‘Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future’ (Niels Bohr, Nobel laureate in Physics). For instance, forecasters in Victorian London foresaw their city knee-deep in horse manure, one of the most pertinent urban environmental problems in cities at that time. A hundred years later, this prediction has not materialized and the situation has changed drastically. While traffic itself is still considered a major cause of urban air pollution, the contribution from horses has entirely disappeared and motorized vehicles are now the major source of deteriorated air quality in most modern cities.

Given the failure of simple extrapolations of present trends into the future, what can we say about air pollution in the coming decades?

To begin with, we know that population will further increase in urban areas, and we know that all societies aim to further strengthen their economic wealth. For a long time, air pollution from anthropogenic (non-natural) activities has been considered an unavoidable concomitant of economic development. Over long historic periods, we have seen air pollution levels increasing together with economic growth. Countermeasures to control air pollution have often been considered too costly to put into effect without compromising economic wealth.

Following this logic, the envisaged continued growth in global population, together with the universal target of improving prosperity, would lead to drastically worsened air quality around the globe, especially in many developing countries.

Early air pollution control efforts were prompted by urban episodes due to local emissions, such as the 1952 London smog associated with sulphur from burning coal (see Chapter 1). Although local areas typically experience the highest levels of health- and ecosystemdamaging air pollution, many species remain in the atmosphere for days, months, or even years. The longer a pollutant stays in the atmosphere, the farther from its original source it travels. For example, it takes about five days for a pollutant to cross the Pacific Ocean, but over a year for pollution to cross from the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes to the Southern Hemisphere. An example of such a pollutant plume as seen by satellite is shown in Figure 3.1.

Regional Air Pollution Transport

Although early scientific and regulatory efforts focused on local emissions and local effects, since the late 1970s, the geographic scale on which pollutant transport is studied and regulated has expanded. In Europe, the UNECE Convention on Long-Range Transbounday Air Pollution (LTRAP, www.unece. org/env/lrtap) came into force in 1983, driven by a concern about acid rain in Europe, and it has since expanded to address nitrogen deposition, ozone, heavy metals, particulate matter, and persistent organic pollutants (POPs). Scientific support for the Convention is provided through the Cooperative Programme for Monitoring and Evaluation of the Long-Range Transmission of Air Pollutants in Europe (EMEP), which assesses air pollution impacts on Europe.

Postmodernism, Culture, and Science

The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed. (2000), defines postmodernism as follows:

Postmodernists rejected any absolute or objective truths, whether scientific, political, religious, or cultural, thus tending to an extreme relativism. Instead, they stressed conflicting viewpoints and the blurring of distinctions between images and reality. By the late 1980s this viewpoint was even evident in the Soviet Union under the more permissive Mikhail Gorbachev. Victor Erofeyev, a Russian writer, described the new movement in literature, “The new Russian literature has called absolutely everything into question: love, children, faith, the Church, culture, beauty, nobility of character, motherhood, and even the wisdom of the common people.”

Postmodernism spread not only to different parts of the globe, but to different fields such as literary criticism, the social sciences, and humanities. One of its most significant manifestations was deconstructionism.

Many of the developments discussed in this book—violence, science and technology, capitalism and communism, imperialism, freedom, the environment—were intertwined with culture. In the broadest sense and in the way many anthropologists use the term, culture embraces the whole way of life of a group, including their physical and mental activities: thus, Chinese, French, or U.S. culture, or even more broadly Asian, Western, or African culture. Related to this definition are terms such as “youth culture” or “popular culture,” both indicating an aspect or subculture of a larger culture. Subcultures can sometimes seem more significant than a larger culture. Being raised in a Jewish or Catholic subculture in the early twentieth century, for example, might have had a greater impact on a young person than being brought up in an English or U.S. culture.

The term culture has also often been used as a collective term for the arts, humanities, and higher knowledge generally. This is a more elitist definition, sometimes referred to as “high culture,” and is related to what is meant by referring to someone as “a very cultured person.” Usually the context in which the word is used makes clear whether the broader or more restrictive use is intended.

Cultural Criticism of Capitalist Society in the Early Twentieth Century

In England during the nineteenth century, the poet Matthew Arnold and others had thought of high culture as an alternative and corrective to the values and manners that the Industrial Revolution and laissezfaire capitalism had introduced into English society.

The increasing body of observations has shown that we are faced with a warming world and other changes in the climate system brought about by increasing anthropogenic (human induced) pollution of our atmosphere. The global average surface temperature has increased over the twentieth century by about 0.6 °C (IPCC 2001a). The Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has re-estimated the global average surface temperature in light of new research and derived a slightly higher warming magnitude due to inclusion of several particularly warm years in this century (2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006) (IPCC 2007; Meehl et al. 2007). The changes in climate, with global warming as their major characteristic feature, are known to occur as a result of internal variability within the climate system and external factors (both natural and anthropogenic). Based on the conclusions derived by IPCC in their Third Assessment Report or TAR in short form (IPCC 2001b) and now in AR4 (IPCC 2007), there is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities. As a result of these anthropogenic activities, concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases and their radiative forcing have continued to increasesince 1750 (the pre-industrial era), thus leading to global warming and significant environmental consequences. Now the emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols are of major environmental concern throughout the world as an issue of global air pollution.

In the 1860s the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy accused historians of muddled thinking when they wrote of progress. Emphasizing the dazzling array of new technologies—in print, transportation, communication (railroads, steam engines, telegraphs, and the like)—historians seemed to assume that such developments necessarily contributed to improvements in the overall welfare of individuals and nations. But Tolstoy was convinced that “progress on one side is always paid back by retrogression on the other side of human life.” For him the growth of cities and newspapers, gas-lighting, railways, and sewing machines, all were either regressive developments or not worth the cost of destroying forests and people's sense of simplicity and moderation. Whether Tolstoy was right or wrong about the effects of such developments is less important than the questions his criticism prompts. What is progress? How is it to be measured? Tolstoy himself equated it with an overall improvement of well-being, which is perhaps as good a definition as any. Thus, the task at hand is to summarize the changing nature of global well-being over the course of the twentieth century, as well as changing perceptions about it.

A key figure in developing the nineteenth-century view of progress, criticized by Tolstoy, was the eighteenth century Scotch economist Adam Smith. He believed that economic progress depended upon the division of labor, free trade, and people pursuing their own economic self-interest.

Air pollution is known to have a range of effects, including those on human health, crop production, soil acidification, visibility and corrosion of materials. This Chapter focuses on the two major impacts of air pollution that have most strongly influenced the development of policies to reduce emissions: those on the natural environment and on human health.

In broad terms, the major impacts of air pollution on the natural environment can be placed into three categories, representing different spatial scales:

• Local impacts of major industrial or urban sources, for example, instances of damage to ecosystems and crop production close to emission sources. Historically, the biggest impacts have been through the direct effects of sulphur dioxide and particles – either around large point sources such as power stations and smelters, or in urban areas with domestic coal burning – and the accumulation of toxic metals in soils around smelters. However, a range of other pollutants from specific local sources can have direct impacts on vegetation.

• Regional impacts of ozone, which is a significant global air pollutant in terms of impacts on vegetation, since high concentrations are found in rural areas.

• Regional impacts of long-Range Transport and deposition of sulphur and nitrogen, which have effects on soil acidity, nutrient availability and water chemistry, and hence on ecosystem composition and function.

The Chapter first considers direct effects of air pollution on vegetation and the visible symptoms of damage that can result, illustrating the spatial variation in damage by reference to national and local studies in the Netherlands.

Air pollution is one of the most important environmental concerns. This is particularly the case in urban areas, where the majority of people live in developed countries and, increasingly so, in the developing regions of the world. It is now widely recognized that air pollution can affect our health as well as the environment. Particles and other pollutants adversely affect the quality of life of critical groups such as children and the elderly, and can lead to a significant reduction in life span (Pope et al. 2002; WHO 2003; Anderson, H.R. et al. 2004).

With rising population, pressure on urban environments is increasing. For example, there is the ever greater demand for travel and the need to increase energy production and consumption. Although other sources, such as industrial pollution, are still a problem in some parts of the world, the greatest threat to clean air is coming from increasing traffic pollution. The link between poor air quality and adverse health conditions is also becoming clearer. Our response to improve air quality in cities at national and local levels, however, is not homogeneous across the globe, with richer nations usually having more stringent and comprehensive pollution management strategies. For example, in the European Union comprehensive legislative frameworks exist to ensure that member states comply with limit values set in the air quality directives and daughter directives (see Directives 96/62/EC, 99/30/EC, 2000/69/EC, 2002/3/EC).

As the nineteenth century was coming to an end, some U.S. citizens thought their country was betraying the freedom-loving dream of its Founding Fathers. The occasion for the dismay was the annexation of the Philippines, despite considerable Philippine resistance, following in the wake of the Spanish–American War of 1898. Early the following year, the philosopher William James wrote, “We are now openly engaged in crushing out the sacredest thing in this great human world—the attempt of a people long enslaved … to be free.”

Although people strongly disagreed on the exact meaning of freedom during the new century (see below, “Debates on Freedom”), it nevertheless remained a cherished goal of individuals, groups, and nations around the globe. Liberty was the name of a leading U.S. anarchist publication at the start of the century. When the future first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, was imprisoned by British authorities in his homeland in 1934, he wrote an autobiographical work entitled Toward Freedom. In 1941 U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt gave his “Four Freedoms” speech, in which he proclaimed to Congress that “we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.” That same year his wife, Eleanor, and others founded Freedom House, which continued to exist into the twenty-first century, when its website described it as “an independent non-governmental organization that supports the expansion of freedom in the world … [and is] a vigorous proponent of democratic values and a steadfast opponent of dictatorships of the far left and the far right.”

Introduction

What is peace? This essay examines the genealogy of the ‘problem of peace’. This is not as commonly thought caused by the contestation of power by sovereign actors (Carter, 1936, p. xi) but rather by the absence of debate on the conceptualisation of peace, and the consequence of assuming it is a negative epistemology that can never fully be achieved (Rasmussen, 2003, p. 174). Instead, it is generally assumed that the ‘liberal peace’ is acceptable to all. This is essentially what Mandelbaum and others have called the combination of peace, democracy and free markets (Mandelbaum, 2002, p. 6; Duffield, 2001, p. 11; Paris, 2004). These assumptions are also prevalent in most policy documents associated with peace and security issues (United Nations, 2004; International Development Research Centre 2001). The liberal peace is assumed to be unproblematic in its internal structure, and in its acceptance in post-conflict zones, though its methodological application may be far from smooth (Paris, 2004, p. 18–20). Yet, the liberal peace's main components – democratisation, the rule of law, human rights, free and globalized markets, and neo-liberal development – are increasingly being critiqued from several different perspectives.

Purpose and Structure

The purpose of this study is to examine the ongoing legal debate surrounding pre-emptive self-defence. The study examines the legal debate surrounding the regulation of the use of force in the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations. The possible interconnection between pre-emptive self-defence and anticipatory self-defence is explored. The political ramification of the possibility of a weakening of the regulation of the use of force as expressed in the Charter of the United Nations is discussed.

The study is structured into two main sections. The first relates to the Charter of the United Nations and the Articles relating to the use of force and the scholarly debate relating to the key Articles is outlined and assessed. The second is an overview and analysis of the renewed attention and interest in issues relating to the use of force in self-defence in interstate relations, in particular the notion of pre-emptive self-defence and related developments in the post-cold war era particularly after 11 September 2001.

The Charter of the United Nations and the Use of Force by States

The provisions of the Charter of the United Nations

There are three clauses in the Charter of the United Nations that regulate the use of force by the individual member states, namely Article 2(3), Article 2(4) and Article 51. Furthermore, in Article 39 the regulations pertaining to the use of force by the United Nations are outlined.

Introduction

According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme (2005) about one-third of all armed conflicts in the post-cold war world era have taken place in African countries (Cited in Harbom and Forsberg, 2005). On a global ratio, Africa in 2004, accounted for 10 out of 30 armed conflicts. Most of these conflicts have been intrastate in nature, but in several cases, as in West Africa and the Great Lakes region, they ‘crossed border’ and mutated into crossborder or the so-called ‘networked’ wars. A lot of these wars have their roots in historically constructed social contradictions and inequities that have alienated large sections of the citizenry, the foreclosure of peaceful change by authoritarianism and repression, and an altered global context following the end of the cold war. Increased transborder flows of people, goods and arms, and decades of misrule and socio-economic crises also contributed to the outbreak of these wars. In most cases, the trigger for the descent into violent conflict lay in the combination of political and economic policies that deepened social contradictions, and resulted in the massive erosion of the state's welfare role(s) and capacities in the face of globally-led reforms.