of abuse of diplomatic immunity. To answer the problem used normative juridical methods through the use of secondary data, such as books, laws, and research results related to this research topic. Based on the results of the study explained that cases of violations of diplomatic relations related to the personal immunity of diplomatic officials such as cases such as cases of persecution by the Ambassador of Saudi Arabia to Indonesian Workers in Germany are of serious concern. The existence of diplomatic immunity is considered as protection so that perpetrators are not punished. Actions against the abuse of recipient countries of diplomatic immunity may expel or non-grata persona to diplomatic officials, which is stipulated in the Vienna Convention in 1961, because of the right of immunity attached to each diplomatic representative.


Author(s):  
Leonard V. Smith

We have long known that the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 “failed” in the sense that it did not prevent the outbreak of World War II. This book investigates not whether the conference succeeded or failed, but the historically specific international system it created. It explores the rules under which that system operated, and the kinds of states and empires that inhabited it. Deepening the dialogue between history and international relations theory makes it possible to think about sovereignty at the conference in new ways. Sovereignty in 1919 was about remaking “the world”—not just determining of answers demarcating the international system, but also the questions. Most histories of the Paris Peace Conference stop with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany on June 28, 1919. This book considers all five treaties produced by the conference as well as the Treaty of Lausanne with Turkey in 1923. It is organized not chronologically or geographically, but according to specific problems of sovereignty. A peace based on “justice” produced a criminalized Great Power in Germany, and a template problematically applied in the other treaties. The conference as sovereign sought to “unmix” lands and peoples in the defeated multinational empires by drawing boundaries and defining ethnicities. It sought less to oppose revolution than to instrumentalize it. The League of Nations, so often taken as the supreme symbol of the conference’s failure, is better considered as a continuation of the laboratory of sovereignty established in Paris.


Author(s):  
Harold A. Trinkunas

Latin America has long aspired for an interstate system based on the principles of nonintervention and adherence to international law. Over time, the region has become increasingly free of war, and interstate disputes are frequently settled via diplomacy or by international courts. But it has achieved a largely “negative” peace as peaceful relations in the region are neither the result of nor have produced deeper commercial integration, effective regional organizations, or epistemic security communities. This chapter examines realist, liberal, and constructivist explanations to explain the sources of peace and peaceful change in Latin America, as well as how structural changes in the international system have affected the region. In particular, it analyzes how Latin America’s relative weakness in terms of material capabilities has led it to rely on diplomacy, “soft balancing,” and norms entrepreneurship in international law to secure its interest in a progressively more peaceful and rule-bound international order.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Iqbal Baiquni

<div><p class="abstract">The case of espionage or spying by Australia against Indonesia is not the first time, but there have been several attempts of espionage against Indonesia. This espionage act is an act of secretly collecting intelligence data in international relations in a country. In this paper, we discuss the wiretapping case and its resolution. This paper uses normative legal research with a qualitative approach. This paper examines the chronology of cases of tapping by Australia against Indonesia, wiretapping in human rights and international law, as well as the final settlement of tensions between Indonesia and Australia through an agreement on the Code of Conduct to normalize bilateral relations between the two countries.</p></div>


Author(s):  
Dunoff Jeffrey L

This chapter describes the contours of the international law (IL) and international relations (IR) scholarship on international organizations (IOs), as well as some of its key characteristics and debates. It proceeds in three parts. Part I briefly surveys the major theoretical approaches to the creation and functions of IOs found in the IL and IR literature. Part II analyzes the most important conceptual debates that have occupied IO scholars in recent years, including debates over the autonomy, accountability, and legitimacy of IOs. Part III explores a cluster of policy dilemmas, including the political implications of institutional fragmentation, how to manage IO interactions, and why IOs increasingly seem unable to effectively address matters of pressing international concern.


Author(s):  
Louis René Beres

In principle, at least, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made his country’s acceptance of Palestinian statehood contingent upon prior Palestinian “demilitarization.” This expressed contingency, however, is potentially contrary to pertinent international law, especially those norms regarding any sovereign state’s peremptory rights to self-defense. It follows, as this article will clarify, that potentially a new Palestinian state could permissibly abrogate any pre-independence commitments it had once made to remain demilitarized, and that reciprocally Israel ought never base its related security expectations upon any such mutable diplomatic promises. Ultimately most important, as the article concludes, is that national leaders all over the world finally begin to take seriously the organic “oneness” of our world legal order, and accordingly look toward identifying some promisingly coherent replacements for our time-dishonored Realpolitik or “Westphalian” world system.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-179
Author(s):  
Daniel St. Pierre

Since the nonbinding Universal Declaration of Human Rights, states have created treaties and conventions to outline what is or is not acceptable regarding the treatment of human beings, with the understanding that if a state signs and ratifies these documents then that state will comply with the principles outlined within it.  Time and again however, compliance, or the lack thereof, has presented as a concern amongst many states, as well as non-state actors.  The issue of compliance is a serious one because it speaks to credibility.  If states do not anticipate compliance from one another it undermines the entire international system and any structure that has been created to address the anarchic nature of international relations will dissolve.  In order to make analysis of this massive issue area manageable, I focus on state compliance with human rights law and more specifically, compliance with the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention 1989, or C169.  Both Brazil and Argentina have signed and ratified C169 and both are democratic with indigenous populations.  Comparing these two states it allows us to better ascertain the circumstances under which states may comply with or defect from international human rights law.  I provide an overview on what rationalist theories suggest about compliance, followed by constructivist views.  I then outline my position before examining the results of the case study and assessing its’ impact as related to both theory and my arguments.  Ultimately, I find that notwithstanding ratification and well-developed democratic institutions that allow for a strong civil society to participate in politics, there are still circumstances wherein a state will defect from a human rights treaty because the gain of doing so outweighs the cost of non-compliance.


Author(s):  
Ralph Pettman

International relations (IR) is widely accepted as an academic discipline in its own right, despite the many subdisciplines which hold it together. These disparate subdisciplines, in fact, have come to define international relations as a whole. Establishing systematic matrices that describe and explain the discipline as a whole can show how the subdisciplines that constitute international relations have sufficient coherence to allow us to say that there is a discipline there. To look at the discipline otherwise would be viewing it as a mere collection of insights taken from other disciplines—in short, international relations could not be defined as a discipline at all. Such an argument forms a more heterodox view of international relations—one which does not attempt to engage with traditional debates about what constitutes the subject’s core as compared with its periphery. The “old” international relations was largely confined to politico-strategic issues to do with military strategy and diplomacy; that is, to discussions of peace and war, international organization, international governance, and international law. It was about states and the state system and little more. By contrast the “new” international relations is an all-inclusive account of how the world works. The underlying coherence of this account makes it possible to provide more comprehensive and more nuanced explanations of international relations.


2005 ◽  
Vol 87 (858) ◽  
pp. 269-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheikh Wahbeh al-Zuhili

AbstractThis article by an Islamic scholar describes the principles governing international law and international relations from an Islamic viewpoint. After presenting the rules and principles governing international relations in the Islamic system, the author emphasizes the principles of sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of other States and the aspiration of Islam to peace and harmony. He goes on to explain the relationship between Muslims and others in peacetime or in the event of war and the classical jurisprudential division of the world into the abode of Islam (dar al-islam) and that of war (dar al-harb). Lastly he outlines the restrictions imposed upon warfare by Islamic Shari'a law which have attained the status of legal rules.


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