This article addresses the role of arbitrators and the everlasting tension amongst personal morals and interpretive rigour. Critiques of investment law have traditionally underscored the lack of ...balance in power between foreign investors and host states under BITs and FTAs and have especially emphasized how investment arbitration is a mechanism that aggravates imbalances and engenders inequitable outcomes. Frequent appeals for the reform of investment arbitration resonate amongst scholars, states, and international organizations, with the appointment of arbitrators and their conduct facing intense scrutiny. Arbitrators, endowed with powers akin to those of adjudicators, demonstrate at times a concerning attitude towards the rigorous interpretation of applicable laws, often overlooking the public international law nature of BITs and FTAs and, on occasion, approaching investment disputes as though they were merely commercial arbitration cases. The conflation of the two types of arbitration has had adverse effects, resulting in dubious awards and decisions. The increasing number of so-called mega-awards exacerbates the problem, as their significance for host states is not necessarily commensurate with the rigor of the legal reasoning underpinning them. This has progressively led to an erosion of trust in investment arbitrators and numerous calls for greater accountability of arbitrators. However, one may argue that even the most rigorous interpretations of BITs and FTAs unavoidably favour the interests of foreign investors due to the inherent nature of such agreements, which prioritize the rights and protections of foreign investors over the interest and welfare of host states and their populations.
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What effects do international crises have on the public legitimacy of International Organizations (IOs)? Deviating from previous research, we argue that such crises make those international ...organizations more salient that are mandated to solve the respective crisis. This results in two main effects. First, the public legitimacy of those IOs becomes more dependent on citizens’ crisis-induced worries, leading to a more positive view of those IOs. Second, as the higher salience also leads to higher levels of elite communication regarding IOs, elite blaming of the IOs during crises results in direct negative effects on public legitimacy beliefs on IOs. Finally, both the valence and content of the elite discourse additionally moderate the positive effects of crisis-induced worries. Implementing survey experiments on public legitimacy beliefs on the WHO during the COVID-19 crisis with about 4400 respondents in Austria, Germany and Turkey, we find preliminary evidence for the expectations derived from our salience argument. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of these findings for future research on IO legitimacy and IO legitimation.
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CEKLJ, EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
Social legitimacy is central to the effectiveness of international organisations (IOs). Yet, so far, we have little systematic knowledge about what drives citizens to support or oppose IOs. In this ...article, we isolate and assess three alternative explanations of social legitimacy in global governance, privileging interest representation, institutional performance, and confidence extrapolation. We test these theories in a multilevel analysis of citizen confidence in the United Nations (UN) using World Values Survey and European Values Study data, supplemented by contextual measures. The results grant support to the arguments that institutional performance and confidence extrapolation shape popular confidence in the UN, while offering little support for the explanation of interest representation. These findings challenge the predominant understanding that more democratic procedures lead to greater social legitimacy for IOs. Instead, the UN case suggests that the social legitimacy of IOs is based primarily on the organisations' capacity to deliver, as well as on citizens' general confidence in political institutions, which IOs may have little to do with and can do little to change.
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Nearly ninety years have passed since the beginning of modern higher education in Iran. During this period, engineering education in the country, along with a large quantitative expansion, has gone ...through many ups and downs. Improving engineering education depends on identifying its challenges and providing solutions to overcome them. And this is possible only with organized research. One of the envisaged measures in this field is to create a center for communication between the activities carried out in the engineering education of the country and the educational centers of other countries and international organizations. In this connection, following the approval of the United Nations Scientific, Educational and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the UNESCO Chair on Engineering Education was established at the University of Tehran. The UNESCO chair, as a think tank, has put research and futures studies in various fields of engineering education, at the top of its goals. In this paper, while introducing the objectives and scope of activities of the UNESCO Chair on Engineering Education, the achievements of a decade of its activities have been reviewed.
The withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union has prompted a global recalibration of treaty relations. Due to the Withdrawal Agreement and its transition period, the UK is expanding ...its international treaty-making powers as it is gradually released from the constraints of EU law. Practice to date shows the creation of many new international legal instruments through which governments have sought to address the novel questions that Brexit raises for the international law of treaties.
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BFBNIB, INZLJ, NMLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PNG, PRFLJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
A new theoretical framework for understanding how
social, economic, and political conflicts influence international
institutions and their place in the global order Today's
liberal international ...institutional order is being challenged by
the rising power of illiberal states and by domestic political
changes inside liberal states. Against this backdrop, Ideology
and International Institutions offers a broader understanding
of international institutions by arguing that the politics of
multilateralism has always been based on ideology and ideological
divisions. Erik Voeten develops new theories and measures to make
sense of past and current challenges to multilateral institutions.
Voeten presents a straightforward theoretical framework that
analyzes multilateral institutions as attempts by states to shift
the policies of others toward their preferred ideological
positions. He then measures how states have positioned themselves
in global ideological conflicts during the past seventy-five years.
Empirical chapters illustrate how ideological struggles shape the
design of international institutions, membership in international
institutions, and the critical role of multilateral institutions in
militarized conflicts. Voeten also examines populism's rise and
other ideological threats to the liberal international order.
Ideology and International Institutions explores the
essential ways in which ideological contestation has influenced
world politics.
In the context of the 2020 world pandemic of COVID-19, many professional and scientific associations have had to change the way that they gather and reorganize their scholarly conferences. For many ...of them, conferences are a main source of income and important occasions for business meetings and managerial decisions. Yet, with trips and face-to-face encounters banned, the opportunity arrived for going virtual and developing human and technical capacities to provide online environments for virtual conferences. In this article, we analyze the case of an e-conference co-organized by two international organizations at two levels: (a) the decision-making process and (b) the assessment by attendees. Relying on personal, first-hand experience, participant observation, and a post-conference survey, we collected data that allow an examination of the intricacies of the decision to go virtual as well as pros and cons of the experiences of colleagues who presented papers and attended sessions. Consistent with previous studies, we found that scholars value the possibility of having more colleagues participating (providing geographic and career stage diversity), reduction of carbon emissions, lower travel and transportation costs, and ease of watching presentations later (through recordings). On the other hand, academics point to the difficulty of socializing as the main problem, with implications for strengthening academic networks and consolidation of professional careers.
El agua siempre ha sido un objeto de la antropología, especialmente dentro del campo de estudios de la Ecología Cultural y la Antropología del Desarrollo. A partir de Siglo XXI las cuestiones ...relacionadas a este elemento adquirieron creciente relevancia cuando los organismos internacionales postularon la inminencia de una Crisis Hídrica Global, aún más incierta por los efectos del Cambio Climático. Dado que la mayor proporción de agua dulce del planeta se destina a la agricultura, en la agenda de las problemáticas hídricas se destaca el uso del agua para riego. Para la antropología, en especial desde mediados del Siglo XX, la investigación sobre dichos sistemas ha revestido importancia tanto teórica como práctica por las implicancias que los mismos tienen para la organización social. A partir de una revisión bibliográfica, el objetivo de este artículo es presentar una síntesis de cómo ha tratado la antropología social las cuestiones vinculadas al riego y argumentar qué es lo que ella tiene para aportar a su estudio. En tercer lugar, se presenta un repaso de los estudios sociales sobre riego en Argentina con el objetivo de trazar un esquema general de la situación actual de este campo en el país. Como resultado se observa una amplia hegemonía del enfoque neo-institucional y del paradigma de la GIRH, liderado por ingenieros agrónomos y economistas de los recursos, dejando de lado otras posibles aproximaciones que enriquecerían la profundidad de los análisis para entender a estos sistemas como parte integral de la organización social.
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