A Short History of Smuggling of Migrants in International Law

2021 ◽  
pp. 162-176
Author(s):  
Andreas Schloenhardt
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Security Threat ◽  
Short History ◽  
True Nature ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Migrant Smuggling ◽  
Relative Neglect ◽  
History Of

Andreas Schloenhardt describes how the turn to criminalization of migrant smuggling has to be seen against the background of the post-Cold War period and the clamp-down by Western states on smuggling across their borders, reconstructed now as a security threat. The fact that this criminalization remains in tension with the relative neglect of migrant’s human rights he argues, reveals the true nature of the Protocol as a suppression convention.

scholarly journals After International Law: Anthropology Beyond the “Age of Human Rights”

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 115 ◽  
pp. 289-293
Author(s):  
Mark Goodale
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Anthropological Research ◽  
Legal Strategies ◽  
The Cold War

This essay examines the ways in which anthropologists have tracked the rise and fall of international law after the end of the Cold War. It argues that anthropological research has made important contributions to the wider understanding of international law as a mechanism for social and political change, a framework for protecting vulnerable populations, and a language through which collective identities can be expressed and valorized. Yet, over time, international law has lost many of these expansive functions, a shift that anthropologists have also studied, although with greater reluctance and difficulty. The essay explains the ways in which particular categories of international law, such as human rights and international criminal justice, grew dramatically in importance and power during the 1990s and early 2000s, a shift whose complexities anthropologists studied at the local level. As the essay also explains, anthropological research began to detect a weakening in human rights implementation and respect for international legal norms, a countervailing shift that has broader implications for the possibilities for international cooperation and the resolution of conflicts, among others. At the same time, the retreat of international law from its highpoint in the early post-Cold War years has given way to the reemergence of non-legal strategies for advancing change and accounting for past injustices, including strategies based on social confrontation, moral shaming, and even violence.

Transformative occupation and the unilateralist impulse

2012 ◽  
Vol 94 (885) ◽  
pp. 237-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory H. Fox
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Critical Function ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Human Rights Treaties

AbstractThe 2003 occupation of Iraq ignited an important debate among scholars over the merits of transformative occupation. An occupier has traditionally been precluded from making substantial changes in the legal or political infrastructure of the state it controls. But the Iraq experience led some to claim that this ‘conservationist principle’ had been largely ignored in practice. Moreover, transformation was said to accord with a variety of important trends in contemporary international law, including the rebuilding of post-conflict states along liberal democratic lines, the extra-territorial application of human rights treaty obligations, and the decline of abstract conceptions of territorial sovereignty. This article argues that these claims are substantially overstated. The practice of Occupying Powers does not support the view that liberal democratic transformations are widespread. Human rights treaties have never been held to require states parties to legislate in the territories of other states. More importantly, the conservationist principle serves the critical function of limiting occupiers' unilateral appropriation of the subordinate state's legislative powers. Post-conflict transformation has indeed been a common feature of post-Cold War legal order, but it has been accomplished collectively, most often via Chapter VII of the UN Charter. To grant occupiers authority to reverse this trend by disclaiming any need for collective approval of ‘reforms’ in occupied states would be to validate an anachronistic unilateralism. It would run contrary to the multilateralization of all aspects of armed conflict, evident in areas well beyond post-conflict reconstruction.

Underpowered and Mostly Unwanted

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 61-76
Author(s):  
Jean Bou
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cold War ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Short History ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Official History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The United Nations

This chapter is a short history of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (unamir). It is based on an examination of the Australian deployment to Rwanda undertaken as part of the five-volume Official History of Australian Peacekeeping, Humanitarian and Post-Cold War Operations. The chapter briefly charts the establishment, travails, reduction, re-establishment and then demise of this UN mission. In doing so highlights how unamir was perpetually dogged by having mandates that, while they seemed suitable when they were created in New York, were quickly overtaken by events in Rwanda. Moreover, after the genocide, the recreated unamir was forced to attempt to police the very people and institutions it was reliant on for its continued survival if it was to carry out its mandate.

scholarly journals Introduction to the AJIL Unbound Symposium on Recognition of Governments and Customary International Law

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 108 ◽  
pp. 199-200
Author(s):  
James Gathii
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
The State ◽  
Effective Control ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Customary International Law ◽  
Regime Changes ◽  
State Practice

In the lead essay in this symposium, Professor Erika de Wet contends that notwithstanding all of the post-Cold War enthusiasm for a right to democratic governance and the non-recognition of governments resulting from coups and unconstitutional changes of government, a customary international law norm on the nonrecognition of governments established anti-democratically has not emerged. De Wet’s position, primarily based on state practice in Africa, is vigorously debated by six commentators.Jure Vidmar agrees with de Wet that the representative legitimacy of governments still lies primarily in effective control over the territory of the state. Vidmar, in his contribution, examines recent collective practice when neither the incumbent government nor the insurgents control the territory exclusively, arguing that in such cases states may apply human rights considerations. Like de Wet, however, Vidmar regards state practice as ambivalent and unamenable to ideal-type distinctions between coups (against a democratically legitimate government) and regime changes (to a democratically legitimate government).

Moving Into UNchartered Waters: An Emerging Right of Unilateral Humanitarian Intervention?

1999 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 759-786
Author(s):  
Steven Blockmans
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Prior Authorization ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Black Letter

With the black letter law of the UN Charter denying states to unilaterally intervene in third states on humanitarian grounds, this article tries to project a picture of the moral controversy of humanitarian intervention as a balance for order and justice. The author argues that some post-cold war armed interventions may be taken as evidence of an emerging rule of international law outside the UN Charter system allowing the use of unilateral humanitarian intervention to keep a third state from committing large-scale human rights violations on its own territory. However, in the absence of prior authorization from the relevant UN organs, it is necessary to address concerns of possible abuse and manipulations of such an emerging rule. The article includes recommendations to this end.To go to war for an idea, if the war is aggressive, not defensive, is as criminal as to go to war for territory or revenue; for it is as little justifiable to force our ideas on other people, as to compel them to submit to our will in any other respect. But there assuredly are cases in which it is allowable to go to war, without having been ourselves attacked, or threatened with attack; and it is very important that nations should make up their minds in time, as to what these cases are.John Stuart Mill, A Few Words on Non-Intervention (1859)

The Myth of Universality: The UNESCO “Philosophers’ Committee” and the Making of Human Rights

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (03) ◽  
pp. 596-617 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Goodale
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Development Policy ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
Alternative Interpretation ◽  
Cultural Narrative ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This article reexamines one of the most enduring questions in the history of human rights: the question of human rights universality. By the end of the first decade after the end of the Cold War, debates around the legitimacy and origins of human rights took on new urgency, as human rights emerged as an increasingly influential rubric in international law, transnational development policy, social activism, and ethical discourse. At stake in these debates was the fundamental status of human rights. Based in part on new archival research, this article offers an alternative interpretation of the rediscovery by scholars in the late 1990s of a 1947 UNESCO survey that purported to demonstrate the universality of human rights through empirical evidence. The article argues that this contested intellectual history reflects the enduring importance of the “myth of universality”—a key cultural narrative that we continue to use to find meaning across the long, dark night of history.

scholarly journals Vicarius Christi: Extraterritoriality, pastoral power, and the critique of secular international law

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Daniel Ricardo Quiroga-Villamarín
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Limited Range ◽  
The Other ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
The Past ◽  
Pastoral Power ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract Since the end of the Cold War, the content, scope, and extent of extraterritorial human rights obligations has become a pressing concern for international lawyers. On one end of the debate, mainstream scholarship argues that jurisdiction is primarily territorial, identifying a limited range of situations in which jurisdiction (and responsibility) is triggered. On the other end, critical scholars suggest that Empire still haunts jurisdiction. By reconstructing the history of this doctrine, they show that the imperial reach has always been extra-territorial and that the intimate linkage between state, territory, and population is of a rather recent and tenuous origin. In both of these narratives, however, lies the assumption that jurisdiction operates as a secularized power. Even if empires/states were once religious, faith’s legacy remains confined to the past. In this article, conversely, I trace a critical genealogy of Christian authority as a jurisdictional structure, in which territoriality was never presumed. After all, one cannot forget that Catholicism and Universalism were forged in the same etymological crucible. By drawing from Foucault’s analysis of pastoral power, I argue that international law has deep roots in Christianity’s claims of governmentality upon ‘men and souls’ instead of over defined territories.

‘Reflexiveness’ in archaeology, nationalism, and Europeanism

2000 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Gramsch
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
European Identity ◽  
Short History ◽  
Social Relevance ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Founding Myth

Abstract‘Reflexiveness’ is a term used for the growth of discussions in archaeology on its history, epistemology, and social relevance. While much of this reflecting refers to the relation of archaeology and nationalism, leading to insights into the politicisation of archaeological research and presentation to the public and the use of the past for ideological purposes, still we can witness many parallels to the use of prehistory for the creation of a European identity. After briefly commenting on discussions on different nationalisms and national and cultural identity, I will present a short history of ideas of Europe, followed by a consideration of two examples of the attempt to create the lacking founding myth of post-cold-war Europe. In the end, it is argued that a ‘Reflexive Theory’ should necessarily replace current rather politically motivated ‘reflexiveness’ and is needed to examine critically the Europeanist notion of European archaeology.

The 1993 World Conference on Human Rights and the retreat of a redistributive rights vision

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland Burke
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
World Conference ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Provisions

  The 1993 UN World Conference on Human Rights, the second held in the history of the UN, and the sequel to the 1968 conference in Tehran, was convened as the faith in the liberal democratic human rights order was renascent. Economic and social rights, one of the dominant notes of Tehran a quarter century earlier, were—in comparative terms—marginal to Western priorities. This paper draws on new archival research to assess the new equilibrium in post-Cold War human rights that emerged from Vienna. The interrelationship between political, civil, and legal freedoms, and economic and social provisions was pared down to mere exhortation. After the transnational ‘Breakthrough’ of human rights NGOs in the 1970s, almost everyone had begun to transliterate their cause to the language of human rights—but it had become a language which required the excision of economic radicalism as a prerequisite for drawing on its newly inflated moral currency.

International Law in the Historical Present Tense

2009 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 629-649 ◽  
Author(s):  
IGNACIO DE LA RASILLA DEL MORAL
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Editorial Policy ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Historical Turn ◽  
History Of ◽  
Background Material ◽  
History Of International Law

Since it is traditionally labelled the most neglected aspect of the field, different triggering factors might account for the so-called ‘historical turn’ in international law in the post-Cold War era. On the material side, the preconditions for professional work in this area have been met by a certain democratization of research brought about by the progressive incorporation of new technologies and a trendy rising demand for international lego-historically oriented work from the publishing side. The emergence of specialist journals, the consecration – as a matter of editorial policy – of special issues in reputed publications to key historical doctrinal figures of international law, and the appearance of a number of emblematic book-length works (which have, in their turn, contributed to feeding the industry of historical international legal commentary) feature both as cause and as nurturing ongoing effect of the contemporary ‘global surge of interest in the history of international law and its scholarship’. While admittedly receptive in its evolutionary dynamics to these favourable background material academic conditions, a number of intra-disciplinary rationales should be concomitantly examined so as to account for the accompanying scholarly spiritual drive that has made it possible that the history of international law might today claim a disciplinary status of its own.

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