Russia,humanitarian intervention and the Responsibility to Protect: the case of Syria

Western analysis perceives Russian approaches to issues of humanitarian intervention and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) as running counter to western‐inspired international norms. This debate has surfaced with some vigour over Russia's policy in the Syria conflict where, in order to protect its strategic interests in Syria, an obstructionist Moscow has been accused of ignoring humanitarian considerations and allowing time for the Assad regime to crush the opposition by vetoing a resolution threatening to impose sanctions. While Russian approaches are undoubtedly explained by a desire to maximize its growing political influence and trade advantages to serve its legitimate foreign policy interests, and while Moscow's attitudes to intervention and R2P exhibit important differences from those of the major western liberal democracies, its arguments are in fact framed within a largely rational argument rooted in ‘traditional’ state‐centred international law. This article first highlights key arguments in the scholarly literature on intervention and R2P before going on to examine the evolution of Russian views on these issues. The analysis then focuses on the extent to which Moscow's arguments impact on international legal debates on the Libya and Syria conflicts. The article then seeks to explore how Russian approaches to intervention/R2P reflect fundamental trends in its foreign policy thinking and its quest for legitimacy in a negotiated international order. Finally, it attempts to raise some important questions regarding Russia's role in the future direction of the intervention/R2P debates.     

Politics by other means? The virtual trials of the Khmer Rouge tribunal

This article argues that more emphasis should be placed on the political aspects of international tribunals, which are often in the business of reshaping politics as well as simply administering justice. By examining the hybrid Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), popularly known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, the article develops arguments previously advanced by Victor Peskin in respect of Rwanda and the former Yuogoslavia. Peskin has suggested that courtroom war crimes trials are paralleled by ‘virtual trials’, in which international and domestic political actors struggle for power and control over the form and outcome of proceedings. He terms these virtual trials ‘trials of cooperation’, in which governments of states where war crimes have been committed seek variously to help or hinder legal proceedings to address those crimes. Such virtual trials now loom extremely large in the Cambodian case; the Hun Sen government, while exploiting the ECCC to deflect domestic and international attention from the endemic corruption and growing authoritarianism over which it presides, has sought tightly to limit the Tribunal's room for manoeuvre. One trial has been completed, another is about to start, and the international investigators and prosecutors are planning a couple more—but Prime Minister Hun Sen has personally declared his opposition to any further cases going ahead. If the ECCC succeeds in trying only five defendants from the murderous 1975–79 Khmer Rouge regime, justice will not have been done; and wider questions will emerge about the future viability of hybrid tribunals. The Cambodian case demonstrates that where war crimes tribunals are concerned, backroom ‘virtual trials’ need as much academic, policy and media attention as the actual courtroom trials of key defendants.     

Contest and conquest: Russia and global internet governance

For more than a decade, Russia's foreign policy has sought to challenge the international consensus on a number of issues. Today, as the international internet ecosystem is becoming more volatile, Moscow is eager to shift the western narrative over the current global internet governance regime, in which the United States retains considerable leverage. In a context wherein states increasingly forge links between cyberspace and foreign policy, this article explores Russia's deepening involvement in internet governance. The disclosure by Edward Snowden of the US government's wide net of online surveillance contributed to legitimize the Russian approach to controlling online activity. While the struggle around the narrative of internet governance has been heating up since then, Russia actively seeks to coordinate internet governance and cyber security policies with like‐minded states in both regional forums and the United Nations. By introducing security concerns and advocating more hierarchy and a greater role for governments, Moscow is contributing to the politicization of global cyber issues and seeking to reshape the network in accordance with its own domestic political interests. Indeed, the Russian leadership has come to consider the foreign policy of the internet as the establishment of a new US‐led hegemonic framework that Washington would use to subvert other sovereign states with its own world views and values.     

Human Rights and International Security: The International Community and the Greek Dictators

The Greek junta was notorious for its use of state torture as a means of control. Yet, for most Western governments and organisations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United Nations (UN), Greece's geostrategic location was considered to be a higher priority than the undemocratic behaviour of the ‘Colonels’. This article seeks to synthesise existing historiography with new research in order to examine the complex and interconnected processes that led Western states and key international institutions to tolerate human-rights abuses in Greece in the face of huge protest from international public opinion. It will look at why Western states failed to explain away the ‘Greek case’, as they had done with Portugal and Spain, as an anomaly on the road to defeating a mortal enemy, the USSR, which was committing far more numerous violations. It will also consider why international opinion focused on Greece so intently. It will show how many in the West were lulled by the regime into believing that human-rights abusers can act as agents of stability and security. The article's footnotes aim to draw attention to the many primary and secondary sources that provide additional information on the issue of human-rights abuses by the Greek junta.     

Human rights in a global ecumene

How should we understand the cultural politics that has surrounded the development of international human rights? Two perspectives frame contemporary debate. For ‘cultural particularists’, human rights are western artefacts; alien to other societies, and an inappropriate basis for international institutional development. For ‘negotiated universalists’, a widespread global consensus undergirds international human rights norms, with few states openly contesting their status as fundamental standards of political legitimacy. This article advances an alternative understanding, pursuing John Vincent's provocative, yet undeveloped, suggestion that while the notion of human rights has its origins in European culture, its spread internationally is best understood as the product of a ‘universal social process’. The international politics of individual/human rights is located within an evolving global ecumene, a field of dynamic cultural engagement, characterized over time by the development of multiple modernities. Within this field, individual/human rights have been at the heart of diverse forms of historically transformative contentious politics, not the least being the struggles for imperial reform and change waged by subject peoples of diverse cultural backgrounds; struggles that not only played a key role in the construction of the contemporary global system of sovereign states, but also transformed the idea of ‘human’ rights itself. In developing this alternative understanding, the article advances a different understanding of the relation between power and human rights, one in which rights are seen as neither simple expressions of, or vehicles for, western domination, nor robbed of all power‐political content by simple notions of negotiation or consensus. The article concludes by considering, in a very preliminary fashion, the implications of this new account for normative theorizing about human rights. If a prima facie case exists for the normative justifiability of such rights, it lies first in their radical nature—in their role in historically transformative contentious politics—and second in their universalizability, in the fact that one cannot plausibly claim them for oneself while denying them to others.     

Russia and the Re-opening of the Polish Question, 1801–1814

At the end of the eighteenth century, the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople was a religious leader of global stature, exercising direct authority over millions of Christians in the Ottoman Empire and a primacy of honor in the wider Orthodox ecumene. By the 1830s, however, the Patriarchate confronted a new international order that was broadly hostile to its claims. Tensions became particularly bad between the Patriarchate and the British government as both sides asserted their right to control religious affairs on the Ionian Islands, a British-administered protectorate lying off the western coast of Greece. A dispute over who had the power to regulate family law in Ionia escalated in the late 1830s into a minor international incident, with the British government demanding that the Ottoman government depose the reigning patriarch, Grigorios VI. These demands sparked a broader discussion among all the Great Powers as to what the legitimate bounds of the Patriarchate's authority might be. One of the more striking aspects of the incident was the determination of the Powers not to recognize any ‘Orthodox Pope’ in international affairs, illustrating the impact of the modern state system on transnational religious organizations beyond the borders of Europe.     

Negotiating Authority between UNHCR and ‘The People’

Refugee camps are exceptional places that are left to the benevolent governing of international humanitarian agencies, and offer unique opportunities to explore the making and un‐making of public authority. This article examines how certain groups of young men in a refugee camp in Tanzania manage to establish public authority by relating to ideas of a Burundian moral order, while at the same time relating to the ‘development‐speak’ of international relief operations. The refugees' attempts to establish public authority are highly contested and highly politicized, clashing with the relief agencies' vision of the camp as non‐political. Ironically, the young men who engage in politics in the camp are also closely linked to these relief agencies in their role as brokers between the agencies and the ‘small people’. Public authority is partly produced by the powers that are delegated to them by the agencies and partly formed in the ‘gaps' in the agencies’ system. Similarly, authority rests in part on the respect that these brokers gain from other refugees — a respect that is earned in numerous ways, including outwitting the international organizations — and in part on the recognition that they get from the very same organizations. In other words, public authority rests on complex relations between legitimacy and recognition and between sovereignty and governmentality.     

Gender as national interest at the UN Security Council

The United Nations Security Council has often been identified as a key actor responsible for the uneven trajectory of the international Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. It is, however, the Council members—who also seek to advance their national interest at this intergovernmental forum—that are pivotal in the Council's deliberations and shape its policies. Yet, little attention has been paid to this aspect of deliberative politics at the Council in feminist scholarship on WPS. This article seeks to address this gap in the literature. It notes that gender has increasingly become part of foreign policy interests of UN member states, as evidenced by practices such as invocation of ‘women's rights’ and ‘gender equality’ in broader international security policy discourse. The article demonstrates that this national interest in gender has featured in WPS‐related developments at the Security Council. Using specific illustrations, it examines three sets of member states: the permanent and non‐permanent members as well as non‐members invited to take part in Council meetings. The main argument of this article relates to highlighting member states’ interests underpinning their diplomatic activities around WPS issues in the Security Council, with the aim to present a fuller understanding of political engagements with UNSCR 1325, the first WPS resolution, in its institutional home.     

Heading west? Georgia's Euro‐Atlantic path

Events in Ukraine in 2014 are likely to transform the presence and role of western institutions such as NATO in the post‐Soviet area. The crisis has starkly revealed the limits of their influence within Russia's ‘zone of privileged interest’, as well as the lack of internal unity within these organizations vis‐à‐vis relations with Moscow and future engagement with the area. This will have long‐term implications for the South Caucasus state of Georgia, whose desire for integration into the Euro‐Atlantic community remains a key priority for its foreign and security policy‐makers. This article examines the main motivators behind Georgia's Euro‐Atlantic path and its foreign policy stance, which has remained unchanged for over a decade despite intense pressure from Russia. It focuses on two aspects of Georgia's desire for integration with European and Euro‐Atlantic structures: its desire for security and the belief that only a western alignment can guarantee its future development, and the notion of Georgia's ‘European’ identity. The notion of ‘returning’ to Europe and the West has become a common theme in Georgian political and popular discourse, reflecting the belief of many in the country that they are ‘European’. This article explores this national strategic narrative and argues that the prevailing belief in a European identity facilitates, rather than supersedes, the central role of national interests in Georgian foreign policy.     

De facto,displaced, tacit: The sovereign articulations of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile

Based on ethnographic research on exiled Tibetan political institutions and practices in India, this paper investigates sovereignty in exile. The Tibetan Government-in-Exile (TGiE) remains internationally unrecognised and lacks de jure sovereignty over territory in both Tibet and in exile. However, this exiled administration claims legitimacy as the official representative of the Tibetan population, performs a number of state-like functions in relation to its diasporic ‘citizenry’ and attempts to make its voice heard within the international community. Rejecting arguments that such entities should be viewed merely as discrepant forms of political practice, this paper asserts that the state, sovereignty, and territory can be conceptually disentangled, opening up the theoretical possibility of entities other than territorial states claiming sovereignty. In teasing apart and problematising constituent elements of sovereignty, this paper focuses on three aspects of the TGiE's articulations of sovereignty: its claims to and production of legitimacy, authority and de facto sovereignty; its displaced sovereignty and strategies of territorial governance over non-contiguous spaces in exile; and the mediation of its ambiguous relationship with the host state India through practices of tacit sovereignty.     

Global multipolarity,European security and implications for UK grand strategy: back to the future,once again

The international system is returning to multipolarity—a situation of multiple Great Powers—drawing the post‐Cold War ‘unipolar moment’ of comprehensive US political, economic and military dominance to an end. The rise of new Great Powers, namely the ‘BRICs’—Brazil, Russia, India, and most importantly, China—and the return of multipolarity at the global level in turn carries security implications for western Europe. While peaceful political relations within the European Union have attained a remarkable level of strategic, institutional and normative embeddedness, there are five factors associated with a return of Great Power competition in the wider world that may negatively impact on the western European strategic environment: the resurgence of an increasingly belligerent Russia; the erosion of the US military commitment to Europe; the risk of international military crises with the potential to embroil European states; the elevated incentive for states to acquire nuclear weapons; and the vulnerability of economically vital European sea lines and supply chains. These five factors must, in turn, be reflected in European states’ strategic behaviour. In particular, for the United Kingdom—one of western Europe's two principal military powers, and its only insular (offshore) power—the return of Great Power competition at the global level suggests that a return to offshore balancing would be a more appropriate choice than an ongoing commitment to direct military interventions of the kind that have characterized post‐2001 British strategy.     

Russia resurgent? Moscow's campaign to ‘coerce Georgia to peace’

Russia's military incursion into Georgia in August 2008 and formal recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia raise fundamental questions about Russian regional policy, strategic objectives and attitudes to the use of armed force. The spectacle of maneouvre warfare on the periphery of Europe could form a watershed in post‐Cold War Russian relations with its neighbourhood and the wider international community. The speed and scale with which Russia's initial ‘defensive’ intervention to ‘coerce Georgia to peace’ led to a broad occupation of many Georgian regions focuses attention on the motivations behind Russian military preparations for war and the political gains Moscow expected from such a broad offensive. Russia has failed to advance a convincing legal case for its operations and its ‘peace operations’ discourse has been essentially rhetorical. Some Russian goals may be inferred: the creation of military protectorates in South Ossetia and Abkhazia; inducing Georgian compliance, especially to block its path towards NATO; and creating a climate of uncertainty over energy routes in the South Caucasus. Moscow's warning that it will defend its ‘citizens’ (nationals) at all costs broadens the scope of concerns to Russia's other neighbour states, especially Ukraine. Yet an overreaction to alarmist scenarios of a new era of coercive diplomacy may only encourage Russian insistence that its status, that of an aspirant global power, be respected. This will continue to be fuelled by internal political and psychological considerations in Russia. Careful attention will need to be given to the role Russia attributes to military power in pursuing its revisionist stance in the international system.     

Japan's global environmentalism: rhetoric and reality

The 1992 Earth Summit marked the emergence of a new type of global environmentalism in which nation states increasingly sought to represent themselves as key environmental actors. Since the early 1990s, Japan has attempted to position itself rhetorically as a global environmental leader. This rhetoric must be compared to Japan's international environmental impacts, which are considerable, especially in East and Southeast Asia. Japan's domestic environmental situation is evaluated, and five key areas of international environmental impacts are discussed: official development assistance, foreign direct investment, deforestation, overfishing, and the promotion of high technology. Motivations for Japan's use of global environmentalist rhetoric including its domestic political environment, geopolitical goals, geoeconomic motivations, and the increasing globalization of the Japanese economy are analyzed. The spread of the Japanese model of development is linked to Asia's continuing environmental crises.     

Bounded political contestation: the domestic translation of international health and housing rights in Australia

Political contestation within liberal democratic states is an important, albeit limited, guide in defining how these states domestically implement their international human rights obligations. While often ritualistically endorsing human rights standards, political actors allow themselves a limited policy space with their domestic political contest circumscribed by more pervasive influences, often at odds with the state's international commitments. This article examines recent health and housing policy initiatives by Australia's two major political parties and assesses them against its international commitments. Applying a social constructivist approach, this article argues that the dominant neoliberal political discourse and the state's institutional structure set contextual boundaries to the parties’ policy contestation and reveal the limited influence of domestic political contestation in determining Australia's rights implementation.     

Prudence and principle in international society: reflections on Vincent's approach to human rights

John Vincent's Human rights and International Relations argued for embedding the right to be free from starvation in the international society of states. Principle and prudence were combined in a distinctive English School analysis of the universal human rights culture. Vincent argued that the entitlement to be free from the tyranny of starvation and malnutrition was one principle on which most societies could agree despite their profound ideological differences. Other conceptions of human rights, including western liberal doctrines of individual freedom, had the potential to create major divisions within international society, particularly when linked with a doctrine of humanitarian intervention. More recent approaches to world poverty raise large questions about whether Vincent succeeded in attempting to marry prudence in preserving an international order that remains anchored in state sovereignty with a principled commitment to ending starvation. Important issues also arise about how to build on his reflections on the prospects for a global ‘civilizing process’ that bridges cultural and political differences in the first universal society of states.     

Research on Birth Control Technology

Abstract

Present contraceptive technology may not be adequate to allow family planning to be successfully practised on a world-wide scale. The limitations of current methods of fertility regulation and service systems are outlined. The development of better technology poses challenging problems. WHO's Special Programme of Research and Research Training in Human Reproduction represents an interdisciplinary and international approach to their solution.     

Implementing International Environmental Agreements: The Case of the Wadden Sea

It has been a feature of the past 30 years or so that individual sovereign states have been increasingly willing to partially set aside their own interests in favour of international treaties on pollution control and wildlife protection. It is the political will of the government signatories to such agreements that is the key to successful implementation as that political will provides the legitimate enforceable authority that is necessary to ensure compliance. This paper examines a trilateral agreement made by the Governments of Denmark, Germany and Holland for the protection and management of the Wadden Sea—one of Europe's most important wildlife sites. The examination of that agreement explores the key mechanisms used for its implementation and, in the case of the Wadden Sea, those mechanisms include the operation of key European Union environmental Directives. The paper finds major differences in approach and application of the Birds, Habitats and Environmental Impact Assessment Directives across the Wadden Sea region and argues that these differences undermine the trilateral agreements made by the three governments.     

Languages of Stateness in South Lebanon's Palestinian Gatherings: The PLO's Popular Committees as Twilight Institutions

Public authority beyond the state has often been seen as isolated from the state and/or constituting a threat to the state. Recent scholarship, however, has started to conceptualize ‘state’ and ‘non‐state’ forms of public authority as closely connected and interdependent. This article contributes to this theoretical shift by means of a qualitative case study of public authority in Palestinian refugee camps in South Lebanon. Lebanon's Palestinian camps are routinely characterized as ‘states‐within‐the‐state’, undermining the sovereignty of the Lebanese state. Yet, as this article demonstrates, both a generic state idea and the specific Lebanese state system constitute crucial benchmarks for the Popular Committees that govern informal Palestinian settlements. The article therefore conceptualizes the Popular Committees as ‘twilight institutions’ and explores the ‘languages of stateness’ that they adopt both communicatively, vis‐à‐vis Palestinian competitors, and coordinatively, vis‐à‐vis Lebanese counterparts. This reveals that the Popular Committees emulate the Lebanese state institutions they come into contact with, to bolster their own authority. They do this partly to be viable interlocutors for Lebanese state institutions; this suggests that the Popular Committees’ non‐state authority might validate rather than challenge state authority in Lebanon, and that state and non‐state authority can be mutually constitutive.