Search: crossing lines
06 Feb Response to Roger Alford
...between these two pieces of the story is reasonably clear. The “Goldilocks” part of the story explains why England had a good head start on the race to world power. The clever strategy, the five point plan, shows how the British and then the Americans managed to turn this initial head start into a long term lead. But there is another question. It is one thing to say that having an open society – here, a society eager and able to develop along liberal capitalist lines – is the first...12 Jul Charnovitz on NGOs
...legal scene. Continuity is the message. To the extent that there has been recent change, it is not in the way of a revolution but rather of a “reformation” – “a return to an earlier doctrine so as to clear away errors, such as the excessive state-centricity of positivist orthodoxy.” The piece makes the best case that can be made along those lines. It is rich in its documentation of the early and mid-twentieth century literature on NGOs (including in the first volume of the AJIL itself), for which purposes...30 Nov The Corrosive Risks of Lawless Leadership
...civilized. That was my duty as their leader . . . War gives the appearance of condoning almost everything, but men must live with their actions for a long time afterward. A leader has to help them understand that there are lines they must not cross. He is their link to normalcy, to order, to humanity. If the leader loses his own sense of propriety or shrinks from his duty, anything will be allowed . . . War is, at its very core, the absence of order; and the absence...15 Dec The Noble Lie and International Politics
...the answer is something along the lines of the limitations that law has to compel or induce states on issues of critical national importance. But, why would this issue, which is certainly not controversial to or disputed by most historians, constitute a sufficiently important issue that Turkey would be willing to jeopardize its EU accession talks? I’m reminded of the noble lie in Plato’s Republic, in which it is acknowledged that all states have their origins in brutality and blood, and therefore all states create national myths about their foundings...27 Jul R2P RIP? Let’s Hope Not
...States, it cuts across partisan lines and unites foreign policy idealists, liberals and conservatives, left and right. The Hoover Institution’s Tod Lindberg, for example, has joined forces for many years with such foreign policy liberals as Lee Feinstein and others to craft and advocate a US foreign policy supportive of the concept. Precisely because I am extremely supportive of R2P, I have always been concerned about the evolution of R2P as a legal concept at the United Nations because, in diplomatic developments there, it seemed to take steps backwards from...14 Apr Our Tax Dollars at Work
...order to drain the ink supply in company fax machines, inundating computers with e-mails causing them to crash, and tying up company phone lines to prevent legitimate calls. We can only pray that al-Qaida hasn’t obtained a copy of the Assessment. Should it ever decide to take a page from the eco-terrorists’ playbook — repurposing the cellphones it now knows we’re monitoring to prank call the Pentagon, for example — the damage to our national security could be incalculable. Keep up the good work, DHS! A weary nation thanks you...
17 Dec The Trump Administration’s Subversion of the State Department’s Human Rights Reporting (Part 2)
...issues were all absent or greatly reduced this year. Across the 2024 country reports, these once-standard topics were essentially collapsed into a few lines under the general “Security of the Person” heading and stripped of any real analysis. The gutting of these central categories of rights violations is of course deeply concerning—but even more troubling are the issues the Trump administration has chosen to elevate instead. Second, the focus has shifted to political priorities of the Trump administration, such as violence against white Afrikaners in South Africa and antisemitism. One...
20 Jan Geoengineering and the Use of Force
...within the current understanding of armed attack justifying self-defense, but as that threat begins to emerge more clearly, one can certainly anticipate that arguments will be made that it is close enough. To the extent that there is strong resistance to such efforts to relax the “armed attack” standard, scenarios such as explored here will tend to blur the lines between self-defense and such justifications as necessity and countermeasures. It is widely accepted that necessity cannot be invoked as a justification or defense for violating the prohibition on the use...
01 Mar Ecofeminism in Public International Law
...wealth. Sustainable development, thus, failed to question the core presumptions of the ‘dominant development model’. It was only in 1995, at the 4th United Nations Conference in Beijing that ‘women and environment’ were identified and given due importance as stakeholders in the contemporary world. International treaties on the lines of the Johannesburg Declaration imbibed gender issues as integral parts of all facets of Agenda 21, encouraging nation-states to first identify, then categorize and eventually resolve issues relating to women and the environment. The decades since have seen slow but consistent...
06 May Options for a Peace Settlement for Ukraine: Option Paper III – Weapons of Mass Destruction
...hostilities. The Role of this Issue in the Negotiations The Russian Federation has made several statements in various fora that Ukraine is attempting to obtain weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, nuclear) to be used against the Russian Federation and others (e.g. here, here and here). These allegations may be an aspect of the current negotiations between the Russian Federation and Ukraine that must be addressed to the satisfaction of both parties. There have been statements along the lines that the Russian Federation’s allegations are a “disinformation campaign”, the intention...