Going forward I need to remember that if I’m ever looking for a quick topic about which to blog, I just need to take a look at the latest developments from the UK on surveillance. First there was using ubiquitous surveillance to make art.  Now there’s surveillance imitating art… specifically The Minority Report, a short story by Philip K. Dick (and subsequently a film). As the Daily Mail explains:

CCTV [closed-circuit TV] cameras which can ‘predict’ if a crime is about to take place are being introduced on Britain’s streets.

The cameras can alert operators to suspicious behaviour, such as loitering and unusually slow walking. Anyone spotted could then have to explain their behaviour to a police officer.

The move has been compared to the Tom Cruise science-fiction film Minority Report, in which people are arrested before they commit planned offences.

(A hat tip to Futurismic for spotting this article.)

Further on, the article states:

Computers are programmed to analyse the movements of people or vehicles in the camera frame. If someone is seen lurking in a particular area, the computer will send out an alarm to a CCTV operator.

The operator will then check the image and – if concerned – ring the police. The aim is to stop crimes before they are committed. If a vehicle is moving too fast or slow – indicating joyriding or kerb-crawling, for example – a similar alert could be given.

Councillor Jason Fazackarley of Portsmouth Council said: ‘It’s the 21st century equivalent of a nightwatchman, but unlike a night-watchman it never blinks, it never takes a break and it never gets bored.’

Of course this is supposed to be reassuring and, as one commentor put it, she would not mind such a system if she was surrounded by a hostile street gang. She assumed that if she was out with a bunch of her female friends, she would not be similarly targeted. The underlying issue, of course, is which activities or groups look suspicious.

The main question, though, is whether or not this is inching toward a panopticon society…

While the attention of the international news is fixed on the Mumbai attacks, I just want to pause to note that there is a growing tide of sectarian violence in Nigeria, which has claimed another 300 lives in the past few days. The strife in Nigeria provides a window into the types of complex ongoing conflicts that combine ethnic tensions, religious disputes, and resource grabs. Moreover, as in the case of Nigeria, there may be multiple semi-independent conflicts within a single country. What, if anything, can international law contribute to resolving such conflicts…

Both pretty and pretty fascinating. See this post at Catholicgauze and this one at Gene Expression. Also, tdaxp relates this map to a deflation of Russian power.

Coming Anarchy has this post on the possibility of Greenland becoming an independent country, noting that

Greenland this week voted with a supermajority of more than 75% to receive greater autonomy from Denmark. This may even lead to independence for this enormous island of just 56,000 people.

For more on “arctic nationalism,” including recent events in the Faroe Islands, check out the posts at Coming Anarchy. (And, to pick up a line from CA, “What’s so bad about Denmark?”)

I just came across (a little late I’m afraid) this notice for a program that the Complex Terrain Lab had in London called “BattleSpaces: Feral Cities and the Scientific Way of Warfare.” The speakers were Geoff Manaugh of the excellent BLDGBLOG (he has a post on the event here) and Antoine Bousquet, lecturer on international relations at Birkbek College. The even description is intriguing:

Contemporary political discourse on armed violence and insecurity has been largely shaped by references to spatial knowledge, simulation, and control: “human terrain”, “urban clutter”, “terrorist sanctuaries”, “failed states”, “core-periphery”. The historical counterpoint to this is to be found in the key role the successive technologies of clock, engine, computer, and network have all played in spatializing the practice of warfare. In this context, what implications do “feral” Third World cities, “rogue” cities organized along non-Western ideas of urban space and infrastructure, and “wild” cities reclaimed by nature, have for the battlespaces of today and tomorrow?

Sounds like a combination of fourth generation warfare   and urban studies.  Hopefully, CTLab and BLDGBLOG will have further posts on this topic…

Edward Lucas has an essay in The Economist on political philosophy and the (r)evolution of central and eastern European politics centered on 1989. His essay begins:

They gripped the world, but left political philosophers yawning. According to Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher, the revolutions that overturned decades of totalitarian rule in central and eastern Europe in 1989 were marked by a “total lack of ideas that are either innovative or orientated towards the future”.

In a sense that was right. One of the most memorable images of the extraordinary “Velvet Revolution” in what was then Czechoslovakia in November 1989 was a map showing a ladder, reaching from the depths of central Europe up a cliff, to the heights of the western part of the continent. “Zpět do Evropy” it read: “Back to Europe”.

For millions of people behind the Iron Curtain, abstract political philosophy and grand schemes had brought nothing but trouble. Vaclav Havel, whom the revolution propelled into Prague Castle as president, said his dream was to live in a “small boring European country”.

But actually Mr Habermas is wrong: a revival of the spirit of 1989 is just what both old and new Europe need. A Czech-born scholar from Harvard, Paul Linden-Retek, has recently finished a fascinating philosophical comparison between Mr Habermas and Mr Havel…

The Linden-Retek paper is available in a link from here.

On behalf of all of us at Opinio Juris I would like to thank  Mary Ellen O’Connell having joined us this week in our second Oxford University Press/ Opinio Juris book symposium for a discussion of  her new book, The Power and Purpose of International Law. 

We would also like to thank Beth Simmons for joining us as a guest commentor.

Thanks also to everyone who posted comments and contributed to the dialogue.  We’ll post the details of our next book discussion soon.

In working through an explanation for the source of international law’s authority in the international community, Mary Ellen O’Connell describes the important role of positive law but also shows its limits. For example, it is very hard to imagine a serious contention that it is somehow possible to legalize genocide or slavery through the mere fact of enacting positive law. As Mary Ellen explains, there would be a general agreement that such laws—in whatever country they existed—would be invalid. In effect, they would be trumped by something prior to positive law. This is the realm of natural law or, to use a relatively recent synonym, jus cogens.

But, as Mary Ellen rightly notes in The Power and the Purpose,

The classic problem associated with natural law is, Who decides? How do we avoid the natural law answer being the subjective opinion of any one person—scholar, judge, world leader? Contemporary natural law theorists have responded to this problem, especially through the concept of the common good as an objective answer for natural law principles.

Mary Ellen, however, offers an additional explanation based on legal process theory.

I agree that a workable concept of natural law could bolster international law by defining a set of rules that were above and beyond the power of states. However, I am skeptical that such an enterprise is politically feasible beyond a very narrow set of rules (such as those mentioned in the first paragraph). In short, I am a natural law skeptic in all but a very few instances. Here are my reactions to Mary Ellen’s argument…

Even though my recent posts on the “frozen conflicts” have actually been on the not-so-frozen conflict in South Ossetia, we should not forget the ongoing situation in Moldova. In fact, the new issue of The Economist has a short piece reminding its readers of the ongoing Transnistrian separatist dispute. The quick update is this: while not as heated as the South Ossetian crisis, the conflict over Transnistria is mired in irresolution. However, the situation in Moldova may play an important part in stability in the region spanning from the Western shores of the Black Sea to the shores of the Caspian.

Regarding the current situation in Moldova, the Economist article begins…

Although the Russian invasion of Georgia this summer has receded from the front pages, it is nonetheless the topic of vigorous debate. At stake is not only how we frame our response to the situation in Georgia, but also how we view our ongoing relationship with Russia.

For example, Edward Lucas, the Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist has posted to his blog a sharp critique of the EU’s policy towards Russia, post Georgian conflict. The essay had originally appeared int he Sunday Telegraph. it begins:

So it is business as usual with Russia. And what a bad business it is. Britain’s decision to allow France to lead the European Union back into normal relations with Vladimir Putin’s ex-KGB regime in Russia is one of the most startling volte-faces in our country’s recent diplomatic history. It has left our allies in Eastern Europe – Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – aghast at our duplicity. “Our last European hope just —-ed us. We should have known. For we are but a small faraway country about which they know nothing,” a senior official in the region wrote in a despairing email after The Daily Telegraph broke the news on Friday.

European unity after the war in Georgia was never terribly impressive – a mild public rebuke and the suspension of talks on a new “partnership and co-operation agreement” until Russia met the conditions of the loosely worded truce brokered by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Russia has met some of those conditions – but not all. EU monitors are still unable to inspect the war zone properly. If they could, they would see evidence of ethnic cleansing in the two separatist enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. They would also see that Russia has increased its military presence. The message to the Kremlin is clear: you can invade a neighbouring country, threaten Europe’s energy supplies, and the EU will do nothing serious about it…

You can read the rest here.  Lucas’ analysis has been in the “new cold war” vein; that is, after all, the title of his book. While I am hopeful that we can manage our relationship with Russia so that we may be competitors but not enemies, I also think that Lucas is an insightful analyst who notices things than many others don’t (or at least notices them first…).

Some of the comments to his post (and his responses to them) are also very interesting. The crux of the critique of Lucas’s argument is the concern that the tide may be turning on the Georgian version of how the fighting began. For example…

On Monday through Wednesday next week, Mary Ellen O’Connell, the Robert and Marion Short Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame Law School, will join us to discuss her new book, The Power and Purpose of International Law.  We are also very pleased that Beth Simmons, the Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs in the Department of Government at Harvard University, will also join us for the conversation.

This book discussion will give us the opportunity to dig into issues of the enforcement of, and compliance to, international law, bringing together a consideration of some of the classic theorists as well as more contemporary debates. Here is a description of The Power and the Purpose from the OUP website:

The world is going through another important transition. International institutions have unquestionably been weakened as the United States works to sort through complicated issues such as the Afghan and Iraq wars, the use of torture and secret detention, Guantanamo, climate change, and nuclear proliferation. In recent memory, top Bush Administration advisers have spoken and written about the powerlessness of international law and its irrelevance-or worse-for the United States. The worldwide public needs and deserves a more accurate account. In The Power and Purpose of International Law , Mary Ellen O’Connor provides such an account by explaining the purpose of international law and the powers of enforcement it has available to achieve its mission…

Via Tom Barnett’s blog, I came across this essay by Jim Hoagland that was published last month in the Washington Post. Hoagland set out observations about the politicking at the World Policy Conference that was sponsored by the Institut Francais des Relations Internationales, a French think tank. What he saw has some interesting implications about the importance of soft power.

After setting the scene by describing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s attempts to drive a wedge between the U.S., on one side, and European and other states, on the other, Hoagland explained:

But as I listened to the freewheeling discussions, I wondered if the widespread obituaries being written for American power and all that it stands for might not turn out to be premature..

No, I’m not talking about how to do ubiquitous surveillance. Rather, I’m talking about how to take the product of massive video surveillance and turn it into, ahem, Art. (Well, maybe that’s only a small-a “art.”) Anyway, let’s say you’re an unsigned band from Manchester, England, and you want to make a video. You could hire some hip upstart video director, hire some models as extras, rent video cameras, lighting, props, etc. Or, well, you could just do this:

Unable to afford a proper camera crew and equipment, The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from the city, decided to make use of the cameras seen all over British streets.

With an estimated 13 million CCTV [closed circuit television] cameras in Britain, suitable locations were not hard to come by.

They set up their equipment, drum kit and all, in eighty locations around Manchester – including on a bus – and proceeded to play to the cameras.

Afterwards they wrote to the companies or organisations involved and asked for the footage under the Freedom of Information Act.

Those cheeky Brits. It seems that they are part of a broader group of artists using CCTV.  I guess the revolution will be televised, after all.  See the video after the jump:

Adding to the fortune-telling articles concerning the policies of the incoming Obama Adminstration, the Wall Street Journal states that the current adminsitration’s policies will go through the transition “largely intact.”  However, I think it is just too early to tell. The WSJ article begins…

In his recent post, Julian wrote that the secret U.S. military raids in Syria, Pakistan, and other countries may be (in his view) easily justifiable under U.S. law, but that the issue of legality

is much harder to answer as a matter of international law - indeed, it would have to be some theory of preemptive self-defense. Expect to see denunciations of these raids from international lawyers in the next few days, as well as from foreign governments on the list of countries named in the order.

I think Marko Milanovic and other commentors have done a good job looking at the international legal problems. For an argument concerning whether international law is evolving regarding the use of force in counter-terrorism activities, I would recommend Jose Alvarez’s Hegemonic International Law Revisited, 97 American Journal of International Law 873 (2003).

Moreover, for further perspective on the domestic legal and policy issues concerning anticipatory self-defense, I want to point to a recent op-ed in the Arizona Republic by Amos Guiora (a former Israeli Defense Force Lieutenant Colonel and a law professor) and Daniel C. Barr (a U.S. lawyer).  As I had mentioned in an earlier post, Guiora has been grappling in his scholarship with the issue of legal regulation of anticipatory self-defense both under U.S. and international law; this op-ed tries to rescue the idea of anticipatory self-defense from the excesses of the Bush Administration and argues for requiring participation of the other branches in decision-making. They wrote, in part…

This past September, I was a speaker at a conference on Law, Ethics and the War on Terror that was organized by Geoff Corn at the South Texas College of Law. The conference is now available as a video-stream. Part one is here and part two is here. The other panelists were incredibly impressive including senior military officials, prominent defense attorneys, and academics whom I admire. Their bios are available here. (This is the first conference I have attended where one of the other panelists is a graduate of Top Gun.) I learned a great deal at this symposium and, although (as far as I can tell) you cannot fast forward through the videos, I highly recommend watching them if you have the time.

As for what is on each video: part one includes the morning panel, “The Criminal Prosecution of Terrorists”, which has presentations by Jeanne Baker (“Terrorism” Is a Crime So Heinous That Even Innocence Is No Defense); Bobby Chesney (Terrorism and the Utility of Federal Criminal Prosecution); Col. Lawrence J. Morris (They Would Have Invented It: The Historical, Constitutional, and Practical Case for Military Commissions);Geoff Corn, Lt. Col. (ret.) (Have We Targeted the Offenses or the Defendants?); and Michael Lewis (The Military Costs and Benefits of a Criminal).The Q&A was moderated by Victor M. Hansen, Lt. Col. (ret.).

This is followed by the morning keynote by Fred L. Borch, Col. (ret.), who spoke on “The Historical Role of Military Lawyers in National Security Trials.”

The second video stream begins with the afternoon keynote, “The Ethical Dimension of National Security Legal Advice,” an address given by Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap, Jr.

This is followed by the afternoon panel (on which I spoke): “Has the United States Lost the Ethical High Ground in the War on Terror?” The panelists in order of presentation were John Hutson, Vice Adm. (ret.) (How America Could Actually Lose the War on Terror); Amos N. Guiora, Lt. Col. (ret.) (Freedom of Religion–Freedom from Religion); Richard Jackson, Col. (ret.) (Law of War in GWOT–Regaining the Moral High Ground); me (Hearts and Minds and Laws: Legal Compliance and Diplomatic Persuasion); and Eugene R. Fidell (The High Ground and the National Narrative). The Q&A was moderated by Walt Huffman, Maj. Gen. (ret.).

Those of us in the U.S. are off to the polls, so I thought we could try doing an open thread today for comments and suggestions to the new President, whoever that is, concerning America’s foreign policy, with a particular emphasis on international law.  Obviously there has been alot of talk about getting out of Iraq, putting a definitive end to torture and/or closing Guantanamo.  What else should the new Administration be thinking about in regards to international law? What advice do our readers/ bloggers have?

I’ll start things off with the first comment…

Today is Halloween in the U.S. and some kids will be going door to door dressed as norm entrepreneurs. Not that they will be dressed up as Nobel laureates (though some may…) but rather that many kids throughout the U.S. will take pasrt in reverse trick or treating, a project to increase awareness among Americans of forced child labor on many of the farms that provide cocoa to large chocolate manufacturers.

Kids participating in reverse trick or treating will distribute information cards about child labor in the cocoa industry at the houses they visit.  They will even give out samples of Fair Trade Certified chocolates. Hopefully, this project will not only educate the public but also help spur a shift to purchasing chocolate products that are not the result of abusive labor practices. The goal is to reach 250,000 households by the end of today.

I hope it works but I fully realize how difficult the process of norm diffusion can be. Because, although my kids (dressed as Asokha from the Clone Wars and the White Power Ranger) will be handing out Fair Trade cards and chocolate samples, in writing this I realize that I will be giving out some candy at home that has been made by the usual corporate suspects (as well as organic lollipops and pretzels, which have not).  I guess norm internalization must begin at home.

Francis Fukuyama, one of the leading intellectual lights of American conservatism, has endorsed Barack Obama in a short essay in the (aptly titled) magazine The American Conservative: 

I’m voting for Barack Obama this November for a very simple reason. It is hard to imagine a more disastrous presidency than that of George W. Bush. It was bad enough that he launched an unnecessary war and undermined the standing of the United States throughout the world in his first term. But in the waning days of his administration, he is presiding over a collapse of the American financial system and broader economy that will have consequences for years to come. As a general rule, democracies don’t work well if voters do not hold political parties accountable for failure. While John McCain is trying desperately to pretend that he never had anything to do with the Republican Party, I think it would a travesty to reward the Republicans for failure on such a grand scale.

McCain’s appeal was always that he could think for himself, but as the campaign has progressed, he has seemed simply erratic and hotheaded…

America has been living in a dream world for the past few years, losing its basic values of thrift and prudence and living far beyond its means, even as it has lectured the rest of the world to follow its model. At a time when the U.S. government has just nationalized a good part of the banking sector, we need to rethink a lot of the Reaganite verities of the past generation regarding taxes and regulation. Important as they were back in the 1980s and ’90s, they just won’t cut it for the period we are now entering. Obama is much better positioned to reinvent the American model and will certainly present a very different and more positive face of America to the rest of the world.

Hat tip: The Huffington Post

In honor of Ken, I wanted to post a quick heads-up to this post by Tom James at Futurismic, which has the excellent title “I, For One, Welcome Our New Robodog Overlords.”  Money quote:

According to Prof Steve Wright of Leeds Metropolitan University:

“What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is perfected we can reasonably anticipate that they will become autonomous and become armed.

We can also expect such systems to be equipped with human detection and tracking devices including sensors which detect human breath and the radio waves associated with a human heart beat. These are technologies already developed.”

I don’t have a Stendahl quote for this, so I’ll close with the opening from William Gibson’s Count Zero, a sci-fi novel from twenty years ago which may prove all-too-prescient in this instance:

They set a slamhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.

He didn’t see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.

[I have no idea what recrystallized hexogene is, but it sure sounds nasty.]