In association with the International Commission of Jurists

National Security Law

20 Sep

Paul Kennedy’s book on the history and future of the United Nations, Parliament of Man, appeared in 2006. A Spanish translation appeared in late 2007, which I review in a (very) long essay (some 10,000 words, be warned) appearing in Spanish in the Revista de Libros (Madrid), November 2008 issue. The Revista, for which I serve as political science advising editor is one of the best...

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11 Sep

I don't watch television, so I wouldn't actually know, but I take it there was some sort of dustup in a Sarah Palin ABC interview in which Governor Palin was asked about the so-called Bush Doctrine.  I don't know exactly what the discussion was about, but I did get an email from a friend a little while ago that said,...

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11 Sep

I hereby nominate all Kenyans for US citizenship: All 22 countries in a BBC World Service poll would prefer Democratic nominee Barack Obama elected US president instead of his Republican rival John McCain. Obama is preferred by a four to one margin on average across the 22,000 people polled. The margin in favour of Obama ranges from just 9 per cent in...

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07 Sep

On behalf of all of us at Opinio Juris I would like to thank Tom Farer for joining us this week in the first Oxford University Press/ Opinio Juris book symposium to discuss his new book Confronting Global Terrorism and American Neo-Conservatism: The Framework of a Liberal Grand Strategy. We would also like to thank Kristen Boon and Mark Shulman for joining us...

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07 Sep

Ken, since I have commitments most of today, I can answer only briefly and perhaps a little too abruptly, the surprising, even astonishing remarks in your last post, remarks so surprising, given their source, that I am wondering whether someone pretending to be you actually made the post. Let’s begin with the granular. In my post on the Israeli-Palestine conflict I...

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05 Sep

Colleagues, The pan of discourse is beginning to sizzle. A delightful sound. So rather than racing on to another main issue I attempt to address in my book, in this post I stop and engage with discussants. Let me start with Ken Anderson in part because his very interesting categorization of ways of thinking about strategy lubricates a segue to Mark...

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04 Sep

Tom Farer's 'Latin Americanization' thesis deserves comment; i.e. that recent anti-terrorism / Guantanamo  measures by the Bush administration are comparable to tactics that certain authoritarian Latin American regimes undertook, in that (i) states of emergency were proclaimed in conjunction with incursions on human rights, and that (ii) neither judicial nor congressional oversight effectively limited the executive's power. The analogy between the current US administration's behavior towards terrorism...

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04 Sep

Building on Tom Farer’s insights, my friend Chris Borgen asks if “what we have is more like a grid with varying degrees of multilateralism and unilateralism as well as degrees of interventionism and noninterventionism.” Chris’s grid helps to explain intervention, i.e. when and how to intervene.  He implies that policy is made to reflect and implement ideas about the relationships...

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04 Sep

I want first to qualify my statement in the last post that probably a majority of contemporary scholars and governments still cling to the position that the only legitimate uses of force are defense against armed attack and enforcement action authorized by the Security Council. In fact, particularly among European and American legal scholars and NATO governments there has grown...

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