Does international law restrict the use of force by states in self-defense even when their survival is threatened? Should it? To answer these questions, I compare international law to domestic law and develop two ideal-types of emergency: in a ‘subject emergency’ law imposes absolute, justiciable limits on self-defense. In a ‘community emergency’ the sovereign, not law, determines what is necessary for the survival of the community and its legal system: sustaining the rule of law justifies its temporary retreat. I show that international law has elements of both ideal-types. It imposes some absolute limits on self-defense. However, international law also retreats, allowing the victim state to determine the (1) aims, (2) ad bellum proportionality, and (3) end of self-defense, as if armed threats triggered community emergencies. These three retreats serve the function of sustaining the rule of international law over the states at war. Retreats (1) and (3) also help sustain the rule of international law over the international community. That international law does and should not treat armed threats against states simply as subject emergencies, shows it can only sustain the rule of international law in an emergency by retreating. This is a negative litmus test for international law's ability to diffuse anarchy in International Relations.

Since the Escazú Agreement entered into force in 2021, many have looked forward to the realization of its goal of further entrenching environmental democratic rights and enabling sustainable development in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region. The severe environmental and related human rights challenges in the region have caught global attention, and the Agreement is most timely in its pursuit of contributing to addressing the situation. This article assesses the quality of, and the extent to which, the right of the public to participate in environmental decision-making processes under the Escazú Agreement can enable the regime to achieve its goal, and how best this right might be strengthened where necessary. This assessment is executed within the context of local peculiarities of the LAC region and good practice in the field, as reflected in the Aarhus Convention and the UNEP Bali Guidelines. The study finds that while aspects of the participatory right regime in the Escazú Agreement are sound – and align with or go beyond existing good practice – some key provisions require improvement in order to increase the effectiveness of the Agreement.

As the origin story of the present world political order the globalization of international society serves as a unifying frame for the discipline of international relations. This paper considers the consequences of the shift from the ‘expansion’ to the ‘globalization’ of international society in relation to two main texts: Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society and Tim Dunne and Christian Reus-Smit's The Globalization of International Society. The analysis shows that Bull's conception of world order depends on a key distinction between aggregate and system which marks the difference between an aggregate of local political orders and a systematically unified world political order (a global international system). Because recent histories of the globalization of international society remain guided by Bull's distinction, they are unable to explain this transition in historical terms without transforming the global international order from the explanandum of the globalization of international society to its explanans. As a result, global histories of the globalization of international society grant a global international system a structural permanence the original expansion story was meant to contest. In doing so they change profoundly the kind of questions that can be asked regarding the origins, character, and future of political order on earth.

Banning political parties is an extreme institutional measure that democracies tend to use sparingly. Nevertheless, Latin American countries frequently proscribe their parties through rules that activate dissolution for not reaching a certain number of votes or seats in an election. Such rules are expected to stabilize and simplify party systems. However, a competing theory suggests that such rules instead promote electoral volatility by injecting political uncertainty into the party system through cyclical refoundation of extinct parties and the mechanical effects of parties’ exits. Attempting to resolve this paradox, this analysis tests the effect of dissolution thresholds on electoral volatility in all Latin American democratic elections since 1980. Party bans based on dissolution thresholds are found to promote electoral volatility, which bears implications for democratic governance.

In 2019, nearly 70 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries received their health insurance coverage through a private, managed care organization (MCO). Twenty-five years earlier, 9.5 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries were enrolled in MCOs. This dramatic growth in Medicaid managed care enrollment represents the delegation of significant power by federal and state governments over a critical social program to private actors and market forces. Medicare, too, experienced a similar pattern of transformation. Together, Medicaid and Medicare, two critical pillars of American social policy, paid more than half a trillion dollars to private insurance companies in 2019 to provide public health insurance to 75 million people. This manuscript examines the policy consequences of building private firms directly into the structure of American social policies. In contrast to existing work on “submerged” or “delegated” policies, this manuscript highlights the structural power that such policies bestow on the government's private partners and develops a new theory of structural power in which firms are able to constrain health policy reform through their threats to disrupt the delivery of public policies and social benefits to millions of people across the United States.

Charles Tilly's classical claim that “war made states” in early modern Europe remains controversial. The “bellicist” paradigm has attracted theoretical criticism both within and beyond its original domain of applicability. While several recent studies have analyzed the internal aspects of Tilly's theory, there have been very few systematic attempts to assess its logic with regard to the territorial expansion of states. In this paper, we test this key aspect of bellicist theory directly by aligning historical data on European state borders with conflict data, focusing on the period from 1490 through 1790. Proceeding at the systemic, state, and dyadic levels, our analysis confirms that warfare did in fact play a crucial role in the territorial expansion of European states before (and beyond) the French Revolution.

Civil religion has been described as the “common elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share”. In an age of partisan division, there have been calls for a revitalized civil religion, but the idea that civil religion can be unifying has been debated. In this paper, we investigate whether civil religion can be unifying, or is it fractured by partisanship? To address this, we use two strategies. First, we created a civil religion battery and deployed it on two different cross-sectional surveys. The results indicate that there are two dimensions to civil religion. These dimensions are distinct from Christian nationalism and structured along partisan lines. Second, we developed two survey experiments to understand the dimensions of civil religion and improve on the causal mechanisms that link civil religion to political behavior. Results indicate that, rather than promoting unity, civil religion is interpreted through partisan lenses.

This paper examines the attitudes of multinational corporations (MNCs) toward the U.S.-China trade war through an original survey of China-based MNC subsidiaries in the manufacturing industry. Our argument is in two parts. First, firms that have relocated production outside of China or are considering such moves should be less likely to oppose the trade war as they possess outside options that reduce their vulnerability to trade restrictions. Second, firms’ tendency toward production relocation can in turn be explained by their local sourcing dependence, as measured by the level of such dependence and the degree to which their operations require supplier certification. This is because firms more heavily embedded in local supplier networks face stronger resource dependence that increases organizational inertia, reducing their ability to switch to alternative suppliers and therefore relocating production to other destinations. Our findings corroborate our hypotheses, highlighting how the heterogeneity in MNCs’ supply chain relationships may influence both their manufacturing relocation decisions and trade policy preferences.

African nations have struggled to secure lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines, while rich nations have purchased more than they needed, depleting the global supply. High vaccine prices and intellectual property regulations that block the production of cheaper generics have contributed to a condition of African waithood. Hagan examines this waithood, which characterizes the disjuncture between African countries’ existential and humanitarian need for COVID-19 vaccines and corporations’ quest for profits in the pandemic. African waithood, produced by pharmaceutical companies including Moderna and Pfizer, is a direct product of colonialism. Waithood echoes the ongoing colonial relations between African nations and the corporations that continue to exploit them.

The African Studies community has reinvigorated discussions about the racial and power dynamics of the field in the past few years. A core question has been how to Africanize knowledge production. Hadfield’s practical example as a white American historian involving Black South African oral history interview participants in different stages of the research process shows that successfully including interview participants in the interpretation stage requires clarity and transparency throughout. If meaningful dialogue is employed and human connections prioritized, the result should be a more accurate and inclusive process that satisfies all, even if scholars and participants disagree.

There are profound expressions of remembrance of science and scientists, innovators and educators in Washington, DC. In this article, we survey the outdoor memorials and also include a few indoor memorials, if they are accessible to the public. There appears to be some predominance of physics and physicists, especially related to electricity among the memorials, but other areas of science are also represented. British and European scientists predominate, reflecting the time gap between memorials and contemporary science. Our coverage extends to a few concepts, such as education, with an emphasis on African American participation, energy, and the protection and conservation of the environment.

In 1989, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh, in the Anwar Hossain Chowdhury case, first embraced implicit unamendability or interpretative unamendability of the Constitution – that is, the basic structure doctrine. Since then, the basic structure or the basic feature doctrine has been recognised as the theoretical premise underpinning judicial review of constitutional amendments in Bangladesh. In 2011, the Parliament adopted Article 7B of the Constitution, which introduced explicit or codified unamendability of a substantial number of provisions of the Constitution. This article argues that with the adoption of Article 7B, the basic structure doctrine has lost its relevance as the most important normative tool for determining the validity of future constitutional amendments, and this was confirmed in the Asaduzzaman case, in which the parliamentary mechanism for the removal of Supreme Court judges was held unconstitutional on the basis of Article 7B of the Constitution. It is also argued that the reasoning provided in the majority opinion of the Asaduzzaman case is not entirely flawless.

The mainstream studies of the East Asian tributary system have been exhibiting a stance that tends to stress the importance of Confucianism in forming and sustaining the tributary system throughout its long history. However, there are still several questions (especially those of a theoretical nature) that historians have yet to answer: How could Confucianism have contributed to the formation and sustenance of this tributary system? Why could this Confucian-based tributary system be recognized and employed in relations with non-Confucian frontier tribes? Why could this system have worked with both the nomadic tribes on the northern frontier and the South-East Asian countries that were neither Confucian nor nomadic? Drawing on the results of ritual studies in anthropology, Chinese historiography and Chinese philosophy, this author seeks a broader methodology that can be used to conceptualize the tributary ritual and its constitutive power structure, which forms the foundation of the central part of the East Asian world order. This paper is a theoretical attempt to find a non-Sinocentric way to interpret the formally Sinocentric tribute system in premodern East Asia.

Drawing upon rhetorical approaches to citizenship, this article analyzes how the contested notion of Bosnian-Herzegovinian (BiH) citizenship has been crafted on the discursive level during two series of social mobilizations taking place in 2013 and 2014. It aims to provide a better understanding of how various actors make sense of BiH citizenship. This study investigates what values were associated with citizenship, how boundaries of membership were drawn, and how the ethno-national dimension and linguistic complexities came into play. It analyzes a corpus of 150 media articles covering the protests in four major printed daily newspapers while methodologically relying on the discourse historical approach developed by Reisigl and Wodak. The analysis demonstrates that discursive articulations of citizenship are generated within the immediate context of social mobilization but are also influenced by historical legacies, institutional preconditions, regional aspects or global narratives. It shows that the decentralized institutional set up combined with the multi-layered and multidimensional meaning of citizenship blur the notion of BiH citizenship as an all-encompassing term and pose an obstacle to the formulation of an alternative vision of the BiH polity to the post-Dayton order.

The assassination of the dictator Park Chung Hee by his intelligence chief Kim Chae-gyu was a momentous events in South Korean history, which garnered two feature-length filmic depictions released fifteen years apart in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The President's Last Bang, released in 2005, was an irreverent black comedy in which all those involved that fateful evening were villains in their own right. The Man Standing Next, from 2020, took a much different tack. Kim gained a righteousness and revolutionary motivation that had been absent in the portrayal in the earlier film, in which Kim's intentions remained open to interpretation. This article analyzes the changes in Kim's depiction in the context of shifting respective political contexts, particularly the impeachment of Park's daughter Park Geun-hye in 2016, and the shadow cast by the legacies of authoritarianism, the specter of which seemed to loom over Korea again during the younger Park's administration. Consequently, the outpouring of public fervor in the ensuing candlelight vigils reaffirmed societal support for democracy and consequently elevated Kim Chae-gyu, Park's bane, to the role of champion of Korean democracy when it seemed under threat once again.

Agricultural emissions in most countries have been increasing against a backdrop of decreasing non-agricultural emissions. The climate change treaties contain a qualification that appears to exempt the agricultural sector from mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions where there is a ‘threat to food production’. This potential mitigation exception gives rise to the risk that states will invoke a threat to food production in order to shield their agricultural sector from intensifying mitigation pressure. A systematic analysis of documentation issued pursuant to the climate treaties reveals that many states, both developed and developing, have made statements suggesting that their agricultural sector is relieved of some or all of the pressure placed on other economic sectors to deliver mitigation outcomes. However, this concern that mitigation of agricultural emissions will threaten food production is only weakly supported, even as it threatens achievement of the Paris Agreement's goal of keeping global warming ‘well below 2°C’.

This article aims to show how reform of the law on terrorism not only has the power to create new criminal procedures, it can also create a distinct, parallel field operating alongside general criminal law. This parallel configuration presents certain unique features and processes which merit their own typology – namely, anti-terrorism criminal law (ATCL). First, the article discusses how states have responded to terrorism through reform of four key arenas: military law, immigration law, administrative law and criminal law. Comparison is then drawn between the United States and Israel in their respective approaches, showing that Israel has executed far more sweeping and significant reforms over the last four decades, mainly in criminal procedure. Examples are given to illustrate how Israel's evolving anti-terrorism legislation – and specifically, the new Counter-Terrorism Law of 2016 – changed the criminal procedural landscape to such a degree that it constituted the new field of ATCL. I contend that this move was anti-liberal in its definition and targeting of terror suspects, and in its pursuit of emergency aims and intelligence gathering rather than liberal criminal law objectives. Further, I show that liberal theory struggles to explain the integrated change model that Israel has implemented in its counter-terrorism reforms, and that the theoretical framings of Carl Schmitt and Michel Foucault may explain it more effectively.