Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 174-188
Author(s):  
Mark S. Berlin
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
International Law ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Reform Processes ◽  
Human Rights Norms ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter summarizes the book’s findings and discuses their implications for research on atrocity justice, human rights, and international law. It highlights the importance of technocratic criminal law specialists in the spread of human rights norms and contrasts these actors with the types of civil society groups that receive much attention in the human rights literature. The chapter also discusses how the book’s findings complicate the narrative of the Cold War period as a time of “hibernation” for the advancement of international atrocity justice. Finally, the chapter highlights the importance of the book’s findings for understanding the domestication of international law more generally. The chapter then discusses how the book’s findings may generalize to explaining the spread of other legal norms that have been shown to be associated with improvements in human rights outcomes. It suggests a number of conditions under which the spread of legal norms will benefit from forms of technocratic legal borrowing inherent in large-scale reform processes.

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.

Unilateral Economic Sanctions, International Law, and Human Rights

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Idriss Jazairy
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Economic Sanctions ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
The West ◽  
Eventual Collapse ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
United Nations Charter

AbstractAs part of the roundtable “Economic Sanctions and Their Consequences,” this essay examines unilateral coercive measures. These types of sanctions are applied outside the scope of Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, and were developed and refined in the West in the context of the Cold War. Yet the eventual collapse of the Berlin Wall did not herald the demise of unilateral sanctions; much to the contrary. While there are no incontrovertible data on the extent of these measures, one can safely say that they target in some way a full quarter of humanity. In addition to being a major attack on the principle of self-determination, unilateral measures not only adversely affect the rights to international trade and to navigation but also the basic human rights of innocent civilians. The current deterioration of the situation, with the mutation of embargoes into blockades and impositions on third parties, is a threat to peace that needs to be upgraded in strategic concern.

Explaining the Criminalization of Atrocities

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-49
Author(s):  
Mark S. Berlin
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Professional Associations ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Rational Expression ◽  
Reform Processes ◽  
Technical Features ◽  
Human Rights Norms ◽  
Code Reform

This chapter presents a theory explaining why states criminalize atrocity offenses in national law. It identifies and theorizes two different pathways to criminalization: targeted legislation and wholesale criminal code reform. These two pathways result from the efforts of different actors with different motivations, and thus represent distinct behavioral logics. Drawing on research on commitment to human rights norms, this chapter argues that criminalization through targeted legislation reflects policymakers’ preferences over the use of violent abuse. Following Simmons, this explanation is referred to as the “rational expression thesis.” In contrast, criminalization though criminal code reform reflects the views of technocratic criminal code drafters over what features they deem to be important for a “modern” code. The book refers to this as the “technocratic legal borrowing thesis,” and it is the main focus of this chapter. The chapter draws on comparative law scholarship and research on professional communities in policymaking to argue that large-scale legal reform processes are a unique and potent opportunity for international legal norms to be incorporated into domestic institutions. It theorizes how these processes empower technocratic legal experts and motivate them to seek out emblematically “modern” norms. This pursuit leads experts to borrow legal ideas from their regional peers and leading transnational professional associations, and in the post-World War II era, such sources have often favored atrocity criminalization. In turn, the depoliticizing context of technocratic modernization helps paint atrocity provisions as merely technical features of a “modern” code, thus reducing government scrutiny of them and facilitating their ultimate approval.

scholarly journals Examining the ‘age of apology’: Insights from the Political Apology database

2021 ◽  
pp. 002234332110246
Author(s):  
Marieke Zoodsma ◽  
Juliette Schaafsma
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

It is often assumed that we are currently living in an ‘age of apology’, whereby countries increasingly seek to redress human rights violations by offering apologies. Although much has been written about why this may occur, the phenomenon itself has never been examined through a large-scale review of the apologies that have been offered. To fill this gap, we created a database of political apologies that have been offered for human rights violations across the world. We found 329 political apologies offered by 74 countries, and cross-nationally mapped and compared these apologies. Our data reveal that apologies have increasingly been offered since the end of the Cold War, and that this trend has accelerated in the last 20 years. They have been offered across the globe, be it that they seem to have been embraced by consolidated liberal democracies and by countries transitioning to liberal democracies in particular. Most apologies have been offered for human rights violations that were related to or took place in the context of a (civil) war, but there appears to be some selectivity as to the specific human rights violations that countries actually mention in the apologies. On average, it takes more than a generation before political apologies are offered.

scholarly journals The Case for Foreign Electoral Subversion

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cécile Fabre
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of ◽  
Democratic Elections ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractIt is widely alleged that President Putin's regime attempted to exercise influence on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It is known that its Soviet predecessors funded Western communist parties for decades as a means to undermine noncommunist regimes. Similarly, the United States has a long history of interfering in the institutions and elections of its Latin American neighbors, as well as (at the height of the Cold War) its European allies. More recently, many believe that, absent U.S.-driven assistance, the Democratic Opposition of Serbia would have lost the 2000 Yugoslavian presidential election to Slobodan Milošević. As those examples suggest, attempting to subvert the democratic elections of a putatively sovereign country is a time-honored way of bending the latter's domestic and foreign policy to one's will. In this paper, I focus on the state-sponsored, nonviolent, nonkinetic subversion of nationwide elections (for short, subversion) through campaign and party financing, tampering with electoral registers, and conducting disinformation campaigns about candidates. I argue that, under certain conditions and subject to certain constraints, subversion is pro tanto justified as a means to prevent or end large-scale human rights violations.

The International Rule of Law—Rise or Decline?—Approaching Current Foundational Challenges

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-30
Author(s):  
Heike Krieger ◽  
Georg Nolte
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Preliminary Assessment ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Public International Law ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
International Rule

The chapter undertakes a preliminary assessment of current developments of international law for the purpose of mapping the ground for a larger research project. The research project pursues the goal of determining whether public international law, as it has developed since the end of the Cold War, is continuing its progressive move towards a more human-rights- and multi-actor-oriented order, or whether we are seeing a renewed emphasis of more classical elements of international law. In this context the term ‘international rule of law’ is chosen to designate the more recent and ‘thicker’ understanding of international law. The chapter discusses how it can be determined whether this form of international law continues to unfold, and whether we are witnessing challenges to this order which could give rise to more fundamental reassessments.

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)

scholarly journals The Importance of Being Quasi-Democratic - the Domestication Of International Human Rights in American and Arab Politics

2007 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 317 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Mednicoff
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Regime Types ◽  
International Human ◽  
Human Rights Norms

The paper builds on a comparative treatment of the politics of contestation and incorporation of human rights law in the United States, Morocco and Tunisia to highlight the salience of international law's democratic legitimacy problems of popular representation and mobilization. The author shows that Morocco enjoyed the most sustained and broadest recent mobilisation of these cases in the domestic extension of international human rights norms. This finding suggests four conclusions. First, democratic legitimacy problems for international law are similar across more and less democratic regime types. Second, the democratic legitimacy problem allows states to use populist appeals to justify their internal deviations from international legal norms. Third, international human rights norms stand the best possibility of mitigating these legitimacy concerns and permeating domestic practice when they have a basis in a pattern of contestation that engages more than a narrow elite, and which might therefore be called quasidemocratic. Fourth, these points demonstrate the imperative of comparing the political processes for the domestic incorporation of international law across different spaces and regime types. 

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.

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