Even as the evidence of global warming mounts, the international response to this serious threat is coming unraveled. The United States has formally withdrawn from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol; other key ...nations are facing difficulty in meeting their Kyoto commitments; and developing countries face no limit on their emissions of the gases that cause global warming. In this clear and cogent book-reissued in paperback with an afterword that comments on recent events--David Victor explains why the Kyoto Protocol was never likely to become an effective legal instrument. He explores how its collapse offers opportunities to establish a more realistic alternative.
Peacekeeping, peace enforcement and ‘stability operations’ ask soldiers to use violence to create peace, defeat armed threats while having no enemies and uphold human rights without taking sides. The ...challenges that face peacekeepers cannot be easily reduced to traditional just war principles. Built on insights from care ethics, case studies including Darfur, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti and Liberia and scores of interviews with peacekeepers, trainers and planners in the field in Africa, India and more, Daniel H. Levine sheds light on the challenges of peacekeeping. And he asserts that the traditional ‘holy trinity’ of peacekeeping principles – consent, impartiality, and minimum use of force – still provide the best moral guide for peacekeepers.
This book analyses and explains China’s behaviour as an increasingly significant member of the United Nations Security Council by the concept of strategic preferences developed in the book. Looking ...at the continuity and change within China’s policy behaviour, it extends our understanding of this fast-rising power within the UN.
As much about ideas as action, this book asks why and in what ways ideas matter in foreign policy analysis. To explain China’s role in UN Security Council decision-making accurately, the author utilizes an original theoretical framework employing the concept of strategic preferences. To explain China’s strategy in the UN Security Council of balancing long-term and short-term concerns, the book examines set and ranked preferences for the courses of action which are informed by China’s national purposes. The book argues that present theories fail to capture the complexity of China’s thinking, the sense of vulnerability underlying China’s policy behaviour, and the increasing willingness to position itself as a responsible world power inclined towards a more positive role in Security Council decision-making.
China in UN Security Council Decision-making on Iraq will be of interest to scholars and students of international relations and Chinese politics.
This book comprehensively examines the different proposals put forward for reforming the UN Security Council by analysing their objectives and exploring whether the implementation of these proposals ...would actually create a representative and more effective Security Council. The book places the discussion on reform of Security Council membership in the context of the council's primary responsibility, which is at the helm of the UN collective security system. The author contends that only a Council that is adequately representative of the UN membership can claim to legitimately act on the members' behalf. This book offers an inquiry into the Council's constitutional framework and how far that framework still reflects the expectations and intentions of the founding nations, whilst remaining flexible enough to satisfy today's, and possibly tomorrow's, membership. Through the use of policy-oriented jurisprudence and elements of the International Law/International Relations theory this book explores how reform can best be realised.
Reforming the UN Security Council Membership will be of particular interest to scholars and students of International Law and International Relations.
The UN and Development provides the first comprehensive overview of the
development policies and activities of the United Nations system from the late 1940s
to the present. With an explicit focus on ...the history of the ideas that have been
generated, institutionalized, and implemented by UN organizations, this book
examines changing trends in development paradigms from the concept of technical
assistance to underdeveloped countries, as they were called in the late 1940s, to
development cooperation in the 21st century. Olav Stokke traces this fascinating
story and demonstrates the UN's essential role and its future challenges in aiding
the least developed countries and the globe's billion poorest inhabitants.
The concept of UN peacekeeping has had to evolve and change to meet the challenges of contemporary sources of conflict; consequently, peacekeeping operations have grown rapidly in number and ...complexity. This book examines a number of issues associated with contemporary multinational peace operations, and seeks to provide insights into the problems that arise in establishing and deploying such forces to meet the challenges of current conflicts. The focus of the book is three case studies (Lebanon, Somalia and Kosovo), involving a comparative analysis of the traditional peacekeeping in Lebanon, the more robust peace enforcement mission in Somalia, and the international administration undertaken on behalf of the international community in Kosovo. The book analyses the lessons that may be learned from these operations in terms of mandates, command and control, use of force and the relevance of international humanitarian and human rights law to such operations.
Beginning with the negotiations that concluded with the unanimous
adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on December 9, 1948, and
...extending to the present day, the United States, Soviet
Union/Russia, China, United Kingdom, and France have put forth
great effort to ensure that they will not be implicated in the
crime of genocide. If this were to fail, they have also ensured
that holding any of them accountable for genocide will be
practically impossible. By situating genocide prevention in a
system of territorial jurisdiction; by excluding protection for
political groups and acts constituting cultural genocide from the
Genocide Convention; by controlling when genocide is meaningfully
named at the Security Council; and by pointing the responsibility
to protect in directions away from any of the P-5, they have
achieved what can only be described as practical impunity for
genocide. The Politics of Genocide is the first book to
explicitly demonstrate how the permanent member nations have
exploited the Genocide Convention to isolate themselves from the
reach of the law, marking them as "outlaw states."
When President George W. Bush launched an invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, he did so without the explicit approval of the Security Council. His father's administration, by contrast, carefully ...funneled statecraft through the United Nations and achieved Council authorization for the U.S.-led Gulf War in 1991. The history of American policy toward Iraq displays considerable variation in the extent to which policies were conducted through the UN and other international organizations.
InChannels of Power, Alexander Thompson surveys U.S. policy toward Iraq, starting with the Gulf War, continuing through the interwar years of sanctions and coercive disarmament, and concluding with the 2003 invasion and its long aftermath. He offers a framework for understanding why powerful states often work through international organizations when conducting coercive policies-and why they sometimes choose instead to work alone or with ad hoc coalitions. The conventional wisdom holds that because having legitimacy for their actions is important for normative reasons, states seek multilateral approval.
Channels of Poweroffers a rationalist alternative to these standard legitimation arguments, one based on the notion of strategic information transmission: When state actions are endorsed by an independent organization, this sends politically crucial information to the world community, both leaders and their publics, and results in greater international support.
