Nuclear Liability and Post-Fukushima Developments

The international community has developed a series of conventions on civil liability for nuclear damage, which aim to ensure compensation is available for damage, including transboundary damage, caused by a nuclear incident. Those conventions have struggled to gain universal adherence, and the “global regime” called for in 2011 is at best a patchwork quilt, with a number of treaties with differing memberships, and many States (including States with large and growing nuclear sectors) not party to any convention. However, the principles of the conventions are reflected in national laws in most States which operate nuclear power reactors and associated facilities. This chapter assesses the current global nuclear liability regime and discusses a series of recommendations made by the International Expert Group on Nuclear Liability (INLEX) to allow the international community to respond to the continued evolution of the nuclear industry.

Meanings of democracy: mapping lay perceptions on scholarly norms

I am grateful for the honor to write this comment because it gave me the opportunity to read this truly exquisite compilation of works collected under the editorship of Osterberg-Kaufmann, Stark and Mohamad-Klotzbach. The focus of the special section is on new frontiers in the empirical investigation of citizens’ subjective understandings of democracy. It is a methodologically and phenomenologically diverse, and yet thematically cohesive, assemblage of studies that comes at due time and in which the various pieces indeed speak to each other. The compendium covers a significant portion of the innovations going on in the field of measuring lay perceptions of democracy across cultures.To me, the key point is how lay perceptions of democracy map on scholarly norms and where and why mismatches between lay perceptions and scholarly norms exist and what the implications of such mismatches are in terms of global regime-culture coevolution. My comments to the individual articles in the special issue are framed within this broader question. I am phrasing my reflections in a more brainstorming manner, rather than systematically going through each contribution in a point-by-point style. For this reason, my discussion will not address each contribution equally but rather in terms of what I feel should loom large on our research agenda. In a nutshell, I am advocating a decidedlyculturaltheory of autocracy-vs-democracy—cultural in the sense that we need to triangulate people’s support for and their notions of democracy in the context of encultured values.

How global socio-technical regimes affect the success of low carbon innovation – The case of the industrial heat pump

This paper analyzes the impact of globalized industries on the diffusion of promising radical low carbon innovations. We do so by studying the interplay of global socio-technical regimes and technological innovation systems (TIS). Building on institutional theory, we develop a theoretical framework for TIS-regime interaction and apply it to the case of the industrial heat pump (IHP) in the Netherlands. Based on a qualitative, historical analysis over the past 30 years, we show how the heat pump TIS is at odds with the global process industry regime and identify several mechanisms through which the regime’s coercive, normative and mimetic institutional pressures influence TIS dynamics. We furthermore discuss how actors respond to and strategically deal with these pressures. We show that the institutionalization of a new logic in the global regime can outpace the rate of technological development of the radical innovation, causing it to become less attractive over time even though the technology’s performance increases. The paper thus provides a better understanding of the effects of global sectoral structures on radical low carbon innovation in particular places and industries. It offers valuable insights into the dynamics of sustainability transitions, especially in regard to the (limits to) effectiveness of policy interventions geared towards a particular TIS at the national level.

International Law and Regional Norm Smuggling: How the EU and ASEAN Redefined the Global Regime on Human Trafficking

The European Union (EU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have developed fundamentally different regional regimes to address human trafficking despite both drawing on the framework established by the U.N. Palermo Protocol. These regimes have been deployed to achieve different missions: crime control animates the European framework whereas migration management informs the ASEAN regime. These different regional agendas have led to all central elements of the respective antitrafficking regimes being addressed differently including, the legal authority of the regional regime over domestic legislation, the allocation of responsibility between “sending” and “receiving” countries, their approaches to subjects of human trafficking, and the connectedness of each antitrafficking instrument to the wider regional regimes. The two regional responses challenge general assumptions about the universality and coherence of the growing international legal framework on human trafficking.

1 A Global Regime for Investment

This chapter provides an overview of investment treaties. Investment treaties, often referred to as ‘international investment agreements’ (IIAs), are essentially instruments of international law by which states (1) make commitments to other states with respect to the treatment they will accord to investors and investments from those other states, and (2) agree to some mechanism for enforcement of those commitments. A fundamental purpose of investment treaties, as indicated by their titles, is to protect and promote investment. International investment treaties consist principally of three types: (1) bilateral investment treaties, commonly known as ‘BITs’; (2) bilateral economic agreements with investment provisions; and (3) other investment-related agreements involving more than two states. The chapter then considers the significance of investment treaties and argues that together they constitute an international regime for foreign investment.

Cultural Rights and Cultural Heritage as a Global Concern

This chapter considers the impact of anthropology on legal thought and practice in relation to cultural rights and cultural heritage at the global level. It examines the mainstreaming of cultural heritage and cultural rights by analysing the normative and operational activities of the international community through its institutions and instruments of global governance. The author argues that the impact of anthropology on the global regime of cultural rights and cultural heritage consists in the employment of anthropological knowledge and expertise in the practical operationalization of culture in international law and policy. In this regard, the chapter delves into the nature and consequences of this employment in relation to the two core aspects: the rhetorical and conceptual evolution of the notion of cultural heritage in international law, and the rise of cultural rights as collective rights. Accordingly, it scrutinizes various stages of the heritigization and anthropologization of both international human rights law and international cultural heritage law from the end of the Second World War to the present. The chapter concludes with an evaluation of the current legal avenues for addressing global challenges in the domains of cultural heritage and cultural rights, which points to the pressing need for more efficient modalities of global solidarity.

Shibboleth

In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign that winnows identities and establishes and confirms borders; it has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliché. The semantic field of shibboleth thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility—to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. In the context of an unending refugee crisis and a general displacement, monitoring and quarantining of populations within a global regime of technics, Paul Celan’s subtle yet fierce reorientation of shibboleth merits scrupulous reading. Building on Jacques Derrida’s Shibboleth: For Paul Celan, but following its own itinerary, this book interprets the episode in Judges together with texts by Celan, passages from William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!, and Doris Salcedo’s 2007 installation Shibboleth at the Tate Modern, pursuing the track of a word to which no language can properly lay claim—a word that is both less and more than a word, that signifies both the epitome and the ruin of border control technology, and that thus, despite its violent role in the Biblical story, offers Celan a locus of poetico-political affirmation.

Operations of power in autonomous weapon systems: ethical conditions and socio-political prospects

The purpose of this article is to provide a multi-perspective examination of one of the most important contemporary security issues: weaponized, and especially lethal, artificial intelligence. This technology is increasingly associated with the approaching dramatic change in the nature of warfare. What becomes particularly important and evermore intensely contested is how it becomes embedded with and concurrently impacts two social structures: ethics and law. While there has not been a global regime banning this technology, regulatory attempts at establishing a ban have intensified along with acts of resistance and blocking coalitions. This article aims to reflect on the prospects and limitations, as well as the ethical and legal intensity, of the emerging regulatory framework. To allow for such an investigation, a power-analytical approach to studying international security regimes is utilized.