Global Rule Of Law Research Articles

The alien tort and the global rule of law

This paper traces the genealogy of legal developments regarding the expansion of civil jurisdiction for human rights abuses. It endeavours to illuminate the relation between these civil remedy developments in alien tort action and globalisation. It elucidates the dimensions of this development, implied by the transformations in substantive and procedural jurisdiction, as well as in legal personality, and subjectivity, reflecting upon the ways that these normative changes help to constitute global rule of law. It ends by concluding that, whatever their contribution, these transnational remedies are best conceived as complementary to the protections offered by state legal systems.

The Politics of Global Legalism and Human Security

This article argues that human security discourses and initiatives are made intelligible by the politics of applying legalism to global politics. Human security projects like the International Criminal Court, the Ottawa Treaty on landmines, and coercive interventions like Kosovo are shaped, mobilised, but also limited and constrained by the wider problematic of the legal constitution of global politics. Although human security has been the justification for efforts to liberalise and humanise politics through law, it has also been associated with exceptionalistic and non-universal legal relationships that reinforce the interests of the most dominant actors in global politics. As a result, human security runs the danger of becoming an instrument of hegemony. Nonetheless, the article also argues that there are always progressive political openings in the politics of a global rule of law that can facilitate a wider conception of human security than has been pursued since the mid-1990s.

Consequences of NATO intervention in Yugoslavia

The article shows that the Kosovo challenge is misrepresented, that fundamental geostrategic interests are hidden by the moral rhetoric securing NATO primacy in relation to the UN, creating a military machine that will be intervening around the globe, whenever it decides that it interests are threatened, redrawing the Balkan map, sending a message to all other potential violators of future NATO ultimatums. The local, regional and global consequences of NATO bombing are taken up from the standpoint of internal democratization, regional stability and the global rule of law. The author concludes that although it is in principle legitimate to defend citizens from the arbitrary use of force by their own state and prevent huge humanitarian catastrophes, in a situation when the character of global institutions and the distribution of global power remain unchanged arbitrary application of force, in these circumstances means only further extension of conditions for the violation of human rights, systematic creation of conditions for humanitarian catastrophes.