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41972. Sundhya Pahuja. Decolonising International Law. Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. 303. £65.00. ISBN:9780521199032.
- Author:
- Muin Boase and Mansur Boase
- Publication Date:
- 08-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Abstract:
- The book under review, which was awarded an ASIL Certificate of Merit, critically examines international law in the period following decolonization. Engaging both legal history and philosophy, the gnawing question which motivates this work, and risks getting lost under the wealth of scholarship, is: ‘Why has international law failed the Third World?’. The author claims that in order to answer this question, we must trace how a development thesis has been universalized and expose the transformative dynamic of a new ruling rationality based on the twin concepts of development and economic growth. The outcome is a regulatory framework, universally applied, which has subsumed the creative promise of international law. The claim is not that international law has shifted the operation of power, but rather that international law has itself become a new mode of power. Despite affirming political equality, the Third World, by avowing economic backwardness, unwittingly endorsed a rhetoric of development and a separation of the economic from the political. Once institutionalized through the Bretton Woods Institutions and the United Nations respectively, this disembedding of economics from politics, which we know from Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944) can only ever be an illusion, has facilitated a new imperialism of international economic law in the national arena. The historical repercussions are well known: the ever-expanding reach of an international technical law positioned as superior to national law, intervening, often violently, to maintain an unfavourable and asymmetric status quo in the name of idealized economic, political, and social models that cast themselves as universal. This pattern is well documented in Anghie’s Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (2004). Anghie argues that the branding of the ‘other’ as uncivilized and particular does not emerge from universals, but rather animates their formation. International law, by this account, was motivated by a civilizing mission, which Anghie terms ‘the dynamic of difference’, and this dynamic endures under very distinctive styles of jurisprudence from 16th century naturalism to 19th century positivism to modern-day pragmatism predicated on an assumed initial consent. Pahuja looks at the most recent form of this dynamic, not so much regarding its consequences as the legal and philosophical reasons for its endurance and even stabilization into the present.
41973. Individual Contributions to Fault Lines of International Legitimacy
- Author:
- Ekaterina Yahyaoui Krivenko
- Publication Date:
- 08-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Abstract:
- Legitimacy has become a popular subject in international law and international relations in the last decade. If previously the issue of legitimacy was addressed only subsidiarily to other issues, today books and articles taking the issue of legitimacy as their main subject abound. The books under review illustrate this trend. They all address 'legitimacy', but approach the notion from different perspectives.
41974. National Courts and the International Rule of Law
- Author:
- Giuseppe Cataldi
- Publication Date:
- 08-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Abstract:
- The book under review concludes research on the practice of domestic courts begun by the author over 10 years ago as part of a project entitled International Law in Domestic Courts. As pointed out in the preface, international doctrine lacked a systematic analysis of the domestic judicial application of international law, one based not on a theorization of relations between domestic law and international law but on an accurate analysis of data emanating from the decisions of domestic courts.
41975. World Trade Law after Neoliberalism. Re-imagining the Global Economic Order.
- Author:
- Michael Fakhri
- Publication Date:
- 08-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Abstract:
- Accounts of trade law usually are written in a technical style or focus on the WTO's legitimacy. Nevertheless, an increasing number of scholars are asking theoretical questions regarding why WTO law is structured as it is and operates the way it does. Some look to political or economic theory to answer the question. Lang, like some others, focuses more on social dynamics.
41976. Freeing the Global Market: How to Boost the Economy by Curbing Regulatory Distortions
- Author:
- Shanker A. Singham
- Publication Date:
- 10-2012
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Abstract:
- The U.S. economy faces major challenges competing internationally. One of the most worrisome is the growing use in China and other advanced developing countries of anticompetitive market distortions (ACMDs)—including regulatory protection that privileges specific companies—which put foreign competitors at a disadvantage. ACMDs are government actions that give certain business interests artificial competitive advantages over their rivals, be they foreign or domestic, to the detriment of consumer welfare. These market distortions are especially damaging to the industries in which the United States enjoys the greatest comparative advantages, but they are also harmful to the long-term prosperity of developing economies and cost the global economy trillions of dollars. To combat ACMDs, the conventional trade policy approach of focusing on the The U.S. economy faces major challenges competing internationally. One of the most worrisome is the growing use in China and other advanced developing countries of anticompetitive market distortions (ACMDs)—including regulatory protection that privileges specific companies—which put foreign competitors at a disadvantage.1 ACMDs are government actions that give certain business interests artificial competitive advantages over their rivals, be they foreign or domestic, to the detriment of consumer welfare. These market distortions are especially damaging to the industries in which the United States enjoys the greatest comparative advantages, but they are also harmful to the long-term prosperity of developing economies and cost the global economy trillions of dollars.
- Topic:
- Economics, Emerging Markets, Globalization, International Trade and Finance, and Markets
- Political Geography:
- Russia, United States, China, India, and Brazil
41977. And Africa Will Shine Forth: A Statesman's Memoir
- Author:
- Jean Ping
- Publication Date:
- 08-2012
- Content Type:
- Book
- Institution:
- International Peace Institute
- Abstract:
- Everyone knows that Africa, cradle of humanity, land of the Pharaohs and human civilization, and vast reservoir of human and natural resources, is not doing well. She crosses the deepest crisis that has shaken her since the end of colonial times. The specter of chaos lurks everywhere. She is now seen as the continent of “collapsing states” and “zombie nations”; the continent of extreme poverty, misery, and injustice; the continent of horrors, of the Rwandan genocide and of the worst atrocities committed in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Darfur and elsewhere. This brutal reality has been, for quite some time now, analyzed by most observers and experts with certain fatalism, as testified by these book titles with pessimistic or even alarmist tones: “Black Africa Started on the Wrong Foot” (René Dumont), “Can Black Africa Take Off?” (Albert Meister); “And What If Africa Refused Development” (Axelle Kabou); “Africa Down” (Jacques Giri). By now, it is just a chorus of permanent lamentations about the “lost continent,” the “damned continent,” or the “cursed continent” whose past is not passing. And the rest of the world, which sees us as negligible, even contemptible (“all corrupt and all dictators,” they say), consider that henceforth, they no longer need us.
- Topic:
- Conflict Resolution, Security, Economics, Post Colonialism, Natural Resources, Fragile/Failed State, and Neoimperialism
- Political Geography:
- Kenya, Africa, Darfur, Liberia, and Sierra Leone
41978. Jean d'Aspremont. Formalism and the Sources of International Law. A Theory of the Ascertainment of Legal Rules. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. 266. £60. ISBN:9780199696314 Jörg Kammerhofer. Uncertainty in International Law. A Kelsenian Perspective. Oxon New York: Routledge, 2011. Pp. 288. £85. ISBN:9780415577847.
- Author:
- Mónica García-Salmones
- Publication Date:
- 08-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Abstract:
- The two books reviewed here invite international lawyers to mobilize. Jean D'Aspremont's Formalism calls for a renewal of the practice of formally ascertaining international legal rules. D'Aspremont attempts to develop a theory for this endeavour to be employed in an age of pluralized normativity. Essentially this theory is grounded in a social thesis with robust Hartian support. Jörg Kammerhofer's Uncertainty in International Law, for its part, argues in favour of a much more theoretical approach to international law, one that is normativist and, more specifically, Kelsenian. Both texts are original and challenging in their effort to draw our attention to new ways of thinking about form. In d'Aspremont's view, the most problematic aspect of the ascertainment of law is the absence of social consciousness in law-applying authorities. He views the absence of a subjective (community) commitment to formalism – that is a commitment to respect the necessity of legal boundaries – as more of an obstacle in the objective production of law than fragmentation. The remedy proposed for this problem is the elaboration of written linguistic indicators which ensure the identification of international legal acts – as distinct from informal mechanisms such as the intent of the law-maker. D'Aspremont regards the written linguistic indicators generally as more suitable to the reality of our times, where informal law-making procedures abound, but nevertheless the need to distinguish law from non-law remains. According to d'Aspremont, what is at stake in the issue of formalism is not just an elementary respect for the rule of law, but also the possibility of critique of international legal rules. Kammerhofer dissects important aspects of the positive international legal order: self-defence, customary international law, interpretation and modification, conflicts of norms, and the idea of a constitution, following Kelsen's Pure Theory. The author devotes the larger part of the book to showing the impossibility of avoiding uncertainty in current international law. The climax is reached in the last chapter with a call to rethink the need for the Grundnorm (Kelsen's famous basic norm) in international legal theory. As Kelsen famously put it, the cognition of a norm as norm, rather than as a psychological or sociologico-empirical reality, is possible only if the norm has a presupposed Grundnorm, because to deny the dichotomy of Is and Ought means to deny the nature of (international) norms. According to Kammerhofer we need, and will always need, to return to the Grundnorm. In essence – and here is the gist of Kammerhofer's formalism – this means to accept the distinction between reality and value. Kammerhofer's insight that the Grundnorm does nothing but restate the idea of normativity reveals his reading of Kelsen and, more generally, his familiarity with the Vienna School of Law. But rather than in taking the Vienna School further, his contribution lies in using some of the theories developed in that school to think about current positive international law. Formalism and the Sources of International Law and Uncertainty in International Law both consider that the rules which determine the law-making powers of any given authority have an existence autonomous from the actual relations of power. In that sense, they constitute useful texts for gaining insights into the latest developments in positivist international legal theory.
41979. Osama bin Laden is Dead
- Author:
- Gregory Shaffer
- Publication Date:
- 08-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Abstract:
- Osama bin Laden is dead. Killed by the Americans in Abbottabad, a garrison town in the night on a skillful raid, photographed dead, but without the pictures released, dumped at sea in debated accordance with debated scripture, from an un-debated carrier, it seems.
- Political Geography:
- America
41980. Editor's Note
- Author:
- Sikander Kiani and Michael Brannagan
- Publication Date:
- 03-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
- Institution:
- Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
- Abstract:
- No abstract is available.
- Topic:
- Politics and Non State Actors
- Political Geography:
- United Kingdom, Middle East, India, and Belgium