Notion Of State Sovereignty Research Articles

Rights of nature, human species identity, and political thought in the anthropocene

While much has been written about the efforts in multiple jurisdictions to recognize nature and natural features as rightsholders, there has been relatively little research into the relationship of these Rights of Nature developments to the Anthropocene. This article uses historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument for the adoption of a human species identity in the Anthropocene as a jumping off point to analyze how legal rights for nature, such as those enacted in the Ecuador and New Zealand, can help address what Chakrabarty identifies as the challenges the Anthropocene presents to contemporary political thought. These pressing challenges include how to politicize relations between humans and non-humans, extend justice and the sphere of human morality to non-humans, cope with human limitations on our abilities to represent non-humans, and to initiate a withdrawal from a human-dominated world that is a common though uneven legacy of imperialism, capitalism, and globalization. The article argues that by providing responses to these challenges, Rights of Nature laws may also further the development of a human species identity. However, it also qualifies this conclusion in several important regards. First, the more expansive of these protections, embracing all of nature within political boundaries and relying on a remedial approach to justice and broad notions of representation in fact may hinder the adoption of the kind of species identity for which Chakrabarty has called. Second, as a cosmopolitan identity, this identity may be inhibited by continued circumscription of Rights of Nature by notions of state sovereignty.

POLITICAL DOWNLINE AND NCHINDAISM IN THE GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

The study focuses on the gambit of capitalism (political downline) and its relationship with the theory of Nchindaism. It provides an understanding to the exploitative mechanics of capitalists on the less developed and predicts the pendulum from Western controlled capitalism to military alliances where Western countries are elbowed from masters to actors and the possible collapse of the United Nations (UN). It targets: derivation, connotation, motives, manoeuvre/repercussions of capitalism, its drift, insight of Nchindaism & International Relations theories. The study is realised with primary, secondary and tertiary data under the ambit of qualitative methodology. Our findings reveal that the myth of None-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction and the abusive application of Veto Rights by the Big Five within the UN Security Council (UNSC) catalysed nuclear polarisation leading to the regress of Western capitalism and the emergence of ideological military alliances. It argues that as long as the notion of state sovereignty is built on mutual respect, equality and none-interference in internal affairs, state’s capabilities and defence mechanics shouldn’t face restrictions from others or organisations if it doesn’t deter human rights and welfare. It concludes that since the evolution of science is a free gift from nature and growth of the human mind, education on nuclear responsibility should take preference rather than the myth of limitation to its development or acquisition.

Lawmaking Under Pressure: International Humanitarian Law And Internal Armed Conflict by Giovanni Mantilla

Reviewed by: Lawmaking Under Pressure: International Humanitarian Law And Internal Armed Conflict by Giovanni Mantilla David P. Forsythe (bio) Giovanni Mantilla, Lawmaking Under Pressure: International Humanitarian Law And Internal Armed Conflict (Cornell U. Press, 2020), ISBN 9781501752582, 247 pages. Giovanni Mantilla, Assistant Professor at the University of Cambridge, takes up an important question in his 2020 book by Cornell University Press: why would states agree to extend international law to internal wars, thus agreeing to limits on their policy making in matters previously seen as internal and arguably protected from outside concern by the notion of state sovereignty? His concise answer is that law making is a political process, and states in a diplomatic conference find themselves under pressure to conform to the dominant views of the times. Not wanting to be isolated within the conference, or seen as generally uncooperative, they may well accept what they do not really believe in. Thus, to take a good example, Britain and France reluctantly endorsed Common Article Three (CA3) of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, establishing for the first time in written international law a set of obligations on fighting parties in non-international armed conflict. True, the Spanish civil war of 1936–1939 had manifested many atrocities, and this [End Page 835] furthered the humane concern about internal wars.1 But the British and French were worried about sovereign control of their colonies going forward from 1949 and realized that new rules on internal violence, or what they considered to be internal violence, might be burdensome.2 Yet they finally voted for the four treaties, including CA3, as they emerged from the diplomatic conference. Hence from 1949 the international law of armed conflict, or international humanitarian law (IHL), or the modern law of war, mandated a set of core protections for individuals in the frequent but ill-defined situation of internal war. CA3 is an important supplement to international human rights law, as both are concerned with human dignity. Both sets of norms are put to a challenging test in a conceptual zone of violence falling between domestic troubles and tensions on the one hand, and full international war on the other. His longer answer as to why states would legally limit their policy choices requires inquiring how one got to the point in 1949 of even examining the question of humanitarian law applied to internal war in a diplomatic conference. This requires an historical approach, which Mantilla provides in well researched detail. His concerns finally take him from 1949 to 1977, when another Geneva diplomatic conference on the laws of war adopted Additional Protocol Two (APII) to the 1949 Geneva Conventions on the subject of internal war. Again he finds that forum pressures and the prospect of political isolation contributed to the adoption of APII, with the approval of some states who were not convinced that much practical benefit was to be found in that instrument. The ebb and flow of international concern for the victims of internal war, which gets us to 1949 and 1977, is well traced by the author. If we pick up the story in 1864 with the first Geneva Convention for victims of international war, and the start of the International Red Cross (IRC) at about the same time, we find that the concern about internal political violence was quick to appear.3 The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which had started the IRC and pushed for (and actually drafted) the 1864 convention, was reluctant to move very fast on the subject of internal violence. Across time the organization proved conservative, fearful of damaging what had already been legally achieved, but which was not immune from collapse, and also fearful of encouraging (especially leftist) agitation against the established European states that were its chief donors and supporters.4 The result was a pattern of deferring to National RC Societies and letting them provide aid to the insurgent side as well as the government side if they were so inclined.5 Things began to shift a little in 1912 when the American Red Cross, not the ICRC, proposed to the International RC [End Page 836] Conference of that year that RC members provide relief in...

The Relationship between International Humanitarian Law and the Notion of State Sovereignty

This article explores the relationship between the laws of armed conflict, or international humanitarian law (IHL), and the international legal concept of State sovereignty. Historically, only wars between sovereign States were subject to regulation by the laws of war. From the 19th century onwards, States agreed upon a significant number of IHL treaties and in 1949, despite calls upon sovereignty, they accepted that international law can also regulate non-international armed conflicts by extending a limited part of the IHL rules to this type of conflict. Since then, through the formation of customary international law and, in part, as result of new treaties, it has been accepted that the majority of IHL rules have become applicable to armed conflicts of a non-international character. In addition, international institutions have been set up to prosecute individuals for serious violations of IHL. The author discusses how IHL and sovereignty have influenced each other’s development. The analysis shows that the development of IHL must not be seen as limiting State sovereignty, but rather ought to be regarded as a manifestation of sovereignty, expressed through the formation of this branch of international law by its core subjects: States. At the same time, as a result of the increased reliance on means other than treaties for clarification and development of IHL, the role of States has become more limited; it is reduced to either accepting or rejecting the prospective developments of IHL and any consequential impact on their sovereignty.

Frontier Cities: The Rise of Local Authorities as an Opportunity for International Human Rights Law

The growing influence and self-confidence of local authorities count among the most interesting recent phenomena in global governance. While not entirely oblivious, international law as a field has struggled to get ahead of this dynamic, focusing instead on how to integrate local authorities into static conventional frameworks firmly based on the notion of state sovereignty. However, as a discussion of the global state of affairs and a focus on human rights cities shows, local actors increasingly claim and obtain a key role in the realization of international law. Additionally, they hold important potential to address some of the most pressing challenges to international human rights law concerning its efficacy and legitimacy. This article therefore calls for a proactive approach to the study of local authorities that considers local authorities as a ‘new frontier’ in international law generally and in human rights law specifically. It proposes a critical research agenda for this purpose that could produce important new insights into (i) the continued relevance and legitimacy of human rights as a discourse of governance; (ii) the bearing of domestic constitutional arrangements on the implementation of human rights law and (iii) questions of, and possible shifts in, legal subjecthood in the contexts of ‘state failure’.

The Relationship between International Humanitarian Law and the Notion of State Sovereignty

This article explores the relationship between international humanitarian law (IHL) and the State sovereignty. Historically, only wars between sovereign States were subject to regulation by the laws of war. From the 19th century onwards, States agreed upon a significant number of IHL treaties and in 1949, despite calls upon sovereignty, they accepted extension of a limited part of the rules to non-international armed conflicts. Since then, through the formation of customary international law and in part as result of new treaties, it has been accepted that the majority IHL has become applicable to internal conflicts. In addition, international institutions have been set up to prosecute individuals for serious violations of IHL. The author discusses how IHL and sovereignty have influenced each other’s development. The analysis shows that the development of IHL should not be seen as limiting State sovereignty, but rather ought to be regarded as a manifestation of sovereignty, expressed through the formation of this branch of international law by its core subjects: States. At the same time, as a result of the increased reliance on means other than treaties for clarification and development of IHL, the role of States has become more limited; it is reduced to either accepting or rejecting the prospective developments of IHL and any consequential impact on their sovereignty.

Islamic Sovereignty Norms and Peaceful Settlement of Territorial Disputes

The notion of state sovereignty is the foundation upon which the modern international system rests. Yet it is a mistake to regard sovereignty as a unitary, global concept: multiple sovereignties exist, particularly among Islamic law states (ILS). Sovereignty in the Islamic legal tradition takes the form of a divine trust bestowed upon the state and rests on personalistic, not territorial, relationships. Some modern ILS adhere to this Islamic notion of sovereignty, and we contend that such ILS find compromise difficult in territorial disputes because they attach divine sanctions to the authority of the state over territory. Using newly collected data from the constitutions of all ILS, 1945-2012, we demonstrate that this is, indeed, the case: ILS with constitutional provisions for Islamic sovereignty are less likely to resolve their territorial disputes peacefully or propose peaceful settlement than ILS that embrace secular, Western notions of territorial sovereignty.

Horizontal Enforcement and the ILC’s Proposed Draft Articles on the Immunity of State Officials from Foreign Criminal Jurisdiction

The Nuremberg principles affirmed by the U.N. General Assembly and formulated by the International Law Commission (ILC) provide that “[t]he fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible Government official does not relieve him (sic) from responsibility under international law.” Few would dispute this basic principle. More contested is the question of who has authority to impose consequences on individuals for international crimes committed on behalf of states. This is because, if an individual has acted with actual or apparent state authority, imposing consequences on the individual without her state’s consent runs counter to traditional notions of state sovereignty and noninterference.

Ungoverned Spaces. Alternatives to State Authority in an Era of Softened Sovereignty. Edited by Anne L.Clunan and Harold A.Trinkunas. Stanford Security Studies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. 310 pp., $23.00 paperback (ISBN 078-0-8047-7013

Ungoverned Spaces. Alternatives to State Authority in an Era of Softened Sovereignty. Edited by Anne L. Clunan, Harold A. Trinkunas . Stanford Security Studies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. 310 pp., $23.00 paperback (ISBN 078-0-8047-7013-2). Governance Without a State? Policies and Politics in Areas of Limited Statehood. Edited by Thomas Risse . New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011. 297 pp., $40.54 hardcover (ISBN 978-0-231-15120-7). Studies of governance arrangements beyond the state have opened new vistas to theory building, substantive research, and policy relevance. Governance in the European Union (EU), the first to be labeled multilevel governance, has generated key findings. These findings have challenged traditional notions of state sovereignty and state impermeability; they have tackled a broad range of substantive issues from agriculture and foreign policy to subregional development and cultural affairs; and they have policy implications for the new generation of EU decision makers. The proliferating global governance literature has studied various arrangements, encompassing such actors as international governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, MNCs, foundations, and more recently networks and multistakeholder actors. The findings of much of this research are that, indeed, there are a multitude of governance arrangements out there, even though they may be hierarchical arrangements. States and governmental bureaucracies may be key participants, but they act in coordination with public and private “others” to provide alternative authority relationships. Even when the state is absent, nonexistent, or failed, governance occurs—governance without the state. These two edited books contribute to this broader literature by focusing on ungoverned spaces (Clunan and Trinkunas volume) and on areas of limited statehood (Risse volume). Both volumes suggest that the paradigm of an international system with state sovereignty is a fiction, misleading to scholars and decision makers alike. In actuality, state sovereignty has softened; the state is joined by numerous other actors, some benign and others malign, which provide different forms of organization (Clunan, p. 6). In many areas, there is limited statehood, where governance occurs through steering via cooperative networks of public and private actors and rule making (Risse, p. 9). Thus, the goal in each volume is to explore theoretically and empirically these spaces and examine the alternative authority and governance structures that have arisen. Both …

Beyond nationality towards a consciousness of 'inter-nationality': balancing force and power

This article analyses how changing notions of state sovereignty and the evolving role of individuals in society affect the way in which disputes can be effectively resolved. In a globalised society, nationality and all its inherent characteristics need to be balanced and viewed in light of the international nature of technology, investment, trade, and education. This paper argues that in an era of globalisation facilitated by an age of technology, parties to national and international disputes must transcend traditional notions of nationality and work from a consciousness of ‘inter-nationality’ in order to find balanced and effective diplomatic solutions to today’s disputes.

Diversity and bioethics

In a recent edition of Foreign Affairs Princeton professor John Ikenberry argues that the liberal international order is alive and well (Ikenberry 2011). The global political order of today is characterized by openness and rule-based relations enshrined in institutions such as the United Nations and norms such as multilateralism. This order has been constructed in the West. Some fear that non-Western developing countries will not share this order. Perhaps they will use the current political and economic changes to introduce more traditional and autocratic approaches. Ikenberry rejects such fears. First, he argues that today’s international order is the result of centuries of struggle and innovation around the world, and thus not simply the product of the West. The notions of state sovereignty and self-determination have in fact encouraged political movements for decolonization and independence in the developing world. The international community has established supra-national institutions as well as elaborated the universal rights of man. The modern international order is therefore not American or Western but much wider. The hegemonic organization of this order may change but not its fundamental principles. Second, emerging states as Brazil, China and India have themselves deep interests in an open and rule-based international order. Countries’ positions within the system will be renegotiated. But the rules and institutions of the order will continue to be embraced, or so Ikenberry argues. Of course there is also growing awareness of global interdependence, demonstrating the need and even further development of multilateral rules and institutions. The same challenges are faced by developed as well as developing countries, viz. climate change, pandemic diseases, disasters, and terrorism. They can only be addressed through cooperation and solidarity. This view of globalization is immediately relevant for global bioethics. In this area we also have the continuous tension between universalism and particularism, globalism and localism. On the one hand, universal principles are formulated and endorsed by international bodies. On the other, principles need to be applied in various contexts and settings. It is an easy strategy to mitigate and deny the tension by arguing that bioethics is a western product or that bioethics is imposing so-called universal principles on other cultures and traditions mostly in non-western countries. These strategies of denial are clearly at work when the notion of diversity is discussed, as Bracanovic demonstrates in his contribution to the current issue of Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy (Bracanovic 2011). In order to respect existing diversity in values and norms, the principle of respect for cultural diversity and pluralism has been incorporated in the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, which has been adopted by the Member States of UNESCO in 2005. This principle, as advanced in article 12 of the UNESCO Declaration, is therefore one of the 15 fundamental principles of global bioethics. At the same time, it is the only principle of the Declaration for which the hierarchical status is determined. Article 12 explicitly states that considerations of diversity cannot be invoked to justify infringements of human dignity and human rights, or any other principle of the Declaration (UNESCO 2005). In the balancing of principles, this particular principle therefore is the weakest one. But nonetheless, for the first time in bioethics, respect for diversity has been formulated as a specific principle that should be taken into account in the assessment of ethical issues and problems. H. ten Have (&) B. Gordijn Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA e-mail: tenhaveh@duq.edu

The ultimate sacrifice and the ethics of humanitarian intervention

AbstractThe discourse about the morality of humanitarian intervention – though undeniably well- (over-?) trodden in recent years – has two critical gaps. First, despite its central moral concern with the rights and lives of individuals living under massively oppressive states or terrible conditions, and despite its powerful attacks on traditional notions of state sovereignty, the discourse remains statist. Humanitarian intervention understood as something that states do, and if there is a right or responsibility to intervene it is a right or responsibility held by states. The second gap in the discourse follows from the first: because we think of humanitarian intervention as something that states do, the role of the individual soldiers who make up the intervening force – their rights and responsibilities – has been undertheorised.This article argues that a reconsideration of the role of individuals in the context of humanitarian intervention not only helps us to ensure that interventions are carried out in a manner consistent with their own justice claims, but also to recapture the moral heroism of those individuals who willingly sacrifice for the rights and lives of others. Although the moral issues raised here may demand a more constrained politics of humanitarian intervention, they also ultimately have an emancipating effect.

Westphalia and the Taiwan Conundrum: A Case against the Exclusionist Construction of Sovereignty and Identity

It is often argued that at the root of the Taiwan question are the myriad differences in politics, ideology, identity, and economy between mainland China and Taiwan. Any prospect for its peaceful resolution, it seems, hinges on bridging those differences through economic and/or political integration. Although the Taiwan conundrum has much to do with wide-ranging cross-strait divergence, this article argues that it cannot be disconnected from one important commonality between Beijing and Taipei, namely, a cross-strait normative convergence on the Westphalian notion of state sovereignty. Encompassing an exclusionary understanding of final authority, territory, and identity, Westphalian sovereignty provides both Beijing and Taipei with a common meaning that Taiwan is an issue of sovereignty, central to their respective national identity and political survival and hence not subject to compromise. As a consequence, it argues that this common meaning is paradoxically responsible for much of the mistrust, tension, and deadlock in cross-strait relations. In order to find a long-term solution to the Taiwan impasse, we need to pay attention to this particular normative convergence as well as to the many differences across the Taiwan Strait.

The Evolution of Post-conflict Recovery

Recent history has been marked by the rise of post-conflict intervention as a component of military and foreign policy, as a form of humanitarianism and as a challenge to Westphalian notions of state sovereignty. The terms of debate, the history of the discipline and the evolution of scholarship and practice remain relatively under-examined, particularly in the post-9/11 period in which post-conflict recovery came to be construed as an extension of conflict and as a domain concerned principally with the national security of predominantly Western countries. The subsequent politicisation of post-conflict recovery and entry of post-conflict assistance into the political economy of conflict have fundamentally changed policy making and practice. The authors argue that research into post-conflict recovery, which must become increasingly rigorous and theoretically grounded, should detach itself from the myriad political agendas which have sought to impose themselves upon war-torn countries. The de-politicisation of post-conflict recovery, the authors conclude, may benefit from an increasingly structured ‘architecture of integrated, directed recovery’.

Japan's Human Security Policy: A Critical Review of its Limits and Failures

The concept of ‘human security’ was created by the UNDP in 1994 when the international community became aware of emerging transnational threats following the Cold War. Since then, the Canadian government has developed the idea into an emerging norm of ‘responsibility to protect’ which requires the international community to rethink traditional notions of state sovereignty and seriously consider guidelines that encourage humanitarian intervention, an approach that has been widely endorsed. The Japanese government, in contrast, has promoted the idea of human security as poverty reduction and human empowerment. This paper examines the limits of Japan's human security policy by examining its background in the geopolitics of the Asian region and its consequent grounding in the principles of state sovereignty and non-interference in domestic affairs. It concludes by suggesting that the success of Canada's human security policy reflects the transformation of the security paradigm after the Cold War and that Japan has not yet become fully aware of this profound transformation in its own security considerations.

Human Trafficking and New Patterns of Migration

Since the end of the Cold War human trafficking has evolved from localized practices of labor recruitment into globalized and multidirectional forms of migration. These new forms of migration patterns have acquired considerable economic and political significance in terms of their regional and global magnitudes and complexities. Previously limited to the purpose of sexual exploitation trafficking now cross-cuts a multitude of female and male migrants searching for work in a wide range of low-skilled and labor-intensive economic sectors particularly construction light industries agriculture and fisheries. There has been a rise in autonomous migration by women young people and children within and outside traditional practices of migration. The growing migration business which takes place under conditions of information asymmetry and under the control of diverse brokers has produced major reactions based on human rights principles. These have contributed to new international regional and national legislative frameworks for prevention prosecution and the social re-integration of trafficked persons. However the implementation of such legislations has led to inconclusive debates about the issues of victimhood and agency on the one hand and the responsibilities of states on the other. The prevalence of differences of interests in the variant policy approaches and civic responses to all the issues-migration management crime control labor standards poverty reduction and particular needs of communities at risk-reflect a fragmented understanding of the situation. The securitization of migration policy which accelerated since 9/11 has reaffirmed the notion of state sovereignty in forceful ways further preventing meaningful negotiations about the discrepancy between the legal and social interpretations of human rights and well being in migration. (excerpt)

SOME CHALLENGES FACING LEGAL STRENGTHENING PROJECTS IN SMALL PACIFIC ISLAND STATES

This article considers some of the challenges facing small Pacific Island States that follow the donation of aid and judicial resources from overseas countries. In particular it considers the impact such assistance has on notions of State sovereignty and the possible compromise it makes to the development of a jurisprudence particular to the South Pacific region, for example in respect of the application of custom and customary law. ∗ Peter MacFarlane BA, BLegS, LLM is an Associate Professor in the School of Law at the University of the South Pacific, Port Vila Vanuatu and a legal practitioner. At the time of the writing of this article he was on leave as an Adjunct Professor with the Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC.

Globalization and genocidalism: Fictional discourse without borders, for fun and profit

In this essay we explore the relationship between globalization and Globalization is understood as freedom and ability of individuals and firms to initiate voluntary economic transactions with residents of other countries, while is defined as (i) the purposeful neglect to attribute responsibility for in cases when overwhelming evidence exists, and as (ii) the energetic attributions of genocide in less then clear cases without considering available and convincing opposing evidence and argumentation. The hypothesis that we defend here as explanatory of globalization’s surprising failure to live up to its often repeated theoretical promise that it is not a zero-sum game, is that this apparent failure is a result of the impact of the sole super-power’s global politics. These policies are manifested through an open onslaught on the notion of state sovereignty (impacting the sovereignty of virtually all countries except that of the U.S.), and an aggressive promotion of all kinds of interventionism, in particular armed (humanitarian) intervention. The nexus between the two is to a significant degree provided by the social phenomenon (characteristic only of the West, since, for example, Mozambique does not go on talking about alleged in, say, Northern Ireland) we call genocidalism. Genocidalism manifests itself as a tool of globalization that is ever more morphing into a sort of imperialism and neo-colonialism, and is indeed becoming something of a remarkably effective judicial Trojan horse. It looks to us that globalization is the globalization of US sovereignty, i.e., its extension over as much foreign territory as possible. Interestingly, genocidalism is a means to that end, and one that is more effective than, say, weapons of mass destruction, or even terrorism as a tool. Genocidalism is so effective that it bars the inherent right to self-defense against aggression, and obviates the sovereignty of the targeted state. Genocidalism can even be employed to actually make states vanish, in what can only be called republicide. Such was the fate of Yugoslavia. The other historical example we use to illustrate our points consist of the events in Rwanda of 1994.

The Emergence of an ‘Ecosystem Approach’ to the Protection of International Watercourses under International Law

Traditionally, customary and conventional rules relating to the utilization of shared natural resources have been based firmly on the notion of State sovereignty, and have therefore focused on the protection of territorial interests. Generally, environmental considerations have only had legal significance to the extent that they coincide with such territorial interests. In other words, environmental harm would only be legally prohibited to the extent that it involved a violation of territorial integrity. This has been particularly true in the case of shared freshwater resources, where ‘the focus of the equitable use principle is on the balancing of different use interests in the resource and not on the protection of ecological interests’ and where ‘rights and obligations under the equitable use rule also remain anchored in the territorial sovereignty of riparian States over the shared resource’. 1 It has been pointed out that this approach is ‘inherently confrontational and does little to promote cooperation in the common environmental interests of States’. 2 However, in recent years, many international instruments, creating regimes for the utilization and protection of international watercourses, appear to have moved beyond the traditional obligations. They now focus on utilizing international watercourses in an equitable and reasonable manner, and prevent significant transboundary harm by including more ‘purely’ environmental obligations, such as provisions that require the adoption of a more ecosystem-oriented approach to such protection. Although the concept has not been the subject of formal legal definition, Brunee and Toope state that: Simply put, an ‘ecosystem approach’ requires consideration of the whole system rather than individual components. Living species and their physical environments must be recognized as interconnected, and the focus must be on the interaction between different sub-systems and their responses to stresses resulting from human activity. Not only does interconnectedness imply management approaches that are broad-based in a spatial sense; it requires as well that human interaction with and use of the environment respect the need for maintaining ‘ecosystem integrity’, in other words, the system’s capacity for self-organization. 3

The responsibility to protect: A new notion of state sovereignty*

The recent policies of the United States Administration threaten the entire structure of international law. Widespread concern in the US and elsewhere has been expressed in a different cluster of principles, in particular in the report of the Canadian‐based Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. Its report states that the primary responsibility of a state is to protect its citizens; such protection includes prevention, reaction and rebuilding. The implications of this for military intervention are discussed; this must be a last resort after all non‐military options have failed in response to the actual or probable large‐scale loss of life and the objective to prevent further suffering. The action must be authorized by the United Nations Security Council or, if this fails to respond, the General Assembly. A further commission should examine how the international community should respond to states that refuse to comply with international law regarding weapons of mass destruction.