Having reviewed the various ways of attempting to resolve international disputes individually, we are now in a position to consider what this survey as a whole demonstrates about the possibilities open to a state when confronted with a dispute, the factors which influence decisions on whether to use a particular procedure and the prospects for improving this situation in the future. To deal with these issues it will be necessary to consider separately some of the legal and political factors which form the context in which decisions relating to the conduct of disputes are taken, and then to suggest some ways of modifying or developing current methods of settlement with a view to making them more effective and easier to use. First, however, it may be useful to recall in brief outline what our study has revealed about the present situation.

Sequential abstraction has enabled software to manage the complex demands of constructing computing applications, debugging software and hardware, and program composition. However, with the end of Dennard scaling (see Section 3.3.4), we have been unable to create sequential computers with sufficient speed and capacity to meet the needs of ever-larger computing applications. As a result, computer hardware systems were forced to adopt explicit parallelism, both within a single chip (multicore CPUs) and at datacenter scale (supercomputers and cloud computing). In this chapter, we describe this shift to parallelism. In single-chip CPUs, the shift has produced multicore processors with first 2 or 4 cores, but growing rapidly to 64 cores (2020) and beyond. Understanding of multicore chips, parallel building blocks used in even larger parallel computers, provides an invaluable perspective on how to understand and increase performance.

When a disagreement between states on some issue of fact, law or policy is serious enough to give rise to an international dispute, their views on the matter in question may be difficult or impossible to reconcile. In such a case, either or both of the parties may refuse to discuss the matter on the ground that their position is ‘not negotiable’. Alternatively, negotiations may drag on for years until one side abandons its claim or loses patience and attempts to impose a solution by force. It follows that negotiation, even if assisted by good offices or mediation, cannot be regarded as an adequate means of resolving all international disputes.

The very idea of international organizations suggests that those entities are capable of performing acts; creating an entity with a separate identity only makes sense (instrumental sense, at any rate) if that entity can subsequently do certain things. In order to do those things, the organization must be able to adopt or create legal instruments.1

Disputes are an inevitable part of international relations, just as disputes between individuals are inevitable in domestic relations. Like individuals, states often want the same thing in a situation where there is not enough of it to go round. Moreover, just as people can disagree about the way to use a river, a piece of land or a sum of money, states frequently want to do different things, but their claims are incompatible. Admittedly, one side may change its position, extra resources may be found, or, on looking further into the issue, it may turn out that everyone can be satisfied after all. But no one imagines that these possibilities can eliminate all domestic disputes and they certainly cannot be relied on internationally. Disputes, whether between states, neighbours, or brothers and sisters, must therefore be accepted as a regular part of human relations and the problem is what to do about them.

So far we have been concerned largely with arbitration between states and such disputes are, of course, the focus of this book. However, in some circumstances it is possible for private persons, who may be individuals or corporations, to engage in litigation with states. This is the situation in international investment arbitration when the home state of an investor and the host state (where the investment is located), are parties to an investment treaty containing a dispute settlement clause. Such a treaty may be a bilateral investment treaty (BIT), or a multilateral investment treaty (MIT) such as the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), but in either case arbitration may be employed by the private investor without the involvement of the investor’s state. Although this is obviously not inter-state litigation, since this use of arbitration is now increasingly important, it merits discussion in a separate chapter. Since investment arbitration is a specific form of arbitration, much of what has been discussed in Chapter 6 is also applicable to this chapter. For example, the questions relating to the terms of reference, and how the proceedings are to be conducted and the definition of the issues to be decided by the arbitral tribunal are similarly decided by the parties.

It is one of the more settled principles of international law, as authoritatively formulated by the Permanent Court of International Justice in the classic Chorzów Factory case,1 that a violation of international law entails responsibility and the obligation to make reparation in one form or another.2 When it concerns the activities of states, the basic rule is, all sorts of difficulties notwithstanding, relatively straightforward: states are responsible for internationally wrongful acts that can be attributed to them.3

The reference of disputes to international political institutions has a history as long as that of arbitration. For present purposes, however, it is unnecessary to go further back than 1919, when, with the creation of the League of Nations as a reaction to the First World War, the first attempt was made to establish a universal organisation with broad responsibilities in this area. Following the failure of the League, or more accurately its member states, to take effective action to forestall a second bloodbath, a fresh effort to bring disputes within the field of operations of a world organisation was made with the creation of the United Nations Organisation in 1945.1

Previous generations of ethnographers have described the successful adaptation of children to societies that are themselves successfully adapted to their environment and material circumstances (Korbin 1987b). But, as these patterns of cultural adaptation are stressed by global forces that overwhelm local coping strategies, the lives of children are adversely affected. Anthropologists are prominent in the corps of concerned observers working to understand the contexts in which contemporary children live and to offer ideas to improve their lot (Schwartzman 2001: 15).

We will see that the distinction posed at the outset between cherubs, chattel, and changelings continues to apply in the present and into the future. In the neontocracy, the elevation of children to god-like cherubs, and corollary expense, show no signs of slowing. Among the poor, parents continue to seek the means to divest themselves of unwanted changelings or to convert their offspring to usable chattel.