United Nations

The use of sonar by military vessels during military exercises may produce acoustic pollution of the marine environment. States have an obligation under international law to reduce and control this form of pollution. Regulation of the use of sonar is rendered more complex by the specific regime applicable to warships, i.e. sovereign immunity. Immunity however does not prevent in all cases action by States other than the flag State, notwithstanding the limitations imposed by Art. 236 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. More importantly, immunity does not prevent the flag State from taking measures to reduce pollution caused by its own warships. Under some environmental treaties, flag States not only may, but have the obligation to adopt measures.

The paper examines the nexus among the concepts of democracy, globalisation and technology, arguably the three most interdependent notions affecting the way and speed in which global dynamics and diplomatic practises were transformed. It analyses the evolution of non-state actors' engagement in multilateral processes between the Stockholm Conference in 1972 and the Rio+20 Conference in 2012. The experience of the Major Group for Children and Youth (MGCY) at the Rio+20 Conference is introduced as a case study to illustrate the practical application of the nexus and its impact on stakeholder engagement. The analysis recognises that the nexus offers a real opportunity to improve diplomacy means and practices and encourage further exploration into the nexus’ full potential.

In December 2018, the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. UNDROP is the product of 17 years of struggle by La Via Campesina, other transnational agrarian movements and allies that included NGOs, states, UN mandate holders, and academics. It recognises the dignity of rural populations, their contributions to global food production, and their ‘special relationship’ to land, water and nature, as well as their vulnerabilities to eviction, hazardous working conditions and political repression. It reiterates rights protected in other instruments and sets new standards for individual and collective rights to land and natural resources, seeds, biodiversity and food sovereignty. This Grassroots Voices forum includes interviews and articles by activists in the UNDROP campaign: peasants from Indonesia, Belgium, France, Germany, Senegal and Argentina; a US farmworker leader; a women’s rights activist from Spain; a Bolivian diplomat; the Indian leader of a transnational Catholic farmers’ movement; an advocate for fishers from Uganda; a Swiss jurist; a Mexican indigenous rights leader; and human rights advocates from the NGOs CETIM and FIAN. They describe a new kind of people’s diplomacy and an innovative, bottom-up process of building alliances, lobbying, and authoring international law.

GUIDE: Established in 1945 under the Charter of the United Nations, the General Assembly occupies a central position as the chief deliberative, policymaking and representative organ of
the United Nations. Comprising all 193 Members of the United Nations, it provides a unique forum for multilateral discussion of the full spectrum of international issues covered by the
Charter. It also plays a significant role in the process of standard-setting and the codification of international law. The Assembly meets in regular sessions intensively from September to December each year, and thereafter as required. General Assembly’s resolutions are not binding and, therefore, considered recommendations, appointing and suggesting actions to be taken individually or in cooperation by member states and the United Nations. The regular flow of debate of high level plenary meetings is the General Speakers’ List and debate is moderated by the chair. All countries have one vote, either in procedural matters or substantive matters. There is no “veto power”, what means that, no matter which countries vote against, once a qualified majority (2/3 of countries in favor) is achieved in voting a resolution, it is approved. All member States take part in the sessions. However, in UFRGSMUN, the Secretariat and the Directors of the committee established a number of countries to be represented during the conference.

L’étude des travaux préparatoires du Pacte de la Société des Nations invite à revenir aux origines d’une controverse qui est toujours au centre de problèmes actuels, comme celui de la réforme du Conseil de Sécurité ou celui de la focalisation de la justice pénale internationale sur les ressortissants d’Etats faibles et anciennement colonisés. Cette controverse tourne autour de la question de savoir comment assurer l’efficacité d’une organisation internationale universelle sans institutionnaliser par là un impérialisme arbitraire, ou sans faire perdre toute indépendance à des Etats représentant des peuples soucieux de s’autodéterminer. En 1919, lors de l’élaboration de l’instrument fondateur de la première organisation de maintien de la paix à vocation universelle, quelle réponse fut apportée à cette question et pourquoi ?
Le Pacte et la Société qu’il établit sont connus pour leur inefficacité à prévenir la Seconde Guerre mondiale, et il n’est pas spécialement méconnu qu’ils véhiculaient un certain impérialisme de la part des vainqueurs du premier conflit mondial. Dans un très grand nombre de travaux toutefois, le Pacte est présenté de manière plus précise comme le projet idéaliste et désintéressé du Président américain Woodrow Wilson, qui n’est malheureusement pas parvenu à imposer une organisation efficace à des partenaires plus réticents. D’origine principalement états-unienne, cette présentation consiste à dénoncer dans le conservatisme européen la source de l’inefficacité du projet porté par le Président des Etats-Unis. Une telle vision des choses est radicalement infirmée par l’examen des projets de Pacte, et par celui du contexte et du déroulement de sa négociation. En effet, plutôt qu’en une véritable concertation multilatérale, la négociation du Pacte consista grosso modo en l’imposition d’un compromis entre Britanniques et Etats-uniens aux Français, puis aux autres Etats membres de la Commission où le Pacte se négociait officiellement, et enfin aux autres Etats présents à la Conférence de Paris. En outre, les négociations montrent que la position de Woodrow Wilson était tournée vers les intérêts de son pays et même vers les siens propres, et qu’il est l’un des principaux responsables de la faiblesse des institutions de la Société. Ainsi, les défauts du Pacte et de la Société étaient déjà connus pour la plupart d’entre eux, et leurs principaux remèdes, présentés par plusieurs délégations et fermement défendus par la délégation française, ne furent pas adoptés en raison de l’opposition opiniâtre des délégations britanniques et états-uniennes. Au nom d’une certaine idée de la souveraineté étatique, celles-ci firent le choix de s’opposer aux transferts de compétences qui auraient permis à la Société de réagir efficacement en cas d’usage de la force.
Si l’inefficacité du Pacte découle des choix faits en ce sens par les Etats en position de force en 1919, l’intégration dans la Charte des Nations Unies des propositions innovantes avancées durant les négociations du Pacte (concernant l’efficacité de l’organisation, les droits de l’homme ou la justice pénale internationale) découle quant à elle du choix inverse faits par les mêmes Etats en 1945.

The Globalization of World Politics An Introduction to International Relations Seventh Edition Edited by John Baylis, Steve Smith, and Patricia Owens A must have text for anybody and everybody interested in the ongoing Globalization of World Politics. Besides the fact that it has been the market-leading introduction to International Relations, written by more than 35 unrivaled experts in their fields. Building their breathtaking narrative on thorough knowledge and careful academic research of national and international history, the book offers a bigger picture of main stream theories international relations. No global structures and processes, and international issues were left unattended. It provides an inquisitive and the most comprehensive coverage of International Relations in the Twentieth and the Twenty-first centuries. The editors: John Baylis, Steve Smith, and Patricia Owens, did their best to ensure an integrated and coherent style throughout the book. Integrated and intera...

In June 2016, the European Union launched its new ‘Global Strategy for Foreign and Security Policy’. In less unusual times, it would have been received as merely the latest iteration of the main tenets and ambitions of EU external action, this time with an enhanced dose of pragmatism to respond to a more challenging international environment. However, with the contours of ‘Brexit’ becoming clearer and the start of the Trump Presidency in the United States, the EU’s Global Strategy has acquired a whole new level of significance. This paper argues that while meant to express a largely uncontroversial consensus, it now needs to be recontextualized as a distinctive vision in the face of trends of anti-globalism and Euroscepticism. This concerns in particular its emphasis on rules-based global governance. Challenged by both President Trump ‘America First’ policy and the British government’s course for a ‘hard Brexit’, the Global Strategy represents a blueprint and rallying point for a continued pursuit of a liberal world order based on the rule of law.

Gli Stati e le istituzioni internazionali agiscono come importanti attori di cambiamento sociale e culturale su individui, gruppi e comunità. Per questo è utile applicare la lente dell’antropologia sociale e culturale ad apparati burocratici che, tramite il paradigma giuridico-politico della salvaguardia delle “culture” intese come diversità di pensiero e di azione, dunque come “biodiversità”, influenzano così tanto la vita quotidiana e le aspirazioni comuni. Peraltro, il lavoro antropologico è assai presente nelle istituzioni internazionali e soprattutto nelle agenzie delle Nazioni Unite, attraverso il coinvolgimento diretto degli antropologi nei lavori di consulenza e di analisi istituzionale che può essere anche molto critica. Passando in rassegna attività svolte nell’UNESCO, nella Banca Mondiale, nella FAO e nell’IFAD, questo volume riflette sul lavoro degli antropologi nelle istituzioni internazionali tra giudizi valutativi, analisi dei progetti, impegno professionale interno e consulenze esterne.

Antonino Colajanni, già professore di Antropologia Sociale presso la Sapienza Università di Roma, si è occupato di cambiamenti sociali e conflitti tra alcune popolazioni indigene dell’America Latina (Jivaro dell’Ecuador e Kogi della Colombia) e anche di Antropologia giuridica, di Antropologia dello sviluppo e di Antropologia applicata. È stato consulente di ONG e di Organizzazioni Internazionali.

Lia Giancristofaro è professore di Antropologia Culturale presso l’Università di Chieti, dove insegna la materia dal 2006. Si occupa di Antropologia delle Istituzioni, Heritage studies ed Etnologia dell’Europa. Coordina progetti di ricerca per il suo Ateneo e altri Enti, operando in Europa, Nordafrica, Canada e Argentina.

Viviana Sacco, laureata in Discipline antropologiche presso la Sapienza Università di Roma, ha conseguito il Master in “Cooperazione e Sviluppo”, presso l’Università degli Studi Superiori di Pavia. Ha oltre 15 anni di esperienza lavorativa nella cooperazione internazionale per conto di ONG e organizzazioni internazionali.

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, held in June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro, was probably the largest event in a long series of megasummits on environmental protection and sustainable development. Roughly 44 000 participants descended on Rio de Janeiro to take part in ten days of preparatory committee meetings, informal consultations, side events, and the actual conference. Yet despite this unprecedented high attendance by participants from governments and civil society, the outcome of the conference is less than many had hoped for. In this paper I review the outcomes of the 2012 Rio conference in detail, with a special focus on its contributions towards the reform of the institutional framework for sustainable development. Following this review, I discuss the way ahead and options for structural reform to restrengthen earth system governance.

This study examines the urge to construct indicators of sustainable development that has been outlined in the Agenda 21 of the Rio Earth Summit 1992, re-expressed in the Rio+20 Declaration “The Future We Want” in 2012, and discussed in the work by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (2009). An indicator of sustainable development (SDI) is a measure expected to signal whether a society is on a sustainable path, or not, by organising large data sets into easily readable illustrations for the purposes of policy-makers. The study positions into the earlier work of sociologists of science and philosophers such as Hacking and Latour who have aimed to understand the contexts in which knowledge is formed. For policymakers and the wider public, understanding the limitations of these different measurement approaches can be beneficial. This study suggests that SDIs can be considered analogous to evidence-based autonomous models that can be framed in various ways. One-dimensional indicators select a single bottom-line against which other considerations are judged; composite SDIs typically aim to balance environmental, social and economic considerations; and monetary-based indicators attempt to incorporate ecological and social losses into economic costs. Depending on the choice of approach, a SDI may either adhere to the principle of ‘strong sustainability’ according to which no ecological harm is acceptable, or ‘weak sustainability’ that accepts substitutability between different types of capital, including the loss of natural capital. However, a general weakness of several SDIs has been their inability to signal when ecological thresholds are crossed. Under energy and resource constraints, these efforts reflect an aspiration, borrowing the terms of seventeenth century political economists, the need to explore means towards a ‘new’ political arithmetic. This study aims to observe what choices researchers and political institutions have and have made in adapting to the realities of climate change and other ecological constraints. The study will argue that the depiction of ‘sustainable development’ may be a worthy ideal but for measurement purposes of actual ecological or social thresholds, a notion of multiple meanings has challenged the work of scientists who have been unable to agree over a ‘proper’ indicator. By assessing the theoretical underpinnings of science, the aim of this study is provide common ground to the multidisciplinary subject matter of sustainability for natural and social scientists who often conduct research in their separate research strands. Furthermore, scientific work itself follows societal progress and is limited by theoretical underpinnings that inevitably also influence the attempts to construct meaningful indicators. The study observes how in the context of political decision-making, institutions that act as gatekeepers that shape the understanding of politicians about the choices they have, even if these institutions are constrained by ideological discourses as well as existing institutional arrangements. For the purpose of the measurement of sustainable development, existing cross-country measures such as the GDP have serious weaknesses. At least in the advanced economies, while the measurement of aggregate economic growth may remain useful, it may be less relevant than it was in the contexts of modernisation and post-Second World War reconstruction when the current UN System of National Accounts was adopted. However, pragmatic challenges also undermine some of the alternative indicators, including the lack of available data as well as the need for institutional capacity and improved theoretical understanding about sustainability. Nevertheless, it is suggested that states could engage more closely to explore the possibility to use SDIs as a new technology of governance. For this purpose, the study also examines indicators of climate change, material flows and energy. It is also suggested that decision-makers may need to better adopt a perspective of systemic thinking that adopts an ecological view that also internalises social considerations rather than macroeconomic theories that treat ecological and social costs as externalities.

This article problematizes the concept of ‘mission’ in international interventions, who is entitled to missionize and how the missionized subject is conceptualized. By looking at the international missions in Kosovo (those of the UN and particularly the EU), we problematize how the EU mission in Kosovo is entrenched in a trajectory of ‘missionizing’ that makes it bear the stigma of a structure non-responsive and non-sensitive to the local. Employing Derrida’s deconstruction, we explain that the criticism (academic, dogmatic, ideological and empirical) of international missions relates not so much to how they operate in their host countries, or to the policy choices they make. Rather, looking at the path dependency of missions in the Western historical and civilizational trajectory, we maintain that the problem derives from the idea and very concept of ‘mission’ as intervention in itself.

If India has supported economic, social and cultural rights far more vocally at global fora than civil and political rights, this is a result of both domestic security compulsions and historical foreign policy positions. Internet rights advocates’ strategies will need to take into account India’s preoccupation with sovereignty and an improved international stature to gain the country’s full support.

With the arrival of cyberspace, a whole host of new security and other challenges have arisen which are not always adequately tackled. In order to deal with them more appropriately, India has repeatedly argued for a greater role of the UN in the formulation of international Internet-related public policies, particularly where cybersecurity is concerned. However, as the cybersecurity landscape is rather complex, it brings a range of challenges to especially India’s more ambitious proposals to mobilise the multilateral system. What are those challenges, how can we work through them, and what are possible alternative approaches to cybersecurity-related problems? We investigate.

The Eastern Aegean Islands are demilitarized under Article 13 of the Lausanne Peace Treaty. Pursuant to said Article, Greece cannot have naval base and establish fortifications in the islands.
No international document has provided Greece the right to militarize the islands in question. Besides that except for the circumstances stated in the United Nations Charter, the principle of self-defense cannot be arbitrarily evoked. As for the Aegean Army of Turkey, it should be underlined that contrary to the status of the Eastern Aegean Islands, the Turkish territories of the Aegean region are not under any demilitarized status.
The demilitarization provisions are essential to the accomplishment of the purpose of the 1923 Lausanne Peace Treaty. It is worthwhile to remember how İsmet Pasha as head of the Turkish Delegation explained the Turkish views on 25 November 1922 in the Territorial and Military Commission of the Lausanne Conference regarding the sovereignty and demilitarization of the said islands. He said in this respect that “The Aegean islands, which depended geographically on Asia Minor, were of great importance for the peace and security of Anatolia.”
It should be kept in mind that there is a direct linkage between the possession of sovereignty over those islands and their demilitarized status. Demilitarization is the essential precondition of Greek sovereignty over these islands. It can be emphasized that demilitarization clauses are sine quo non for the Aegean status quo. Trying to replace this status quo with faits accomplis is equivalent to opening Pandora’s Box which is to be carefully avoided.

The ongoing outbreak of the Ebola virus in West Africa is the largest on record; it has undermined already fragile healthcare systems and presented new challenges to contain the spread of the disease. Based on our observations in the field and insights from referenced sources, we aimed to identify key experiences of community engagement and social mobilization efforts in the current Ebola response. We concluded that there is no excuse not to actively involve local people and that the United Nations (UN) agencies and other partners did learn from their earlier mistakes to make a genuine attempt to better engage with communities. However, bottom-up approaches have not been widely implemented during the response and the reasons for not doing so must be further assessed. Health promotion can make an important contribution, because it shows how to enable people to take more control over their lives and health. This commentary can provide a guide to agencies to understand an appropriate w...

The internationalists of the last century are, it turns out, quite relevant to our current crisis: they helped us get here, and they offer us no way out.

A review of Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, The Internationalists: How A Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (Simon & Schuster, 2017).

The essay seeks to determine how UNRWA, as a unique international investment in the welfare of one single category of refugees, has assumed these roles and reflects on their impact on the Palestine refugees and the overall Middle Eastern context. In so doing, it offers insight into the interplay of humanitarian/development operational concerns, as articulated by UNRWA, and of more normative and political interests that have underlain the stances of donor and host countries as well as those of the refugees and their representatives. In this respect, UNRWA has been a site of conflicting claims its management has had to grapple with. The two first sections trace the dynamics behind the creation and the evolution of its mandate in terms of institutional and operational development and overview the impact of its assistance programs. The third section focuses on the political dimensions attached to the concepts of “community participation” and of “protection” that UNRWA has recently mainstreamed across its various activities.

Personal reflections on “The Roots of Russia”, written by the late Dr. Lev Dobriansky (1918-2008), a renowned Professor of Economics at Georgetown University, and former US Ambassador to the Bahamas. The Dobriansky article was published, courtesy of the (US) Naval Institute Proceedings-April 1963, in An Cosantoir (The Defender), The Irish Defence Journal, Dublin in January 1964, under the auspices of the Irish Defence Forces. European coherence largely depends on two critical factors today: Russia's ability to respect Ukraine sovereign choices and to restore itself to international and multilateral collaboration, and Germany's ability to think "outside the box", and with some modesty realise that in the wider EU, it is a minority nation, for there is no majority one, and should therefore exert its influence more positively to build consensus around options and choices for European futures. Even Russia would be a minority country if and when it joins the EU. This neighbourhood no longer has any room for bullies.

Little is known about the effect of community versus health facility-based interventions to improve and sustain antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence, virologic suppression, and retention in care among HIV-infected individuals in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We systematically searched four electronic databases for all available randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and comparative cohort studies in LMICs comparing community versus health facility-based interventions. Relative risks (RRs) for pre-defined adherence, treatment engagement (linkage and retention in care), and relevant clinical outcomes were pooled using random effect models. Eleven cohort studies and eleven RCTs (N = 97,657) were included. Meta-analysis of the included RCTs comparing community- versus health facility-based interventions found comparable outcomes in terms of ART adherence (RR = 1.02, 95 % CI 0.99 to 1.04), virologic suppression (RR = 1.00, 95 % CI 0.98 to 1.03), and all-cause mortality (RR = 0...

The purpose of this chapter is to delve into housing rights as expressed in national constitutions. We report on all 189 constitutions of UN member states, describing and evaluating them in terms of what they say about the right to housing. As a benchmark for evaluation, we turn to the UN’s main interpretation on adequate housing, known as comment No. 4 to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights [ICESCR] of 1966 (UN General Assembly). This document stipulates seven criteria of adequate housing. <br><br>The chapter opens with current knowledge about the comparative right to housing, followed by our own contribution. We then expand on each of the seven criteria of adequate housing: legal security of tenure, availability of services and infrastructure, affordability, habitability, accessibility, location, and cultural adequacy. These criteria serve as our benchmarks for evaluating the constitutional right to housing (CRtH) in the wording of all th...

With the budget cuts to peace operations implemented last year and the prospect of even more reduction in resources, debates about UN peacekeeping effectiveness have intensified. One of the areas sorely in need of innovation is peacekeeping training and, more generally, the preparation of troops, police officers, and civilians for peace operations.  Secretary General António Guterres  acknowledged this point in January 2018 at the African Union (AU) Headquarters in Addis Ababa, when he emphasized the need to ensure better preparation for peacekeeping forces.  The point is also reinforced by the recent report “Improving Security of United Nations Peacekeepers,” which identified deficient pre-deployment training as one of the main causes of fatalities and serious injuries among peacekeepers in the field. Improving peacekeeping training centers in the most important troop and police contributing countries (TCCs and PCCs) for UN and AU missions—most of them developing countries facing considerable resource limitations—has thus acquired greater urgency.

يعرض المقال لوضع الشباب على أجندة المنظمات الدولية والإقليمية والمجتمع المدني العالمي، في ظل احتلالهم موقع القمة في الهرم السكاني، والدور المتزايد لهم في الحفاظ على الأمن والسلم الدوليين، واهتمام المنظمات الدولية والإقليمية بسياسات ادماجهم في استراتيجياتها وهياكلها التنظيمية، ويخلص إلى أهمية طرح الأمم المتحدة لاتفاقية دولية تنظم حقوق الشباب أسوة بالوضع القائم للمرأة والطفل والمعاقين، وأن يتوازى معها تقييم دور الهياكل العالمية المعنية بقضايا الشباب، وتطوير الإطار التنظيمي المعني بالشباب في المنظمات الإقليمية.

La lucha del movimiento LGBTI ha marcado las últimas dos décadas en el sistema de derechos humanos de la ONU. Una lucha marcada por un proceso de reconocimiento de sus derechos, reconocimiento que sigue siendo contestado y revertido por diferentes países. El movimiento LGBTI ha procurado en la ONU promover su reconocimiento para eliminar la violencia, discriminación e injusticia hacia las personas LGBTI como un colectivo víctima de la opresión sexual en todo el mundo, que no les reconoce sus derechos humanos debido a prejuicios como el heterosexismo.

Mars in unearthly, unchartered, unknown & yet attracts all of humanity. The hazards of the endeavor are overwhelmed by the hype & hope surrounding the enterprise. A variety of individuals, private companies, commercial firms and national space agencies are engrossed in efforts at landing & inhabiting Mars. However, these efforts are disjoint and there exists little or no coordination. The aspirations as also hazards are immense, the resources scarce & costly. Consequently, left ungoverned, the potential for conflict in space exploration is high. There exists a critical need to regulate and coordinate affairs in this area right now when the technologies and legislation are yet immature. This calls for a credible institutionalized governance structure. This paper proposes an expansion of the existing United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) to take on the mantle of space exploration governance and to continue with incremental progressions later.

This article aims to analyze the World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna, 1993) as a landmark in the human rights field. The goal is to discuss two hypotheses. First, that the Conference played an important role in the dissemination of human rights as an issue-area in international relations. Second, that the Conference contributed to the process of “relaxation of sovereignty”. The article is divided into three parts: the background to the Conference; the relationship between human rights and state sovereignty in the international system; the third section aims to connect the two hypotheses based on the debates of the Conference. The goal is not to analyze the Conference itself, but rather to demonstrate the trends that were empowered and unleashed by it in relation to the two hypotheses.

This brief considers the issue of ‘everyday’ criminal justice in the Central African republic (CAR) and reflects on the challenges that low-level crimes present for international actors engaging in civilian protection activities. It focuses on contemporary operational dilemmas faced by international actors in CAR, considering the perspectives of humanitarian actors, actors from the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA), displaced populations, local civil society, and armed actors. This brief may be read alone or alongside
a companion brief (Research Brief 1 on CAR). The field research that generated these findings was conducted by the author during a three-week visit to CAR in April 2019.

Governments and NGOs all over the world are condemning the three evils; human slavery, human trafficking, and forced labour, by passing national and international laws and regulations and often in favour of status quo.

        The system of liberal capitalism is successful at diverting the attention away from itself on the three evils by relying upon the definitions given by the law and regulations passed by governments and NGOs such as the United Nations. According to the governments and NGOs, the three evils are illegal, immoral and criminal activities. Therefore, by diverting the focus on slavery, trafficking, and forced labor, the system is continuing to abuse women, children and men by way of labor exploitation in order to increase their economic gain and advancement at the expense of the innocent women, children, and men.