This article examines the paradoxical effects of international legal accountability processes on the international law of intelligence. In response to increasing exposure of their intelligence activities, liberal democracies have shifted from a national security culture of secrecy to one of legal rationalisation, offering legal justifications to defend and legitimate contested practices. Rather than improving compliance, accountability processes have enabled states to strategically reshape legal norms to accommodate their preferred policies. Focusing on how legal justifications affect international law’s constraining function, the article analyses the effects of legal justifications on three dimensions of legal norms: obligation, precision and delegation. Intertwining doctrinal legal analysis with International Relations scholarship on rhetorical and justificatory approaches to international law, it identifies four causal mechanisms through which strategic legal justifications decrease law’s constraining power on state behaviour and facilitate norm evasion. The article demonstrates how strategic uses of international law for legitimation purposes can gradually alter legal norms without formal changes to legal texts or institutions, ultimately decreasing international law’s constraining power. Shedding light on the limits and risks of legalisation as a regulatory strategy, these findings raise important questions about the effectiveness and adequacy of legal accountability strategies, particularly strategic litigation, in inducing behavioural change.

We conducted an exploratory cross-sectional analysis of ethical principles and practices in forty-one published research papers with empirical data on HIV prevalence, incidence, or risk factors in humanitarian settings. We identified ten key concepts pertinent to ethical principles and applications, and presented recommendations to inform future HIV prevention research.

This case note analyses the General Court’s judgment in Arysta Lifescience v EFSA (Case T-222/23), which addresses the tensions arising from the disclosure of the lists of co-formulant in the context of the EU risk assessment of pesticides. The decision consolidates the General Court’s interpretation of “information relating to emissions into the environment” under Article 6(1) of Aarhus Regulation, confirming its applicability to the list of co-formulants contained in representative products.

In the literature, the Rule of Law (ROL) is mainly explained, and its value justified, by reference to its support for a liberal conception of human agency. As such, the connection between the ROL and legitimacy is normally considered contingent if the conception of the ROL is thin. It can be rendered necessary, it seems, only by a substantive conception that incorporates other political ideals, notably democracy. Without recourse to such a move, this article defends a necessary ROL-legitimacy connection by exploring the ROL’s contribution to the task of pacification, which, I argue, is inherent in the claim of legitimacy. My interpretation re-orients the ROL’s foundational value from the liberal conception of human agency to politically inspired fear and summa mala. The paradigmatic shift is in line with the realism approach to political theory which derives and explains moral claims in political theories from considerations of basic political necessity.

This paper examines Health System Resilience (HSR) through a political science lens, arguing that the capacity of health systems to become resilient is shaped not only by technical capabilities and available resources but also by the political theories underpinning health systems and health policy. While HSR has gained prominence in health research as a concept, its integration with political theories remains limited – particularly within political science literature. Drawing on a scoping review, the paper finds that political dimensions – such as governance and leadership, institutional path dependency, and power dynamics – are rarely and unevenly addressed in the literature. Most sources adopt a fragmented view of policy and politics, infrequently identifying the Political Determinants of Health (PDoH) systematically or analysing them through robust political theory. As a result, resilience is often depoliticised and treated as a managerial issue rather than a contested political process. In light of these findings, the paper proposes new opportunities to scrutinise how HSR is shaped by the interplay of actors, ideas, and institutions. In doing so, it contributes to developing a political science of health that fosters stronger interdisciplinary engagement. The paper calls on political scientists to engage more proactively with public health scholarship to support politically informed and more effective resilience strategies.

This paper revisits debates about the right to communicate from the late 1960s to early 2000s, examining how different actors engaged with this concept in reaction to imminent technological changes and their implications for society. It explores how these actors advocated for or contested this concept at different international forums such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to advance different agendas for the international order. In telling the story of the right to communicate, this paper adopts a historical-materialist approach, examining discursive struggles as reflective of and conditioned by material and social relations and their contradictions, and reflects on the question of the promise and perils of human rights for social change, considering not only the malleability of rights language but the material conditions of which human rights concepts are reflective and constitutive.

This article distinguishes isolationist and integrationist accounts of the legal-economic nexus. Isolationists deny the possibility of integrating different theoretical perspectives, while integrationists try to unify different accounts. Leading legal theorists have recently presented isolationist efficiency-, liberty-, and democracy-centred accounts of the market. It is argued that the legal–economic nexus is an integrationist concept, requiring an integrationist understanding of the constitutive role of law in the economy – a common view within the Law and Political Economy movement. Two integrationist strategies are presented: structural integrations and epistemic translations. Using them, an integrated consumer-centric account of the market is offered: consumers are not mere instruments; they are the lead actor, with all the entitlements in terms of powers, rights, and responsibilities that this position of authority entails.

Strikes against public policies have often been classified as illegal political strikes. Nevertheless, the concept of social movement unionism (SMU) describes how trade unions in some countries have become active players in social struggles, alongside social organizations and protest groups, by using political strikes. Although the International Labor Organization (ILO) prohibits purely political strikes, it recognizes the legitimacy of protest strikes concerning public issues. In this respect, the article combines the notion of global constitutionalism with the concept of SMU to explore the issue of political strikes in times of social or democratic struggles. Global constitutionalism regards certain international principles as paramount, offering them a status akin to constitutional law. Drawing on the intersection of the theory of SMU with the concept of global constitutionalism, the article suggests that strikes against governmental policy, framed as part of broader social protests, can effectively oppose controversial public policies. The article claims that protest strikes should be recognized as legitimate exercises of workers’ freedom of association, based on the application of relevant ILO principles through global constitutionalism.

On grounds of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi between 2021 and 2023, this paper analyses 20 cases of police violence, which occurred during the December 2019 protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. I argue that majoritarian practices of policing, through legal and extra-legal mechanisms, “unmake” the victims of violence. Instead, police procedures frame victims as perpetrators. The unmaking of the victims and subsequent criminalization occur through layers of discursive, procedural, investigatory, and legal strategies employed in everyday policing. In a Kafkaesque turn in law and society, I identify the omissions, exclusions, and invocations that result in a devastating deprivation of justice.

The writer, Chimamanda Adichie, was sent out of an Nsukka chapel for wearing a short-sleeved blouse. The TV presenter, Funmi Iyanda, was harassed by police for wearing a knee-length dress. Nigeria’s response to a suit at the ECOWAS Court of Justice brought by an actress, Dorothy Njemanze, included that she “dress[ed] naked or half naked”. Firdaus Amasa was initially denied call to the Nigerian bar because she wore a hijab beneath her lawyer’s wig, and several young women have been decamped from the mandatory National Youth Service Corps programme for wearing skirts instead of trousers and shorts. Analysing the above incidents, alongside the Supreme Court’s decision in Lagos State Government v Abdulkareem, this article finds that though it is easier to enforce women’s rights to choose their dress when religious liberty is engaged, the constitutionally guaranteed protection against degrading treatment is one thread that runs across all instances of policing women’s dress. Consequently, prioritizing dignity rights for Nigeria’s womenfolk will shield them from indignities associated with policing their dress choices.

This article examines the role of the African Union’s Peace and Security Council (PSC) in strengthening compliance with international humanitarian law (IHL), a dimension of its mandate that remains largely unexplored in the literature. The article argues that although this mandate is explicit and carries significant normative potential, its implementation remains limited, fragmented and inconsistent. To demonstrate this, the study proceeds in three steps. First, it analyzes the normative foundations of the PSC’s IHL mandate through an interpretative and systemic reading of its constitutive texts. Second, it critically assesses the Council’s concrete practice, highlighting the limits and inconsistencies of its actions and instruments. Third, it identifies avenues for improvement, emphasizing the need to institutionalize compliance monitoring, to structure PSC decisions with greater precision and gradation, and to make fuller use of available legal mechanisms and partnerships. The central argument is that the PSC holds under-utilized legal and institutional tools which, if fully mobilized, could significantly enhance its effectiveness in fulfilling its IHL-related mandate and establish it as a key regional actor in the promotion of respect for IHL and the protection of victims of armed conflict.

The article discusses the unfolding of the anticorruption campaign in Romania, from pre-accession to present day. Its argument is that the risk-induced anticorruption paradigm has produced effects that have been from the very beginning irreconcilable with liberal-constitutional normativity. To generate results, normative understandings regarding fundamental rights, institutional autonomy, and judicial independence were subordinated to the policy imperatives and manipulated to achieve them. In the long run, normative considerations resurfaced as a backlash, in equally distorted and instrumental forms. I argue that a single-minded pursuit of policy imperatives thought conducive to risk-abatement has not only not reduced or managed the risk of corruption but also has generated more intractable, systemic threat patterns. Some of these paradoxical, unintended consequences are not contained, resulting in normative spillover within the common constitutional area. The first part of my paper discusses the politicisation of the judicial system. A second substantive section analyses the protracted saga of judicial salaries and pensions and repeated attempts to manipulate the retirement conditions in order to generate personnel and policy changes. A third probes into the dialogues between the CJEU, the Romanian Constitutional Court and the High Court of Cassation and Justice regarding the statute of limitations and its implications.