New Issue: Ethics & International Affairs

The latest issue of Ethics & International Affairs (Vol. 32, no. 1, Spring 2018) is out. Contents include:

• Essay
• Ayelet Shachar, The Marketization of Citizenship in an Age of Restrictionism
• Roundtable: Rising Powers and the International Order
• G. John Ikenberry & Shiping Tang, Introduction
• G. John Ikenberry, Why the Liberal World Order Will Survive
• Shiping Tang, China and the Future International Order(s)
• Anne L. Clunan, Russia and the Liberal World Order
• Deepa M. Ollapally, India and the International Order: Accommodation and Adjustment
• Ole Wæver, A Post-Western Europe: Strange Identities in a Less Liberal World Order
• Andrew Hurrell, Beyond the BRICS: Power, Pluralism, and the Future of Global Order
• Review Essay
• Gillian Brock, How Should We Combat Corruption? Lessons from Theory and Practice

Conference: Treaty Shopping and Tools for Investment Treaty Reform

On March 12, 2018, the OECD will host its Fourth Annual Investment Treaty Conference. The theme is: "Treaty Shopping and Tools for Investment Treaty Reform." The program is here. Here's the idea:

The fourth annual OECD Investment Treaty Conference will address treaty shopping -- a controversial investment treaty issue of policy interest for many governments and stakeholders -- and explore tools to help interested governments improve their investment treaty policies.

Treaty shopping is widespread in the current investment treaty system. The Conference will discuss methods used, impact, policy issues raised, relevant government treaty policies and other issues.

pThe Conference will also present the innovative Multilateral Convention to Implement Tax Treaty Related Measures to Prevent Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (MLI) to the investment policy community. The MLI was developed by an ad hoc group of over 100 countries to address tax treaty shopping and additional issues. It facilitates the swift and consistent implementation of internationally agreed measures into existing bilateral treaties and provides for modification of almost half of the over 3,000 bilateral tax treaties in force today.

A concluding session will consider potential tools for reform based on the discussion and prior work by the Freedom of Investment Roundtable, and future steps.

King & Meernik: The Witness Experience: Testimony at the ICTY and Its Impact

Kimi Lynn King (Univ. of North Texas) & James David Meernik (Univ. of North Texas) have published The Witness Experience: Testimony at the ICTY and Its Impact (Cambridge Univ. Press 2018). Here's the abstract:

This book provides the most comprehensive and scientific assessment to date of what it means to appear before war crimes tribunals. This ground-breaking analysis, conducted with the cooperation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) Victims and Witnesses Section, examines the positive and negative impact that testifying has on those who bear witness to the horrors of war by shedding new light on the process. While most witnesses have positive feelings and believe they contributed to international justice, there is a small but critical segment of witnesses whose security, health, and well-being are adversely affected after testifying. The witness experience is examined holistically, including witness' perceptions of their physical and psychological well-being. Because identity (gender and ethnicity) and war trauma were central to the ICTY's mandate and the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, the research explores in-depth how they have impacted the most critical stakeholders of any transitional justice mechanism: the witnesses.

New Issue: International Criminal Law Review

The latest issue of the International Criminal Law Review (Vol. 18, no. 1, 2018) is out. Contents include:

• Anne-Laure Chaumette, International Criminal Responsibility of Individuals in Case of Cyberattacks
• Janine Natalya Clark, The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Armed Conflict: The ‘Human Element’ and the Jurisprudence of the ICTY
• Nadia Tapia Navarro, Collective Reparations and the Limitations of International Criminal Justice to Respond to Mass Atrocity
• Clotilde Pégorier, Speech and Harm: Genocide Denial, Hate Speech and Freedom of Expression
• Mikkel Jarle Christensen & Astrid Kjeldgaard-Pedersen, Competing Perceptions of Hybrid Justice: International v. National in the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia
• Clare Frances Moran, A Perspective on the Rome Statute’s Defence of Duress: The Role of Imminence
• Geert-Jan Alexander Knoops & Ine van Giessen, The Investigative Scope of Article 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute before the ICC within the Palestine Situation

Call for Papers: New Security Challenges: Organized Crime & Urban Conflict in the Americas

The Universidad del Pacífico Law School has issued a call for papers for a conference on "New Security Challenges: Organized Crime & Urban Conflict in the Americas," to take place October 24-26, 2018, in Lima. The call is here (English/Español/Português.

Kittichaisaree: The Obligation to Extradite or Prosecute

Kriangsak Kittichaisaree (Judge, International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea) has published The Obligation to Extradite or Prosecute (Oxford Univ. Press 2018). Here's the abstract:

Prosecution of serious crimes of international concern has been few and far between before and even after the establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2002. Hope thus rests with the implementation of the international legal obligation for States to either extradite or prosecute such perpetrators among themselves or surrender them to a competent international criminal court. This obligation was considered by the United Nations International Law Commission (ILC) which submitted its final report in 2014.

Kittichaisaree, Chairman of the ILC Working Group on that topic, not only provides a guide to the final report, offering an analysis of the subject and a unique summary of its drafting history, he also covers important issues left unanswered by the report, including the customary international legal status of the obligation, the role of the universal jurisdiction, immunities of State officials, and impediments to the surrender of offenders to international criminal courts.

Conference: 112th ASIL Annual Meeting (Reminder)

On April 4-7, 2018, the American Society of International Law will hold its 112th Annual Meeting, in Washington, DC. The theme is: "International Law in Practice." I am one of the meeting's co-chairs, and the program is great. There are many fabulous panels, and keynote speakers and honorees include: Rosalie Silberman Abella (Justice, Supreme Court of Canada), Dapo Akande (Univ. of Oxford - Law), Joan E. Donoghue (Judge, International Court of Justice), Olufemi Elias (U.N. Assistant Secretary-General and Registrar, International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals), Christopher Greenwood (formerly, Judge, International Court of Justice), Meg Kinnear (Secretary-General, International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes), and Peter Trooboff (Covington & Burling LLP). The draft program is here. I encourage all of ILR's readers to attend. You can register here. Here's the idea:

Practice reifies and animates international law, shaping what it means, how it is applied, and how effectively it achieves the diverse goals of those who invoke it. Practice is constitutive and contentious. It looks both backward and forward.

The 2018 Annual Meeting will focus on international law in action: how and by whom international law is made, shaped, and carried out, both formally and informally; how it is taught; how the practices of international institutions, law firms, companies, not-for-profit organizations, government offices, and militaries generate international rules; how and in what ways states and other actors interact; and how participants deploy international legal arguments. The meeting will consider how international legal practice has changed and is continuing to change in response to geopolitical shifts and contemporary challenges, including demands for greater transparency, accountability, legitimacy, and inclusion.

At its 112th Annual Meeting, the American Society of International Law invites policymakers, practitioners, academics across the disciplinary spectrum, and students to reflect on the broad manifestations, sources, and implications of international legal practice.

Call for Submissions: German Yearbook of International Law

The German Yearbook of International Law has issued a call for submissions for its forthcoming volume 61 (2018). Here's the call:

CALL FOR PAPERS

The German Yearbook of International Law is Germany’s oldest yearbook in the field of public international law. The GYIL is published annually by the Walther Schücking Institute for International Law at the University of Kiel and contains contributions on topics addressing all aspects of public international law. We aim to provide a platform for scholars of international law – both inside and outside Germany – to publish new research advancing public international legal discourse as well as analysis of current issues. The Yearbook features a ‘Forum’ section for which prominent scholars are invited to enter into discussion on newly developing topics in international law and a ‘Focus’ section for which a group of experts are invited to write articles examining in-depth various aspects of a topic chosen in advance by the editors. The GYIL also publishes English-language summaries of exceptional German doctoral and post-doctoral theses in the fields of public international law and European law.

The General Articles section of the GYIL is open to submissions from the entire academic community and is independently peer-reviewed by a board of renowned experts. All work submitted will be scrutinised based on its intellectual quality and its advancement of academic discourse. The Editors welcome submissions for volume 61 (2018) of the GYIL, inviting interested parties to submit contributions for consideration for inclusion in the forthcoming edition.

The paper should be 10,000-12,500 words inclusive of footnotes and conform with the GYIL Style Sheet. Submissions, including a brief abstract, statement of affiliation, and confirmation of exclusive submission, should be sent by 1 September 2018 to the Assistant Editors of the GYIL via e-mail: yearbook@wsi.uni-kiel.de.

Conference: Trafficking, Smuggling and Illicit Migration in International History: New Geographic and Scalar Perspectives

On April 12-13, 2018, the Laureate Research Program in International History at the University of Sydney, in collaboration with University College London and Birkbeck College London, will host a conference on "Trafficking, Smuggling and Illicit Migration in International History: New Geographic and Scalar Perspectives." Here's the idea:

This workshop, which brings together scholars working on or based in Oceania and the Asia-Pacific region, will ask how our global and international histories of trafficking and illicit migration change if we bring new geographies into the mix, and in doing so open up the geopolitics of our scholarly discussions about intimate labour and illicit migration. At the same time, it will centre questions of scale in our discussions of trafficking, interrogating the analytic distinctions made between the micro/local and the macro/global levels of analysis in histories of trafficking and illicit migration. This geographic and scalar broadening will have two foci in particular:

1) exploring trafficking and illicit migration – as social practices, contested categories of domestic regulation and loci of international governmentalities – in the Asia-Pacific region, with a particular focus on the links between trafficking and the narrowing of legal migratory routes that accompanied the imposition of racialized exclusion policies in the twentieth century, and

2) exploring the interaction between multiple racialised migration regimes which themselves have specific geographies as well as differentiated international biopolitics. In particular, we aim to study practices of racial othering and colonial exclusion which were at the heart of the Pacific zone of exclusion alongside what migration historian Adam McKeown has called the other great ‘East-West divide’ of modern migration regimes – the one separating Europe from the Ottoman empire, Russia and Eurasia. How do our histories of trafficking, intimate labour and illicit migration change if we compare, contrast and connect these multiple, overlapping and inter-linked systems of migration control?

In both cases the aim of our workshop will be not so much to supplant older geographic foci in the study of trafficking, illicit migration and forced labour, as to ask what we can learn by combining the study of, for example, the racialised dynamics of trafficking and anti-trafficking in Europe and the Middle East with an examination of similar dynamics in the Asia-Pacific region. Combined with our interrogation of scale as a framing device for our histories of trafficking, the workshop will constitute both an opportunity to examine substantive new material on histories of trafficking and illicit migration, and a methodological conversation about the kinds of geographic assumptions that are folded within our attempts to do global and international history.

Whytock: From International Law and International Relations to Law and World Politics

Christopher A. Whytock (Univ. of California, Irvine - Law and Political Science) has posted From International Law and International Relations to Law and World Politics (in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics). Here's the abstract:

Political scientists—primarily in the discipline’s international relations subfield—have long studied international law. After considering how political scientists and legal scholars define international law, this article identifies five stages of political science research on international law, including the current interdisciplinary international law and international relations (IL/IR) stage, and it reviews three trends in political science research that constitute an emerging sixth stage of interdisciplinary scholarship: a law and world politics (L/WP) stage. First, moving beyond the “IL” in IL/IR scholarship, international relations scholars are increasingly studying domestic law and domestic courts—not only their foundational role in supporting international law and international courts but also their direct role in core areas of international relations, including international conflict and foreign policy. Second, moving beyond the “IR” in IL/IR scholarship, political scientists are adapting their research on international law to the broader world politics trend in political science by studying types of law—including extraterritoriality, conflict of laws, private international law, and the law of transnational commercial arbitration—that govern the transnational activity of private actors and can either support or hinder private global governance. Third, moving beyond the domestic-international divide, political scientists are increasingly rejecting “international law exceptionalism,” and beginning to take advantage of theoretical convergence across the domestic, comparative, and international politics subfields to develop a better general understanding law and politics.

Christensen: The Creation of an Ad Hoc Elite: And the Value of International Criminal Law Expertise on a Global Market

Mikkel Jarle Christensen (Univ. of Copenhagen - Law) has posted The Creation of an Ad Hoc Elite: And the Value of International Criminal Law Expertise on a Global Market (in The Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law, Kevin Jon Heller, Frédéric Mégret, Sarah Nouwen, Jens David Ohlin, & Darryl Robinson eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

This article investigates the creation and evolution of a new professional elite within and around the international criminal courts. By professional elite the article refers here to the agents able to move into senior positions and individually exert material and symbolic influence on the development of international criminal law (ICL). Building on a wider internationalization of criminal law and political investments in international institution building, this group of professionals moved from other career paths into the nascent field of ICL. Here they became the drivers of new institutional and legal developments and one of the primary embodiments of the institutional and symbolic authority generated in this field. The influence of this heterogeneous group that consisted of legal professionals, NGO advocates, diplomats and academics often built on the ability to mobilize several different forms of expertise and invest it towards the promise to end impunity.

Job Opening: Groningen (PhD Positions)

The University of Groningen has issued a call for applications for two PhD positions for the research project “The Rules of Interpretation of Customary International Law.” Here's the announcement:

Open call for 2 PhD Positions for the European Research Council (ERC) Funded Research Project, “The Rules of Interpretation of Customary International Law” (TRICI-Law), University of Groningen

TRICI-Law is a research project funded through an ERC Starting Grant (on ERC StGs see here), which was awarded in 2017 to Prof. Panos Merkouris. Based at the Department of Transboundary Legal Studies of the University of Groningen, TRICI-Law is seeking two PhD Researchers, each of which will be a four-year appointment.

The research focus of the PhD positions will revolve around the theory of interpretation of customary international law, and the manner in which both international and domestic courts have approached it in their own jurisprudence (on the research focus of each position see here). The successful applicants will be appointed starting 1 May 2018 (or soon thereafter).

More information on the positions, the project, submission of applications and selection process can be found here.

Applications must be submitted by 29 March 2018 (23:59 CET).

Informal enquiries may be directed to Prof. Panos Merkouris (p.merkouris@rug.nl).