scholarly journals Good offices: grasping the place of law in conflict

Legal Studies ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 469-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aoife O'Donoghue

In the pantheon of approaches open to participants in the pacific settlement of disputes, good offices holds a noteworthy place. The evolution of good offices over the past century is concurrent with a trend of considerable transformation within international law, including – amongst other changes – a move away from a state-led legal order, including in good offices following the emergence of the heads of international organisations as its prime users, and a process of legalisation and specialisation within the subject that has entirely altered its character. These changes have led to a redefinition of good offices that stresses the actor carrying out the role above the form that it takes. To accompany these changes in practice, there is a need for a transformation in the legal analysis and definition of good offices. One potential option in achieving this end is Bell'slex pacificatoria. If good offices is to continue to play a significant role in the settlement of violent conflicts, a fully developed legal analysis is necessary to grasp both its historical development and its potential future role.

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-35
Author(s):  
Priju Varghese

Marriage is a topic that has been dealt by Hollywood since the beginning of motion pictures. Even though the subject of marriage seems to be banal, there is a wide diversity in how people lead their married lives. Factors such as culture, religion, education, and history have major influences on the perception and definition of marriage. Hollywood, which has always been deft to notice the evolution in marriage, has accurately portrayed them through the use of movies. Through this paper, the researcher intends to chart the development in the concept of marriage through cinema over the past century.


1920 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 26-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald F. Roxburgh

Every satisfactory definition of law implies a sanction. Some penalty must be imposed upon a law-breaker, to be exacted, in the last resort, by external power. Force, therefore, is vital to law as it is to war, though normally it plays a less obvious part. A felon who is brought up for trial, condemned, and sent to prison, is induced by force, or by the fear of force, to submit to the court and to punishment. The policeman and the warder are the instruments of external power by which he is constrained to obey.Force also supplies the most important incentive for securing obedience to law. It is true, as Maine pointed out, that for every man who keeps the law through conscious fear of punishment, there may be hundreds who do so as it were instinctively, and without a thought on the subject. But while this law-abiding spirit, which is characteristic of large sections of a modern community, owes its origin to a number of causes, perhaps the most potent of all has been the enforcement of law through long ages in the past.


2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lori A. Allen

AbstractThe conflict in Palestine has been the subject of numerous international investigative commissions over the past century. These have been dispatched by governments to determine the causes of violent conflicts and how to resolve them. Commissions both produce and reflect political epistemologies, the social processes and categories by which proof and evidence are produced and mobilized in political claim-making. Using archival and ethnographic sources, my analysis focuses on three investigative commissions: the King-Crane (1919), Anglo-American (1946), and Mitchell (2001) commissions. They reveal how “reading affect” has been a diagnostic of political worthiness. Through these investigations, Western colonial agents and “the international community” have given Palestinians false hope that discourse and reason were the appropriate and effective mode of politics. Rather than simply reason, however, what each required was maintenance of an impossible balance between the rational and the emotional. This essay explores the ways that affect as a diagnostic of political worthiness has worked as a technology of rule in imperial orders, and has served as an unspoken legitimating mechanism of domination.


2003 ◽  
Vol 93 (4) ◽  
pp. 267-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
L.V. Lainé ◽  
D.J. Wright

AbstractThe subterranean termites in the genus Reticulitermes have a complex and plastic life cycle, which has been the subject of a number of publications over the past century. Given the inherent difficulties in studying such cryptic, eusocial organisms it is not perhaps surprising that the literature on their biology has failed to reach a consensus. An overview of the literature is given, which is followed by a discussion of the various theories on the life cycle of Reticulitermes spp. A substantial proportion of the review focuses on the French literature, which constitutes the majority of the primary sources and can be difficult to access. There are many discrepancies in the literature in terms of the number of instars, the definition of workers and the question of whether they should be termed pseudergates or, potentially, an additional terminology used to differentiate between pseudergates and the true workers seen in the higher termites (Isoptera: Termitidae). It remains very difficult to compare publications as there is little conformity; a problem that is aggravated by a general absence of drawings of the relevant instars. Further work on the biology of Reticulitermes is clearly required. There is also a need for researchers to agree on a standard terminology for this genus. A glossary is provided for the various synonyms and definitions.


2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 377-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Karska ◽  
Karol Karski

Modern international law defines a very narrow definition of mercenarism. It does not include all aspects of this phenomenon as it was known and understood for centuries. At the same time the emergence of new forms of mercenary-related activities is observed. The terms ‘foreign fighters’ and ‘foreign terrorist fighters’ should be analysed in this context inter alia from a legal perspective. A question needs to be answered if those existing regulations relating to mercenaries can apply to these terms. It is also important to note how both mercenaries and their activities are perceived under international law. The international legal analysis of factual and legal measures undertaken by states towards foreign fighters and foreign terrorist fighters is also interesting. Frequently these activities concern not just the fighters alone but apply also to all of us. This requires us to look at them in the context of international human rights law. These issues are the subject of current works undertaken within the scope of international organisations. un Security Council adopted resolution 2170 (2014) and 2178 (2014) regarding foreign terrorist fighters. The un General Assembly and un Human Rights Council also tackle these issues. The activity of foreign fighters and foreign terrorist fighters on one side and the activities of the states in reaction to this activity on the other side are also monitored inter alia by the un Working Group on the use of mercenaries.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Sujit Sivasundaram

AbstractThe Pacific has often been invisible in global histories written in the UK. Yet it has consistently been a site for contemplating the past and the future, even among Britons cast on its shores. In this lecture, I reconsider a critical moment of globalisation and empire, the ‘age of revolutions’ at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth century, by journeying with European voyagers to the Pacific Ocean. The lecture will point to what this age meant for Pacific islanders, in social, political and cultural terms. It works with a definition of the Pacific's age of revolutions as a surge of indigeneity met by a counter-revolutionary imperialism. What was involved in undertaking a European voyage changed in this era, even as one important expedition was interrupted by news from revolutionary Europe. Yet more fundamentally vocabularies and practices of monarchy were consolidated by islanders across the Pacific. This was followed by the outworkings of counter-revolutionary imperialism through agreements of alliance and alleged cessation. Such an argument allows me, for instance, to place the 1806 wreck of the Port-au-Prince within the Pacific's age of revolutions. This was an English ship used to raid French and Spanish targets in the Pacific, but which was stripped of its guns, iron, gunpowder and carronades by Tongans. To chart the trajectory from revolution and islander agency on to violence and empire is to appreciate the unsettled paths that gave rise to our modern world. This view foregrounds people who inhabited and travelled through the earth's oceanic frontiers. It is a global history from a specific place in the oceanic south, on the opposite side of the planet to Europe.


Author(s):  
Evan Perlman

Although there are dozens of countries with present day border disputes, few have received such unrelenting international focus as Israel. Maps, cartography and geographic education support the developing doctrine of national boundaries that form collective national identity and ideology. Geographically, throughout the past century, the borders of Israel have become a melding of the phenomena of national identity with physical territory – also referred to as territorial socialization. My paper argues that Israel’s use of geographic description of borders specifically through cartography over time is an example of how boundaries are a powerful tool in the naturalization of ideology of Jewish Israelis. This argument is analyzed by examining historical and biblical cartography, territorial evolution, geography curriculum and textbooks, the Atlas of Israel and mental mapping by citizens. Varying portrayals of Israel’s historical, biblical, natural and political boundaries creates an ambiguous definition of Israel’s borders for citizens. In turn, this importantly shapes the present day religious and seculargeographies of the population of Israel as well as the political behaviours by the democratically representative Israeli government.


1975 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 137-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. M. Kennedy

Yet another survey of the much-traversed field of Anglo-German relations will seem to many historians of modern Europe to border on the realm of superfluity; probably no two countries have had their relationship to each other so frequently examined in the past century as Britain and Germany. Moreover, even if one restricted such a study to the British side alone, the sheer number of publications upon this topic, or upon only a section of it like the age of ‘appeasement’, is simply too great to allow a compression of existing knowledge into a narrative form that would be anything other than crude and sketchy. The following contribution therefore seeks neither to provide such a general survey, nor, by use of new and detailed archival materials, to concentrate upon a small segment of the history of British policy towards Germany in the period 1864–1939; but instead to consider throughout all these years a particular aspect, namely, the respective arguments of Germanophiles and Germanophobes in Britain and the connection between this dialogue and the more general ideological standpoints of both sides. In so doing, the author has produced a survey which remains embarrassingly summary in detail but does at least attempt to offer a fresh approach to the subject.


Glasnik prava ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-51
Author(s):  
Edina Kočan

The author presents a comparative legal analysis of the segments of construction law in Croatian and Slovenian law, with the aim of pointing out the differences that exist between them. Considering that this is a relatively new legal institute, which was somewhat earlier standardized in Slovenian law in relation to Croatian law, in the introductory exposition, a brief review was made of the occurrence of the construction law and the reasons for earlier non-regulation. The second part of the paper is dedicated to the stipulations of Act on ownership and Property Code of the Republic of Slovenia. This part refers to the conceptual definition of the construction law, in order to classify it in a certain broader unit, to which it belongs - genus proximum - searching for the closest relative, emphasizing the important characteristics that make it specific in relation to other property rights. In the third part of the paper, the author analyses the stipulations related to the subject of building rights, with reference to the dilemmas that exist in that sense, both in Croatian and Slovenian jurisprudence, as well as in the legal science of some other countries. The fourth part of the paper is dedicated to the stipulations that regulate the acquisition and duration of construction rights. Considering that derivative acquisition, among other things, characterizes the existence of bases and ways of acquisition, first possible bases of acquisition are presented, and then entry in appropriate public books as a way of acquiring this right and its duration. The concluding part of the paper summarizes the results of the analysis and evaluates the considered legal solutions, with the presentation of reasoned objections to the existing regulations, all with the aim of eventual amendment of the right to build in the legal systems in question.


Author(s):  
Juan E. Méndez ◽  
Andra Nicolescu

The legal definition of torture is not limited to pain and suffering inflicted during interrogation or as punishment. Other practices, like domestic violence and female genital mutilation, have gradually been incorporated into the definition of torture and other ill-treatment. The absolute prohibition of torture extends to practices justified on grounds of “medical necessity” or “therapeutic purpose,” but which nevertheless inflict pain crossing the requisite threshold of severity, including the denial of pain relief and legally available abortions, or practices affecting persons with psychosocial disabilities or suffering from drug addiction. This chapter illustrates the gray areas where health care and the prohibited infliction of pain collide, discussing the rapidly evolving legal definition of torture and concepts like legal capacity, consent, and medical necessity. It recognizes that international law on the subject is far from settled, especially with regard to standards enacted by the recent Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities.


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