The paradox of modern warfare is that while its legal boundaries became more tightly defined, its practice became ever more murderous. The expansion of international law coincided with the industrialisation of warfare and the development of total war. In this context, what makes for legitimate warfare today?
The political and humanitarian situation in Zimbabwe continues to cause great concern. This article considers whether R2P offers a framework for a national and, if necessary, an international response to the crisis. It is argued the UN has other diplomatic tools which could be more effective at this stage.
Last week, the National War Powers Commission published its report on how to fix war powers. The Commission notes that the War Powers Resolution of 1973 has been monumentally ineffective at resolving fundamental questions — both constitutional and political — of war powers.
There is some irony in the criticism of ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo for issuing his request for a warrant of arrest for Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir. The Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) was previously criticised for moving too slowly and for not targeting high levels of the government. How sensitive to a politics of consequence, then, should the Prosecutor be?
In this brief piece we will look at Kenya’s politics of displacement. Recent violence in this important East African country left over a thousand dead from police bullets, fires and machetes and around 600, 000 displaced. Whilst such violence reaches back into the colonial period, the combination of bad government and the revival of multi-party elections is also central.
In 1998, Jonathan Fox and David Brown found that a loose, interactive group of civil society actors and small numbers of Bank and donor officials, had provided the evidence, ideas and encouragement for donors such as the United States to pressure the World Bank to move away from environmentally and socially hazardous projects.
Paranoid and mistrustful of the outside world, Burma’s generals were criminally tardy in permitting emergency humanitarian supplies and personnel to come into the country after a devastating cyclone in early May. Yet attempts to invoke R2P were ill advised.
On May 27, John McCain took what appeared to be a strong stand in favor of nuclear arms control and disarmament. He argued that “it is our responsibility to build” a world in which there are “far fewer” nuclear weapons “than there are today.” Therefore, he said, “the time has come to take further measures to reduce dramatically the number of nuclear weapons in the world’s arsenals.”
In the spring of 1970, Canada unilaterally enacted legislation to regulate activities in the Arctic Ocean. While criticized as an attempt to assert ownership over what was then perceived to be international territory, the act signalled a bold willingness to prosecute polluters in the absence of sufficient rules of international law. Canada acted to protect the Arctic Ocean’s pristine nature for all of mankind. Today, retreating polar ice and the potential for extensive oil and gas reserves have renewed interest in the region, but for a far less altruistic motive.
Despite the common claim that China can’t be moved by international pressure from human rights or advocacy groups, the campaign to link genocide in Darfur to Beijing’s hosting of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games has thoroughly belied this notion. It is a campaign which must not give way to political expediency.
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