New Issue: Revista Latinoamericana de Derecho Comercial Internacional

The latest issue of the Revista Latinoamericana de Derecho Comercial Internacional/Latin American Journal of International Trade Law (Vol. 2, no. 1, 2014) is out. Contents include:

• Inu Barbee & Simon Lester, The TPP and the future of trade agreements
• Elisabeth Bürgi Bonanomi, An enabling regulatory environment for sustainable investment: the example of trade law
• Luciana Dutra de Oliveira Silveira & Ricardo Inglez de Souza, The public interest analysis in trade remedies investigations in Brazil
• Eduardo Márquez Certucha, Social Entrepreneurship: bringing together impact investment, trade facilitation and regulatory reform
• Ricardo García de la Rosa, Dichotomous evolution, regionalism and multilateralism: plurilateralism as a missing link
• Carlo Sheiternig, Sovereign bonds as investments under the ICSID convention
• Pedro Arcoverde, Public policy and the recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards in Brazil: an analysis against the backdrop of global governance
• David Khachvani, Exclusion of right to challenge the arbitral award
• Carlos H. Reyes Díaz, BG v. Argentina. Investor State arbitration. Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States of America

Binder & Lachmayer: The European Court of Human Rights and Public International Law: Fragmentation or Unity?

Christina Binder & Konrad Lachmayer have published The European Court of Human Rights and Public International Law: Fragmentation or Unity? (Nomos 2014). Here's the abstract:

How does the European Court of Human Rights deal with notions, issues and principles of public international law? How is public international law received and applied by the European Court of Human Rights? The different contributions analyse the question “Fragmentation or Unity?" in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights in light of different issues. Topics include the Court’s approach to the law of treaties, state responsibility, and state and diplomatic immunity. Likewise, the manner in which the European Court of Human Rights deals with the obligation to not recognize unlawful situations is examined.

New Volume: Australian International Law Journal

The latest volume of the Australian International Law Journal (Vol. 20, 2013) is out. Contents include:

• Mini Symposium: Creating New Futures for All: International Law and the Protection of Migrant Children at Risk
Yanghee Lee, Address: Creating New Futures for All Children: The Promise of International Human Rights Law
• Ron McCallum & Hannah Martin, Comment: The CRPD and Children with Disabilities
• Mary Crock, Of Relative Rights and Putative Children: Rethinking the Critical Framework for the Protection of Refugee Children and Youth
• Ben Saul, Indefinite Security Detention and Refugee Children and Families in Australia: International Human Rights Law Dimensions
• Kim Rubenstein & Jacqueline Field, Conceptualising Australian Citizenship for Children: A Human Rights Perspective
• Other Articles
• Megan Davis, Luke Bastin, Amici Curiae in Investor-State Arbitrations: Two Recent Decisions
• Ilyas U Musurmanov, The Implications of Romak v Uzbekistan for Defining the Concept of Investment
• Owen Webb, Kiobel, the Alien Tort Statute and the Common Law: Human Rights Litigation in this ‘Present, Imperfect World’
• Patrick Wall, Sitting on Solid Ground: The International Legal Basis for Overseas Sittings of the Military Court of Australia

Conference: 22nd ANZSIL Annual Conference

The Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law will hold its 22nd Annual Conference on July 3-5, 2014, at the Australian National University, in Canberra. The theme is: "Towards International Peace through International Law." The program is here. Here's the idea:

The theme of ANZSIL’s 22nd Annual Conference has been chosen to resonate with the commemorations taking place around the world in 2014 to mark the centenary of the beginning of World War 1. The conference will provide an opportunity to reflect upon the project of achieving international peace through international law that has shaped the past century. Horror at the scale and destructiveness of World War 1 spurred a new political commitment to preventing future wars. The League of Nations Covenant signed in the war’s aftermath expressed the commitment of the High Contracting Parties to achieving international peace and security through accepting obligations not to resort to war, establishing international law ‘as the actual rule of conduct among Governments’, and maintaining ‘justice and a scrupulous respect for all treaty obligations’. The dream of achieving perpetual peace was an old one, but the emphasis on doing so through international law and international institutions was new. Despite the subsequent disenchantment with the failures of the League, reflected famously in the skeptical reactions of realists such as EH Carr and Hans Morgenthau to the ideal of achieving ‘peace through law’, the United Nations Charter expressed an ongoing determination ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’ through the maintenance of international peace and security and the peaceful settlement of international disputes in conformity with international justice and international law. Today the commitment to settling disputes by peaceful means continues to underpin many developments in international law. Public and private international law initiatives in the fields of trade, investment, and financial regulation aim to secure peace through economic stability and commercial relations, while the language of security continues to inform internationalist projects, from the maintenance of collective security to human security, food security, energy security, climate security, and cyber security.

The conference will explore the role that international law and international lawyers have played in the pursuit of international peace and security over the past century, and the role that they might play in the century to come. How have changing definitions or visions of peace and security informed the development of international law? How do the trauma and memory of war shape international law as an ideal, a set of institutions, a commitment, or a project? What contribution have Australians and New Zealanders made to the realisation of peace through law, whether on the Security Council, in peace operations, as judges and arbitrators at the Peace Palace and beyond, as civil society activists, as scholars, or as ‘norm entrepreneurs’? How do international legal doctrines and practices respond to changes in the nature of war and new threats to peace and security? What happens when the pursuit of peace and security comes into conflict with other values, such as justice, equality, or self-determination? What mechanisms and techniques for achieving the peaceful settlement of disputes have been developed by international lawyers, and what innovations are today being developed to address contemporary disputes and potential conflicts?

Vidmar: Democracy and Regime Change in the Post-Cold War International Law

Jure Vidmar (Univ. of Oxford - Law) has posted Democracy and Regime Change in the Post-Cold War International Law (New Zealand Journal of Public and International Law, Vol. 11, p. 349, 2013). Here's the abstract:

International human rights treaties were drafted in the age of the Cold War. In this environment, they remained neutral with respect to the particular political system or electoral method. In the post-Cold War era, scholarly arguments have been made that contemporary international law should be read with a democratic bias. Analysing the practice of states and United Nations organs, this article critically considers the democratic reading of international legal norms and argues that even in the post-Cold War era, a state does not violate international law simply by not being democratic. But this conclusion is not unqualified. The article demonstrates that collective practice is emerging of denial of legitimacy to coup governments where they overthrow democratically-elected ones. Governments can also lose international legitimacy on the basis of their abusiveness, although the latter is not necessarily determined by a lack of democratic electoral practices. Finally, where a regime change is internationalised, a collective attempt is commonly made to enact a new democratic government. Although not a legal norm per se, democracy is often an international policy preference which has influenced even some legally-binding documents adopted in the post-Cold War period.

Nollkaemper: Power and Responsibility

André Nollkaemper (Univ. of Amsterdam - Law) has posted Power and Responsibility (in Un Diritto Senza Terra? Funzioni e limiti del principio di territorialità nel diritto internazionale e dell’Unione europea / A Lackland Law? Territory, Effectiveness and Jurisdiction in International and European Law, A. Di Stefano ed., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

This paper critically reviews the popular proposition that 'power breeds responsibility'. It first explains why this proposition is intuitively appealing. Particularly in situations where multiple actors contribute to harm, power can be a criterion for determining who of a multitude of actors should bear responsibility. For instance, much of the case law on extra territorial human rights protection is based on a concept of power. The paper then explains why this intuition can be misleading. Saying that power informs responsibility is begging the question what type of power triggers what type of responsibility in what way. The paper focuses in particular on the ambiguity of the concept of power (different meanings of power have different implications for responsibility) and on the duality of the power-responsibility relationship (power itself may be constituted or influenced by responsibility). While generally speaking power indeed is highly relevant in explaining the allocation of responsibility between multiple parties, power is best considered as a compound concept that can take different forms, and which may pull in different directions, depending on the perspective from which power is analysed and the context in which it is applied.

Conference: Fifth International Four Societies Conference

On July 1-2, 2014, the American Society of International Law, the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law, the Canadian Council on International Law, and the Japanese Society of International Law will hold their fifth joint conference, at the Australian National University, in Canberra. The theme is "Experts, Networks and International Law." The program is here.

Krieger: The Oxford Companion to International Relations

Joel Krieger (Wellesley College - International Relations) has published The Oxford Companion to International Relations (Oxford Univ. Press 2014). Here's the abstract:

International Relations has long been a core discipline within Political Science, one of vast importance for understanding social, cultural, economic and political exchanges across national boundaries. Every dimension of human experience falls within the scope of the field, making it applicable to psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and others across a wide swath of academia. The two-volume Oxford Companion to International Relations would be one of the first reference works to make this field clear and comprehensible to both specialists and non-specialists. Entries are mostly thematic in content, rather than site-specific, permitting the work to have value and currency for years to come. The numerous theories and applications of IR are comprehensively covered, as would controversies related to the field, prominent figures, and ways IR has shaped political history. There are revised & updated entries derived from the Oxford Companion to Politics of the World, while the rest would be newly commissioned and authored by the foremost IR scholars around the world. New entries cover institutional developments (for instance, the creation and operation of the International Criminal Court, the governance of the Internet, and the various changes in the international monetary architecture since the beginning of the economic crisis); significant events that were not covered in the older volume (the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the challenges facing new democratic regimes in Eastern Europe and Africa); and advances in IR scholarship, especially in the fields of terrorism and international security. Fifteen interpretive essays are interspersed throughout the A-Z text, encouraging further scholarship and dialogue between readers.

Wirth: The World Trade Organization Dispute over Genetically Modified Organisms: The Precautionary Principle Meets International Trade Law

David A. Wirth (Boston College - Law) has posted The World Trade Organization Dispute over Genetically Modified Organisms: The Precautionary Principle Meets International Trade Law (Vermont Law Review, Vol. 27, no. 4, 2013). Here's the abstract:

“Precaution” is increasingly accepted as a basis for governmental policy in the areas of public health and environment on both the domestic and international levels. A precautionary perspective counsels action to avert danger or threats in situations of scientific uncertainty or incomplete information. Precautionary approaches find expression in internationally harmonized formulations as non-binding exhortations, binding treaties, and meta-level principles. Precaution is a particular challenge to free trade agreements, whose purpose is to eliminate unjustified barriers to trade. In that context, precaution as a justification for a challenged governmental measure may appear to be nothing more than a pretext for protectionism. This article traces the treatment of precaution in the jurisprudence of the World Trade Organization, and particularly under the Uruguay Round Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards. From this perspective, the piece analyzes a number of controversial disputes, including those over hormone-treated beef and genetically modified food and crops, and makes recommendations for an alternative treatment of this important question by the WTO’s Appellate Body.

New Issue: Questions of International Law

The latest issue of Questions of International Law / Questioni di Diritto Internazionale (no. 4, 2014) is out. Contents include:

• The latest (and hopefully last) boat tragedy. Is there a right to be rescued at sea?
• Introduced by Andrea Caligiuri and Irini Papanicolopulu
• Seline Trevisanut, Is there a right to be rescued at sea? A constructive view
• Efthymios Papastavridis, Is there a right to be rescued at sea? A skeptical view

Clark: International Trials and Reconciliation

Janine Natalya Clark (Univ. of Sheffield - Politics) has published International Trials and Reconciliation: Assessing the Impact of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (Routledge 2014). Here's the abstract:

Transitional justice is a burgeoning field of scholarly inquiry. Yet while the transitional justice literature is replete with claims about the benefits of criminal trials, too often these claims lack an empirical basis and hence remain unproven. While there has been much discussion about whether criminal trials can aid reconciliation, the extent to which they actually do so in practice remains under-explored. This book investigates the relationship between criminal trials and reconciliation, through a particular focus on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Using detailed empirical data – in the form of qualitative interviews and observations from five years of fieldwork – to assess and analyze the ICTY’s impact on reconciliation in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia and Kosovo, International Trials and Reconciliation: Assessing the Impact of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia argues that reconciliation is not a realistic aim for a criminal court. They are, Janine Clark argues, only one part of a rich tapestry of justice, which must also include non-retributive transitional justice processes and mechanisms.

New Issue: International Journal of Human Rights

The latest issue of the International Journal of Human Rights (Vol. 18, no. 3, 2014) is out. Contents include:

• Special Issue: Climate change, environmental violence and genocide
• Jürgen Zimmerer, Foreword
• Jürgen Zimmerer, Climate change, environmental violence and genocide
• Mark Levene & Daniele Conversi, Subsistence societies, globalisation, climate change and genocide: discourses of vulnerability and resilience
• Martin Crook & Damien Short, Marx, Lemkin and the genocide–ecocide nexus
• Gregory Kent, Crystallisations of the global western state in the era of climate change
• Rebecca Hofmann, Culturecide in changing Micronesian climates? About the unintenionality of climate change
• Andreas Exenberger & Andreas Pondorfer, Genocidal risk and climate change: Africa in the twenty-first century
• Jürgen Scheffran, Tobias Ide & Janpeter Schilling, Violent climate or climate of violence? Concepts and relations with focus on Kenya and Sudan

New Issue: International Journal of Refugee Law

The latest issue of the International Journal of Refugee Law (Vol. 26, no. 2, June 2014) is out. Contents include:

• Liv Feijen, Filling the Gaps? Subsidiary Protection and Non-EU Harmonized Protection Status(es) in the Nordic Countries
• Mollie Gerver, Testing Repatriation Contracts for Unconscionability: The Case of Refugees in Israel
• Tilman Rodenhäuser, Another Brick in the Wall: Carrier Sanctions and the Privatization of Immigration Control
• Joke Reijven & Joris van Wijk, Caught in Limbo: How Alleged Perpetrators of International Crimes who Applied for Asylum in the Netherlands are Affected by a Fundamental System Error in International Law
• Hugo Storey, What Constitutes Persecution? Towards a Working Definition

New Issue: International Relations

The latest issue of International Relations (Vol. 28, no. 2, June 2014) is out. Contents include:

• Peter Vale, If International Relations lives on the street, what is it doing in the classroom?
• Jan Niklas Rolf, The state of nature analogy in International Relations theory
• Sam Raphael & Doug Stokes, US oil strategy in the Caspian Basin: Hegemony through interdependence
• Andrés Villar Gertner, The Beagle Channel frontier dispute between Argentina and Chile: Converging domestic and international conflicts
• Tyler M Curley, Methodological process ethics in international theory
• Forum
• Richard N Lebow & Thomas Lindemann, Symbolic and cultural approaches to the origins of World War I: Introduction
• Richard N Lebow, What have we learned from World War I?
• Franca Loewener, World War I: A matter of respectability?
• Reinhard Wolf, Status fixations, the need for ‘firmness’, and decisions for war
• Charles F Doran, World War I as existential crisis amidst the shifting tides of history
• Thomas Lindemann, World War I as a self-fulfilling catastrophe

Special Issue: L'Afrique face à la justice pénale internationale

The latest issue of Études internationales (Vol. 45, no. 1, March 2014) focuses on "L'Afrique face à la justice pénale internationale." Contents include:

• Special Issue: L'Afrique face à la justice pénale internationale
• Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer, Introduction : Union africaine versus Cour pénale internationale : répondre aux objections et sortir de la crise
• Frédéric Mégret, Cour pénale internationale et néo-colonialisme : au-delà des évidences
• Diane Bernard, Un (possible) apport africain à la justice internationale pénale
• Damien Scalia, Le sens de la peine dans la première condamnation par la Cour pénale internationale
• Viviane E. Dittrich, La Cour spéciale pour la Sierra Leone et la portée de son héritage
• Raymond Ouigou Savadogo, Les Chambres africaines extraordinaires au sein des tribunaux sénégalais. Quoi de si extraordinaire ?
• Fannie Lafontaine, La compétence universelle et l'Afrique : ingérence ou complémentarité?

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al.: The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies

Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (Univ. of Oxford), Gil Loescher (Univ. of Oxford), Katy Long (Univ. of Edinburgh), & Nando Sigona (Univ. of Birmingham) have published The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (Oxford Univ. Press 2014). The table of contents is here. Here's the abstract:

Refugee and Forced Migration Studies has grown from being a concern of a relatively small number of scholars and policy researchers in the 1980s to a global field of interest with thousands of students worldwide studying displacement either from traditional disciplinary perspectives or as a core component of newer programmes across the Humanities and Social and Political Sciences. Today the field encompasses both rigorous academic research which may or may not ultimately inform policy and practice, as well as action-research focused on advocating in favour of refugees' needs and rights.

This authoritative Handbook critically evaluates the birth and development of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, and analyses the key contemporary and future challenges faced by academics and practitioners working with and for forcibly displaced populations around the world. The 52 state-of-the-art chapters, written by leading academics, practitioners, and policymakers working in universities, research centres, think tanks, NGOs and international organizations, provide a comprehensive and cutting-edge overview of the key intellectual, political, social and institutional challenges arising from mass displacement in the world today. The chapters vividly illustrate the vibrant and engaging debates that characterize this rapidly expanding field of research and practice.

Ohlin: Acting as a Sovereign Versus Acting as a Belligerent

Jens David Ohlin (Cornell Univ. - Law) has posted Acting as a Sovereign Versus Acting as a Belligerent (in Theoretical Boundaries of Armed Conflict and Human Rights, Jens David Ohlin ed., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

In many legal disputes, the selection of one body of law rather than another is outcome-determinative. The situation with targeted killings is no different. Although there are contrary impulses at the margins, in the main a human rights paradigm is more likely to restrict such operations while a law of war paradigm is more likely to sanction it. But the question is when each body of law applies, a question that is not explicitly addressed by either body. By looking at the underlying object and purpose of each body of law, however, an account of their respective spheres becomes apparent. This essay defends the claim that the dividing line is represented by a state acting as a sovereign as opposed to acting as a belligerent. In the former situation, the state acts as a ruler over its subjects and its activities are constrained by human rights law. In contrast, when the state acts as a belligerent during armed conflict, International Humanitarian Law regulates its actions. This essay provides a framework to determine when the state is acting in one mode rather than another: acting as a sovereign involves an unequal relationship (ruler-to-ruled), while belligerency is characterized by two, formally co-equal collectives facing each other in battle. At the closing stage of an armed conflict, the relationship of belligerency may give way to sovereignty, a transition point that is often characterized by the law of occupation. The argument is both normative and descriptive in the sense that the two bodies of law already embody these normative distinctions; therefore their respective application is currently delimited by these existing principles.

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 6, no. 2, July 2014) is out. Contents include:

• Arjun Chowdhury & Raymond Duvall, Sovereignty and sovereign power
• Luis Cabrera, Individual rights and the democratic boundary problem
• Juha Käpylä & Denis Kennedy, Cruel to care? Investigating the governance of compassion in the humanitarian imaginary
• Forum: Interrogating the use of norms in international relations: postcolonial perspectives
• Charlotte Epstein, The postcolonial perspective: an introduction
• Ayşe Zarakol, What made the modern world hang together: socialisation or stigmatisation?
• Julia Gallagher, Chopping the world into bits: Africa, the World Bank, and the good governance norm
• Robbie Shilliam, “Open the Gates Mek We Repatriate”: Caribbean slavery, constructivism, and hermeneutic tensions
• Vivienne Jabri, Disarming norms: postcolonial agency and the constitution of the international

New Issue: Die Friedens-Warte

The latest issue of Die Friedens-Warte (2013, nos. 3-4) is out. Contents include:

• Accountability of Peacekeepers
• Andreas von Arnauld & Sinthiou Buszewski, Modes of Legal Accountability: The Srebrenica Example
• Christiane Ahlborn, To Share or Not to Share? The Allocation of Responsibility between International Organizations and their Member States
• Katarina Lundahl, The United Nations and the Remedy Gap: The Haiti Cholera Dispute
• Philipp Stöckle, Victims Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Individual Compensation Claims against Troop-Contributing States
• Tomas Macura, Accountability and Protection of UN Peacekeepers in Light of MONUSCO
• Vanshika Vij, Individual Criminal Responsibility Under Aiding and Abetting After the Specific Direction Requirement in the Taylor and Perišić Cases
• Hannah Birkenkötter, Explaining Srebrenica: Establishing a Narrative through Criminal Trials
• María Juliana Machado Forero, Sandra Karlsson, & Lisa-Marie Rudi, The Victims Who Are Not Quite Victim Enough: How the ICC Creates Divides Within Victim Communities

New Issue: Review of International Organizations

The latest issue of the Review of International Organizations (Vol. 9, no. 2, June 2014) is out. Contents include:

• Special Issue: The Political Economy of Multilateral Trade Negotiations
• Peter Egger & Marcelo Olarreaga, Introduction to the special issue on the political economy of multilateral trade negotiations
• Simon J. Evenett, The Doha Round impasse: A graphical account
• Katerina Gradeva & Dany Jaimovich, Multilateral determinants of regionalism revisited
• Erik van der Marel & Sébastien Miroudot, The economics and political economy of going beyond the GATS
• Bernard Hoekman, Sustaining multilateral trade cooperation in a multipolar world economy
• Richard Baldwin, WTO 2.0: Governance of 21st century trade

Call for Papers: Imagining Post-Neoliberal Regulatory Subjectivities

The research project How to Rule the Economy? has issued a call for papers for a seminar on "Imagining Post-Neoliberal Regulatory Subjectivities." Here's the call:

Imagining post-neoliberal regulatory subjectivities: call for papers

The tide of neoliberalism lies at the heart of the modus operandi of Western societies. Its first wave pushed an agenda of deregulation. The second wave started a reflexive process of re-regulation. Standards, codes of conduct, recommendations and other soft legal instruments proliferated to address the market failures and information asymmetry problems unearthed by the initial ebb of regulation.

The neoliberal deregulatory push introduced a flurry of instruments which challenge legal orthodoxy. These instruments seem to be performing a novel ontology of law, one which eludes the previous legal heuristic of prescription and proscription, inclusion and exclusion. The central-but hitherto under-conceptualised-tenet of this transformation is that law no longer leaves its subjects radically free to act within the bounds of law. Instead, regulation extends its reach to virgin territory, within the subject itself.

The new art of regulation works through establishing elaborate schemes aimed at producing actors with appropriate agency – or in anthropomorphic terms, a subjectivity. Many of these subjectivity regulation processes have taken place inside economic actors. For example, the Basel banking rules, the ISO 26000 Guidance on social responsibility and the OECD Principles of Corporate Governance all articulate and assign actors specific subjectivities to perform. By scripting the internal cognitive and control flows, the regulatory schemes seem to control the conduct of their subjects by affecting the subjects’ selves.

This subjectivity turn is a challenge to regulatory theory. We are not accustomed to think that law purposely changes its subjects. Simultaneously, the fundamental change seems to also open a possibility for transcending the paralysing effects of zombie neoliberalism. A new space for ethical struggle emerges. Despite its origins in ordoliberal schemes of ameliorating perceived rationality deficiencies in economic theory and practice, subjectivity regulation is inherently inundated by ethical programs and value judgements. Once the self of the subject is on the table, even a progressive ethics can no longer be bracketed away in the favour of external rationalities or set, immobile neoliberal subjectivities. The playing field is levelled: regulation becomes a battlefield of multiple ethics and concomitant assemblages of things, ideas and subjects.

How to Rule the Economy, a research project funded by the Academy of Finland, is organising a seminar on imagining post-neoliberal regulatory subjectivities. We call for papers dealing with different aspects of the subjectivity turn. The papers could, for example, map the possible genealogies for the emergence of post-neoliberal law, or address the implications of anthropomorphic corporate regulation, or transformations in sovereign subjectivities.

The seminar takes place in south-western Finland, in a former leper colony, from October 15 to October 17 2014. The seminar is intended for late stage PhD students and early career post-docs. We will accept 8-12 applicants to give papers. The generous support from How to Rule the Economy and Faculty of Law, University of Turku allows us to pay for travel and accommodation for presenters. If you would like to participate, please send us an abstract (max. 600 words) at the latest on August 15, 2014 to lawinthelighthouse@utu.fi

Arnone & Borlini: Corruption: Economic Analysis and International Law

Marco Arnone & Leonardo S. Borlini (Bocconi Univ. - Law) have published Corruption: Economic Analysis and International Law (Edward Elgar Publishing 2014). Here's the abstract:

Corruption presents many legal and regulatory challenges, but these challenges cannot be met by the law in isolation. This book presents economic analysis of crime as an essential tool for shaping an effective legal apparatus.

The authors contend that in order to assess whether and how to regulate corruption, it is necessary to start with a thorough inquiry into the causes, institutional and social effects, and most of all, actual and potential economic and financial consequences of crimes. This, they argue, should inform and help shape a balanced legal and regulatory approach to corruption.

Economic analysis is also the key to measuring the efficacy of current anti-corruption instruments, and in the light of this the book finds many existing legal counter-measures lacking. On the other hand, its assessment of new international instruments and their domestic implementation and enforcement, and the monitoring mechanisms embedded by certain international organizations, demonstrates a clear relationship between realistic economic analysis and effective solutions to the economic and legal problems posed by corruption.

Offering a comprehensive legal study of corruption and grounded in economic analysis, this detailed book will appeal to scholars and researchers in crime and corruption, international public organizations and anti-corruption agencies.

Krabbe: Excusable Evil: An Analysis of Complete Defenses in International Criminal Law

Maartje Krabbe (Radboud Univ. - Law) has published Excusable Evil: An Analysis of Complete Defenses in International Criminal Law (Intersentia 2014). Here's the abstract:

Could Hitler have pleaded insanity? Can a soldier participating in a massacre claim duress because his superior forced him? In domestic criminal law complete defenses, such as insanity and duress, are relatively common legal concepts. But what is the role of these arguments in international criminal law? Can horrific large-scale crimes, such as genocide and crimes against humanity, ever be excused?

This book provides an analysis of cases featuring complete defenses before international criminal courts (IMT, IMTFE, ICTY, ICTR and ICC). The conclusion of the analysis is that international criminal courts recognize most complete defenses in principle. However, they consistently reject them in practice. Courts thus tend to say: “Insanity is available as a complete defense … but not in this case”. This conclusion raises questions as to the compatibility between complete defenses and international crimes: When they are never accepted in practice, should such defenses be available at all? The final Part of the book answers this question in the affirmative and provides recommendations on the contents of complete defenses in the field of international criminal justice.

Tooze: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916-1931

Adam Tooze (Yale Univ. - History) has published The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916-1931 (Allen Lane 2014). Here's the abstract:

In the depths of the Great War, with millions of dead and no imaginable end to the conflict, societies around the world began to buckle. As the cataclysmic battles continued, a new world was being born. Adam Tooze's extraordinary new book is a truly global history from 1916 to the 1920s. It shows how the war and its aftershocks completely reshaped country after country, leaving politicians to battle with circumstances unimaginable before 1914. New ideologies took over entire nations, empires which had lasted since the Middle Ages collapsed in ruins and an entirely new architecture had to be created for running the world if a second, perhaps even more terrible conflict, was to be avoided.

Woltag: Cyber Warfare: Military Cross-Border Computer Network Operations under International Law Author(s):

Johann-Christoph Woltag has published Cyber Warfare: Military Cross-Border Computer Network Operations under International Law (Intersentia 2014). Here's the abstract:

In the last five years the topic of cyber warfare has received much attention due to several so-called “cyber incidents” which have been qualified by many as State-sponsored cyber attacks. This book identifies rules and limits of cross-border computer network operations for which States bear the international responsibility during both peace and war. It consequently addresses questions on jus ad bellum and jus in bello in addition to State responsibility. By reference to treaty and customary international law, actual case studies (Estonia, Georgia, Stuxnet) and the Tallinn Manual, the author illustrates the applicability of current international law and argues for an obligation on the State to prevent malicious operations emanating from networks within their jurisdiction.