Reform, Resist, Create

Author(s):  
Luis Cabrera

While there have been numerous recent analyses of the legitimacy of suprastate governance institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) or United Nations Security Council, few accounts have considered individual duties in relation to those institutions, broadly analogous to suprastate political obligation. Identified in this chapter are three categories of duties that should be salient to a range of institutions. These include duties to support their reform, to resist specific institutional features or practices, and to reject the continued operation of some institutions and support the creation of alternate ones. These duties would correspond roughly to how well an institution would appear to fit into a global institutional scheme that actually would fulfill cosmopolitan aims for rights promotion and protections and related global moral goods. An implication is that the current global system itself is a candidate for rejection, given its inherent tendencies toward the gross underfulfillment of individual rights.

Author(s):  
Simon Caney

In recent years, a number of powerful arguments have been given for thinking that there should be suprastate institutions, and that the current ones, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and United Nations Security Council, need to be radically reformed and new ones created. Two distinct kinds of argument have been advanced. One is instrumental and emphasizes the need for effective suprastate political institutions to realize some important substantive ideals (such as preventing dangerous climate change, eradicating poverty, promoting fair trade, and securing peace). The second is procedural and emphasizes the importance of political institutions that include all those subject to their power in as democratic a process as possible, and builds on this to call for democratically accountable international institutions. In this chapter, the author argues that the two approaches need not conflict, and that they can in fact lend support to each other.


Author(s):  
Grégoire Mallard

As the critical sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program demonstrate, the implementation of sanctions against nuclear proliferators has led to the creation of a global system of surveillance of the financial dealings of all states, banks, and individuals, fostered by United Nations Security Council resolutions—a new and unprecedented development. This chapter asks: Which actors have been in charge of designing and implementing sanctions against nuclear proliferators? Which legal technologies have they developed to regulate global financial transactions? Answering these questions generates a better understanding of key processes in global governance: the increasing role of the Security Council as a global legislator; the “financialization” of global regulation, with the increasing role played by international and US domestic financial institutions that were historically foreign to the field of nuclear nonproliferation; and the judicialization of the enforcement of sanctions, which is accompanied by the multiplication of secondary sanctions against sanctions-evaders.


2021 ◽  
pp. 119-142
Author(s):  
Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann

Legal history confirms that general interests of citizens can be protected most effectively through ‘democratic’ and ‘republican constitutionalism’ protecting constitutional rights and remedies of citizens and of their democratic and judicial institutions to hold governments accountable for providing public goods (PGs). Yet, the United Nations (UN), World Trade Organization (WTO), and related multilevel governance institutions do not effectively protect general interests and corresponding rights of citizens. The inadequate legal, democratic, and judicial accountability of intergovernmental power politics entails that – outside Europe’s multilevel ‘common market constitutionalism’ and ‘human rights constitutionalism’ – many governance institutions fail to protect transnational PGs effectively. This contribution explains why – even if ‘global democracy’ remains a utopia – today’s universal recognition of ‘inalienable’ human rights and of related constitutional principles requires re-interpreting the power-oriented ‘international law of states’ as multilevel governance of transnational PGs for the benefit of citizens and their constitutional rights.


2001 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 714-724
Author(s):  
Joe McMahon ◽  
Catherine Seville

This Journal's previous piece on current developments in EC intellectual property noted that this area of law is dominated by the drive towards harmonisation.1 This drive continues, and its success has been such that it can now begin to be seen in an overarching context of globalisation. The idea of a unified global system for the protection of intellectual property now seems at least conceivable, even if not immediately achievable. It is even possible to state that some stages have been achieved on the journey, most notably the TRIPs Agreement. Since adherence to this is a requirement of World Trade Organization (WTO) membership, the arguments in its favour have suddenly become “persuasive”. It represents a tremendous achievement in terms of the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights throughout the world. The World Intellectual Property Organisation's contribution here and elsewhere has been immense.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-331
Author(s):  
Laura J. Shepherd

AbstractPrevention is a central pillar of the ‘Women, Peace and Security’ agenda, a policy architecture governing gender and conflict that is anchored in a suite of United Nations Security Council resolutions adopted under the title of ‘Women and Peace and Security’. In this article, I argue that prevention is currently constituted within the WPS agenda in multiple ways, all of which are organised in accordance with different logics: a logic of peace; a logic of militarism; and a logic of security. This presents prevention as a paradox, because in operation it collapses back into a logic of security, even as it is constructed and positioned as security's temporal and conceptual other. I provide a close reading of the WPS resolutions and show how the articulations of prevention across the agenda, and in certain resolutions, operate according to logics of security and militarism. The significance of such an argument is twofold: it lies both in the possibility of reconstruction of prevention in the WPS agenda according to different logics, and in the potential of undoing security – as the manifestation of prevention in practice – in queer, feminist, decolonial, and posthuman ways of knowing and encountering the world.


1999 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis J. Halliday

The impact of the sanctions regime imposed on Iraq by the member states of the United Nations Security Council since 1990 has many facets. The horrifying human face of malnutrition and death has, quite rightly, been given greatest media and other exposure, but other forms of damage are also severely felt. This article intends briefly to explore some aspects of the impact in an attempt to show a somewhat wider picture of the sanctions catastrophe. While the catastrophe is a thing of the present, it has potentially lasting consequences for the future, not only for the Iraqi people, but for the peace and well-being of the Arab region and the world as a whole.


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