Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice lists “international custom, as evidence of a general practice accepted as law” as the second source of law to be used by the Court. In other words, customary international law (CIL) requires state practice and opinio juris, the belief that the practice is legally required. A basic principle of international law is that sovereign states must consent to be bound by international legal requirements. Therefore, for a norm to become CIL, a widespread group of states must consistently follow the norm and indicate, either explicitly or implicitly, that they consent to the norm. Consistent action is important in two ways: consistent state practice following the norm indicates state consent to be bound by the norm and consistent objection to the norm indicates that the state does not consent to the norm. To avoid being bound by a rule of CIL, a state must persistently object to the rule during and after its formation. Changing CIL requires new state practice and evidence that opinio juris supports the new, not the old, state practice. Debates surrounding state practice include the number of states required to demonstrate “widespread” action, whether the states must be representative of the community of states, and how long consistent practice must occur before CIL is formed. Opinio juris is debated because it is subjective unless there is a specific, official statement that there is a belief that the practice is legally required.
Once a state consents, implicitly or explicitly, to a CIL rule, it cannot withdraw that consent. States that gain independence after a CIL rule is established are bound by that rule if the former government was not a persistent objector. This is problematic, particularly for former colonies that were not able to object during the formation of existing CIL rules because they were not considered “sovereign states.” Scholars supporting this perspective argue that, prior to decolonization, CIL was used to control the colonies and, since their independence, it is used by the colonizers to maintain their power and perpetuate inequality.
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Customary International Law
Kathleen Barrett
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United Nations Peacekeeping and Civil Conflict
Timothy J. A. Passmore
UN peacekeeping serves as the foremost international tool for conflict intervention and peace management. Since the Cold War, these efforts have almost exclusively targeted conflicts within, rather than between, states. Where traditional peacekeeping missions sought to separate combatants and monitor peace processes across state borders, modern peacekeeping in civil wars involves a range of tasks from intervening directly in active conflicts to rebuilding political institutions and societies after the fighting ends. To accommodate this substantial change, peacekeeping operations have grown in number, size, and scope of mandate.
The increasing presence and changing nature of peacekeeping has sparked great interest in understanding when and how peacekeeping is used and how effective it is in delivering and sustaining peace. Significant advances in peacekeeping data collection have allowed for a more rigorous investigation of the phenomenon, including differentiation in the objectives, tasks, and structure of a mission as well as disaggregation of the activities and impact of peacekeepers’ presence across time and space. Researchers are particularly interested in understanding the adaption of peacekeeping to the unique challenges of the civil war setting, such as intervention in active conflicts, the greater involvement and victimization of civilians, the reintegration of rebel fighters into society, and the establishment of durable political, economic, and social institutions after the fighting ends. Additional inquiries consider why the UN deploys peacekeeping to some wars and not others, how and why operations differ from one another, and how the presence of and variation across missions impacts conflict countries before and after the fighting has stopped.
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The Role of Local Actors in Peacekeeping: The Cases of Liberia and Sierra Leone
Norman Sempijja and Ekeminiabasi Eyita-Okon
With the advent of multidimensional peacekeeping, in considering the changing nature of conflicts in the post–Cold War period, the role of local actors has become crucial to the execution of the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping mandate. Just as peacekeeping does not have space in the UN charter, local actors do not have a clearly defined space in the UN-led conflict resolution process. However, they have gained recognition, especially in policy work, and slowly in the academic discourse, as academics and practitioners have begun to find ways of making peacekeeping and peacebuilding more effective in the 21st century. Therefore the construction and perception of local actors by international arbitrators play an important and strategic role in creating and shaping space for the former to actively establish peace where violent conflict is imminent. Local actors have independently occupied spaces during and after the conflict, and although they bring a comparative advantage, especially as gatekeepers to local communities, they have largely been kept on the periphery.
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Peacekeeping Economies
Kathleen M. Jennings
“Peacekeeping economy” designates the political economy of a peacekeeping operation. It broadly encompasses economic activity that either would not occur, or would occur at a much lower scale and pay rate, without the international peacekeeping (or peacebuilding) presence. Peacekeeping economies are, to a significant degree, inextricable from peacekeeping missions: While they are not under the purview or direct control of the mission, the formal and informal economic activity that they include is important to peacekeeping missions’ ability to function in the host society. Of course, behind this simple formulation is a significantly more complex phenomenon. Moreover, the peacekeeping economy is not just an interesting empirical reality. It is also a useful analytical framework for examining and better understanding how peacekeeping is designed, regulated, and done; its socioeconomic, gendered, and racialized dimensions; and its (intended and unintended) consequences.
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Women’s Rights as Human Rights
Jutta Joachim
For centuries, women have been struggling for the recognition of their rights. Women’s rights are still being dismissed by United Nations (UN) human rights bodies and even governments, despite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex. It was not until the 1993 UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, Austria that states began to recognize women’s rights as human rights. However, this institutional change cannot solely be credited to the UN, but more importantly to the work of international women’s organizations. According to the social movement theory, these organizations have been permeating intergovernmental structures and, with the help of their constituents and experienced leaders, framing women’s rights as human rights in different ways throughout time. It is through mobilizing resources and seizing political opportunities that women’s rights activists rationalize how discrimination and exclusion resulted from gendered traditions, and that societal change is crucial in accepting women’s rights as fully human. But seeing as there are still oppositions to the issue of women’s rights as human rights, further research still needs to be conducted. Some possible venues for research include how well women’s rights as human rights travel across different institutions, violence against women, how and in what way women’s rights enhance human rights, and the changes that have taken place in mainstream human rights and specialized women’s rights institutions since the late 1980s as well as their impact.
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Human Dignity in International Relations
Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr.
The literature on dignity in international politics can be analytically evaluated based on three key themes: (a) historical, conceptual, and political underpinnings; (b) international law and global governance; and (c) the global political economy. Although discussions of human dignity within these three themes draw on varied disciplines (philosophy, political theory, political science, law, and history), they demonstrate a shared purpose in investigating the nature of human dignity and its implications to understanding individuals and political orders amid increasing global interdependence. Human rights scholarship has been a firmly established research agenda in international relations (IR) since the end of the Cold War, but the notion of human dignity has yet to gain traction as a key research topic on its own beyond its peripheral association with the human rights literature. Dignity may be a highly contested concept, but its mere invocation in policy and scholarly debates attracts so much moral appeal and intellectual curiosity. If the core normative task of IR research pertains to the improvement of the human condition (and its relationship to global humanity and the ecosystem), then human dignity should feature as a core object of analytic inquiry in the future.
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Researching Modern Economic Sanctions
Menevis Cilizoglu and Bryan R. Early
Economic sanctions are an integral part of states’ foreign policy repertoire. Increasingly, major powers and international organizations rely on sanctions to address an incredibly diverse array of issues—from fighting corruption to the prevention of nuclear weapons. How policy makers employ economic sanctions evolved over time, especially over the past two decades. The recognition of the adverse humanitarian impact of economic sanctions in the late 1990s and the “War on Terrorism” following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks have led to major changes in the design and enforcement patterns of economic sanctions. Academics’ understanding of how these coercive tools work, when they are utilized, what consequences they create, and when they succeed are still heavily shaped by research findings based on observations from the latter half of the 20th century. Insights based on past sanctions episodes may not fully apply to how sanctions policies are being currently used.
In the latter half of the 20th century, the majority of sanctions cases were initiated by the United States, targeted governments, and involved restrictions on international trade. In the last two decades, however, additional actors, such as the European Union, the United Nations, and China, have emerged as major senders. Modern sanctions now most commonly involve targeted and financial sanctions and are imposed against individuals, organizations, and firms. The changing nature of the senders, targets, stakeholders, and economic tools associated with sanctions policies have important implications for their enforcement, effectiveness, and consequences. The legal-regulatory and bureaucratic infrastructure needed to implement and enforce modern economic sanctions has also become far more robust. This evolution of modern sanctions has provided the scholarly community with plenty of opportunities to explore new questions about economic coercion and revisit old ones. The research agenda on economic sanctions must evolve to remain relevant in understanding why and how modern sanctions are used and what their consequences are.
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Human Rights: Effectiveness of International and Regional Mechanisms
Par Engstrom
The issue of human rights presents a dilemma for the discipline of international relations (IR) in general and the literature on international institutions in particular. Since international human rights institutions are primarily, but not exclusively, concerned with how states treat their own citizens, they seek to empower individual citizens and groups vis-à-vis their own governments. A major concern is whether such institutions make a difference for the protection and promotion of human rights. This concern has spawned a series of research questions and some major lines of enquiry. The study of human rights regimes has developed at the interface between IR and international law, along with the norms and practices of global human rights institutions. In addition, human rights has been institutionalized globally through the United Nations system and the connections between the development over time of international human rights institutions on the one hand, and their relative effectiveness in shaping human rights behavior on the other. The development and impact of international human rights law and policy have also been influenced by regionalism. While the research on human rights regimes has provided important insights into the role of institutions in narrowing the gap between the rhetoric and practice of human rights, there are crucial areas that need further scholarly attention, such as the domestic actors and institutions that act and could potentially act as “compliance constituencies” and conduits of domestic implementation linking international human rights norms to domestic political and legal institutions and actors.
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The Right to Health
Audrey R. Chapman
The right to health and health services is generally framed as the right to the highest attainable standard of health. Like other human rights, the right to health confers to all people specific entitlements and imposes duties on governments to protect and promote them. It reflects a broadened sense of governmental responsibility for the welfare of its citizens and a more inclusive understanding of human rights. All countries, including the United States, have ratified at least one binding human rights convention that includes a provision on the right to health. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations more than six decades ago, has given rise to a series of international human rights instruments that legally obligate states to implement their provisions. The two most important of these are the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Despite substantial progress, a number of issues still need to be addressed for the realization of the right to health, such as the lack of political commitment on the part of many states with regard to implementation and the weakness of the international human rights system. Furthermore, many states which have ratified international or regional human rights instruments that recognize a right to health or have relevant constitutional provisions still do not invest the necessary resources or apply human rights standards to the framing of health policies.
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UN, Gender, and Women
Soumita Basu
After the end of World War II, women’s rights advocates at the United Nations vigorously campaigned for equality between the sexes. At the UN Charter Conference held in San Francisco in 1945, women delegates fought for the recognition of sex-based discrimination as a violation of human rights in Article 1 of the Charter. At the UN, issues relating to women were primarily placed under the purview of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), established in June 1946 with the mandate to “prepare recommendations and report to the Economic and Social Council on promoting women’s rights in political, economic, civil, social and educational fields.” Three main perspectives underpin feminist International Relations (IR) literature on the UN, gender and women: promoting women’s participation and inclusion of women’s issues at the UN; gender critique of the UN, geared towards institutional transformation; and challenging the universality of the UN. Despite some fundamental differences between these three strands of thinking, their political significance is widely acknowledged in the literature. The co-existence of these contentious viewpoints resonates with the vibrant feminist politics at the UN, and offers a fruitful avenue for envisioning a better intergovernmental organization. This is particularly relevant in light of feminist scholars’ engagement with activism and policymaking at the UN from the very beginning. Nevertheless, there are issues that deserve further consideration, such as the workings of the UN, as reflected in its unique diplomatic characteristics and bureaucratic practices.
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Peace Operations
Paul D. Williams
Peace operations involve the expeditionary use of uniformed personnel (police and/or military) whose mission is to help secure “international peace and security.” In many ways, peace operations are the most visible activity of the United Nations with a mandate to deter armed conflict through preventive deployment or help to kick-start a peace process through peacemaking initiatives, among other purposes. Peace operations can be grouped into several categories, including preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping, post-conflict peacebuilding, and peace enforcement. There are three clusters of approaches that have tried to think conceptually about the relationship between peace operations and broader processes of global politics: global culture, critical theory, and cosmopolitanism. Questions of success and failure in peace operations have been tackled in the literature, which includes the UN’s own reports as well as books and articles appearing within a range of academic disciplines. Scholars have also analyzed the many challenges facing peace operations ranging from civilian protection and gender issues to public security and policing, privatization, intelligence provision, and state-building. Overcoming these challenges will require, at a minimum, new ways of thinking about the problems concerned, new ways of organizing the relevant institutions, and getting the would-be state-builders to allocate substantial resources. There are also some important questions that deserve greater attention; for example, what types of non-UN peace operations are most effective, under what conditions, and how they compare with UN operations, or how a world order can be constructed in which the peacekeepers have put themselves out of business.
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International Organizations and Preventing War
Martin S. Edwards and Jonathan M. DiCicco
International organizations (IOs) such as the United Nations play an important role in war prevention. In theory, IOs reduce the risk of war between belligerents by improving communication, facilitating cooperation, and building confidence and trust. In practice, however, IOs’ war-preventing capacities have sparked skepticism and criticism. Recent advances in the scholarly study of the causes of war have given rise to new and promising directions in research on IOs and war prevention. These studies highlight the problems of interstate and intrastate wars, global and regional organizations, preventive diplomacy and peacekeeping, and the relationship between IOs and domestic institutions. They also offer novel insights that both complement and challenge studies of traditional concepts such as collective security. An interesting work is that of J. D. Fearon, who frames war as a bargaining process between rational states. Fearon articulates a central puzzle of international relations: since war is costly, the question that arises is why rational leaders of competing states choose to fight instead of pursuing less costly, nonviolent dispute settlements. Three general mechanisms account for rational, unitary states’ inability to identify an alternative outcome that both would prefer to war: bluffing about private information, commitment problems, and indivisibility of stakes. Despite the obvious progress in research on IOs and war prevention, there remain methodological and theoretical issues that deserve consideration for further investigation, two of which are: the interaction of domestic and international organizations, and the implications of variations in IO design.
Article
The Right to Development
Daniel J. Whelan
The right to development is an internationally recognized human right that entitles every human person and all peoples to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural, civil, and political development. It is a right held both by individual human persons and all peoples. The right was enshrined in the Declaration on the Right to Development, adopted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in December 1986. It has since been reiterated as indivisible with all other human rights in scores of UN resolutions and summit outcome documents, most notably the 2030 Agenda for Development, adopted by consensus in 2015. The right to development entails a variety of obligations on states (at the domestic and international levels), regional actors, non-state actors (e.g., transnational corporations), and international organizations. Since 2019, the UN Human Rights Council’s Intergovernmental Working Group on the Right to Development has been discussing a draft Convention on the Right to Development to codify these obligations. Since it first came under discussion at the UN in the 1970s, the right to development has consistently generated debate and controversy among scholars and governments, which has frustrated the formation of a consensus around both conceptual issues (the nature and scope of such a right and how it is defined) and practical considerations (the extent of obligations, who holds them, and challenges of monitoring and implementation). There are those, especially (but not exclusively) in the Global South, who view the right to development as rightfully prioritizing the international duty to cooperate, which is a prerequisite for, first, the realization of economic, social, and cultural rights, and then of civil and political rights. This duty obligates developed countries to provide economic, technological, and other resources to developing states, free of conditionalities. In contrast, although generally agreeing that there are important “soft” obligations for development, skeptics, especially (but not exclusively) in the Global North, are wary of making such aid and assistance obligatory, and they are concerned that the right to development may be (or has been) used to justify curtailing especially civil and political rights in the name of “development.” They instead argue for a “human rights approach to development” that entails national-level commitments to good governance, transparency, accountability, and respect for all human rights in the development process.
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Human Rights and Foreign Policy Analysis
Shannon Lindsey Blanton and David L. Cingranelli
Foreign policy analysis emerged as a subfield ino the late 1950s and early 1960s, when scholars began to focus on substate factors and on the decision making process in evaluating foreign policy. It was during this time that the United States embarked on an effort to establish internationally recognized legal standards aimed at protecting individual human rights. The United Nations Charter and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR) made human rights promotion the responsibility of all member nations. But it was only in the late 1970s that human rights became an important component of quantitative foreign policy analysis. Numerous developments, including the Helsinki Accords of 1975 and the International Human Rights Covenants in 1976, helped elevate human rights concerns in the U.S. foreign policy making process. The scholarly literature on the subject revolves around three key issues: whether governments should make the promotion of human rights a goal of their foreign policies; whether the increasing use of human rights language in foreign policy rhetoric has been translated by the United States and other countries into public policies that have been consistent with that rhetoric; and whether the foreign policies of OECD governments actually have led to improved human rights practices in less economically developed countries. While scholars have produced a considerable amount of work that examines the various influences on the policy making process—whether at the individual, institutional, or societal levels of analysis—relatively few of them have focused on human rights perse.
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International Organization and Bureaucracy
James P. Muldoon Jr.
The evolution of international administration in theory and practice mirrors the pattern of development of international organizations and the institutionalization of governance for the international system, which can be divided into three time periods: 1815–1945, which marks the initial organization and bureaucratization of the international system; 1945–91, the period of rapid growth of international organizations and reconstitution of the international system that had been destroyed by World War II; and, 1991–present, which represents the end of the Cold War and a transformational moment for the international system as globalization and the technological revolution challenge the structure and function of international governance system. The bureaucratization of the international system is due to the effectiveness of this type of organization for administration and government on the national level. However, the structure and function of international administration is different from national administration. The bureaucracies of today’s international organizations reflect both the changes in the environment in which they observe and the nature of the issue areas they are tasked to manage. Meanwhile, the creation of the United Nations (UN) in 1945 marked the transition from the first stage to the second in the development of international organizations and the system of governance for a new international order. Finally, the end of the Cold War and the dramatic changes in the world’s political, economic, and social landscape brought about by globalization revived interest in international organizations, and the role that they would play in the “new” world order.
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Responding to Refugee and Humanitarian Crises
Daniel Warner and Georg von Kalckreuth
The term “refugee crisis” is used throughout the literature to refer to situations where large numbers of refugees or displaced persons more generally are present, whereas “humanitarian crisis” refers to situations where the lives, health, safety or well-being of a large number of people are at substantial risk. The term “complex emergency” is defined as “a humanitarian crisis typically characterized by extensive violence and loss of life, massive displacements of people, widespread damage to societies and economies, and hindrance of humanitarian assistance by security risks and political and military constraints.” A typical complex emergency consists of one or more humanitarian and refugee crises, regardless of their actual causes, and necessitates an international and United Nations system-wide response because of its complexity. Humanitarian and refugee crises have often generated international response efforts that were intended to help affected individuals, alleviate their suffering, and restore their situation from the plight of crisis to some level of normality. In addition to the UN and its specialized agencies, international responses bring together a large and diverse set of actors such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and its national societies, national and international nongovernmental organizations, and the governments of third states. Their responses have drawn scholarly interest, especially after World War II. However, the literature on international responses to humanitarian and refugee crises does not offer a comprehensive and exhaustive scholarly treatment of the issue. This is an obvious gap that needs to be addressed in future research.
Article
Model UN and Model EU Programs
Gretchen J. Van Dyke
The United Nations and the European Union are extraordinarily complex institutions that pose considerable challenges for international studies faculty who work to expose their students to the theoretical, conceptual, and factual material associated with both entities. One way that faculty across the academic spectrum are bringing the two institutions “alive” for their students is by utilizing in-class and multi-institutional simulations of both the UN and the EU. Model United Nations (MUN) and Model European Union simulations are experiential learning tools used by an ever-increasing number of students. The roots of Model UN simulations can be traced to the student-led Model League of Nations simulations that began at Harvard University in the 1920s. Current secondary school MUN offerings include two initiatives, Global Classrooms and the Montessori Model Union Nations (Montessori-MUN). Compared to the institutionalized MUNs, Model EU programs are relatively young. There are three long-standing, distinct, intercollegiate EU simulations in the United States: one in New York, one in the Mid-Atlantic region, and one in the Mid-West. As faculty continue to engage their students with Model UN and Model EU simulations, new scholarship is expected to continue documenting their experiences while emphasizing the value of active and experiential learning pedagogies. In addition, future research will highlight new technologies as critical tools in the Model UN and Model EU preparatory processes and offer quantitative data that supports well-established qualitative conclusions about the positive educational value of these simulations.
Article
Peacemaking, Peacekeeping, and Peacebuilding
Luc Reychler
Peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding have generated considerable interest in the areas of education, research, and politics. This can be attributed in part to the growing recognition that there are limits to violence and that proactive violence prevention is more cost-effective than reactive conflict prevention. Peacebuilding became part of the official discourse when the United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali introduced the concept of post-conflict peacebuilding in the Agenda for Peace. The agenda specified four areas of action relating to preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding. Two important documents have helped bring peacebuilding to the mainstream: the 2000 Brahimi Report, a response to the failures of complex UN peacekeeping in the 1990s, and In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights, which led to the establishment of the Peacebuilding Commission. Conflict prevention and peacebuilding have also been mainstreamed in the European Union and in most of the foreign offices of the member states. A central focus of studies on peacebuilding is the interrelationships between peacemaking, political change, development, peacekeeping, and reconciliation. Despite the progress made in terms of research, there are a number of gaps and challenges that still need to be addressed. Many analysts, for example, leave the end state vague and implicit and make no systematic differentiation between different types of peace. With respect to context, two salient issues require more attention: the qualities of a peacebuilder and the role of integrative power. The widest research gap is found in the planning of the peacebuilding process.
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Security Council Resolution 1325
Charlotte Graves Patton
Resolution 1325, adopted by the United Nations Security Council (SC) on October 31, 2000, reaffirms the important role of women in conflict resolution as well as in the maintenance and promotion of international peace and security. Res 1325 urges states to expand the number of women working in UN peacekeeping, diplomacy, the military, and police, while rejecting impunity in matters of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, especially with reference to violence against women. It also calls for greater consideration of the needs of women and girls in conflict circumstances, including in refugee camps, and the different needs of female and male ex-combatants in disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR). Transnational networks, such as the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace, and Security (NGOWGWPS), played an influential role in the drafting of Res 1325y. The implementation of this resolution throughout UN agencies may be assessed using two theoretical perspectives, constructivism and neorealism. The NGOWGWPS’s published report, Five Years On Report: From Local to Global: Making Peace Work for Women, describes National Action Plans (NAPs) as a tool that member states could use to detail steps that they will take to fulfill Res 1325’s objectives. It is worth noting that 37 out of 193 member countries of the UN have or are establishing NAPs. However, the UN has been slow to “adopt, consume, and promote” the norms embodied in SC Res 1325. One way to address this is to include changes in national foreign policies actively supporting such norms.
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International Law and the Responsibility to Protect
B. Welling Hall and Nadira Khudayberdieva
The notion of responsibility to protect (R2P) emerged as a legal challenge to what F. R. Teson called “the moral and legal enclosure of states.” The development of the R2P doctrine coincided with the surge in popularity of the democratic peace thesis, according to which the creation of a security community rests not on the existence of a common enemy, but on the “positive shared foundation of democracy and cooperation.” The R2P doctrine was developed by international lawyers in response to the failure of the international community to prevent or react effectively enough to the commission of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, Bosnia, Haiti, and elsewhere during the last decade of the 20th century and the first of the 21st century. Some scholars of international law argue that R2P reconceptualizes sovereignty as a legal construct and expands the international toolkit for the peaceful prevention of deadly conflict. The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) report, The Responsibility to Protect, lays emphasis on military intervention as a key component of R2P. Others, however, claim that R2P simply provides new, legal justifications for the use of force. International law scholarship on R2P is overwhelmingly dedicated to the question of when and how R2P might be invoked to support military intervention (jus ad bellum) and the relationship between R2P and international criminal tribunals (jus post bellum). One area that deserves attention from scholars is a “law instead of war,” or jus non bello.
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