Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin Recent documents in Peter G. Danchin en-us Sat, 20 Jun 2009 11:51:11 PDT 3600 http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/20 http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/20 Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:01:56 PDT In 2004, the Report of the Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change emphasised the linkages between economic development, security and human rights, and the imperative in the twenty-first century of collective action and cooperation between States. In a world deeply divided by differences of power, wealth, culture and ideology, central questions today in international law and organisation are whether reaffirmation of the concept of collective security and a workable consensus on the means of its realisation are possible. In addressing these questions, this book considers the three key documents in the recent UN reform process: the High-Level Panel report, the Secretary-General's In Larger Freedom report and the 2005 World Summit Outcome document. The chapters examine the responsibilities, commitments, strategies and institutions necessary for collective security to function both in practice and as a normative ideal in international law and relations between state and non-state actors alike. Comprehensive and critical discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of key documents in the recent UN reform process for contemporary conceptions of collective security Cross-disciplinary analysis of collective security addresses all the major issues in current collective security and UN reform debates and developments Brings together an experienced group of scholars and practitioners from Europe and the United States, giving readers the benefit of theoretical and practical studies from a range of multi-disciplinary perspectives Peter G. Danchin International Law http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/19 http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/19 Tue, 05 May 2009 08:16:55 PDT Whether viewed as a socio-legal project gently civilizing states away from an older politics of diplomacy, deterrence, self-help and legitimate warfare, or as an institutional project establishing a collective security system premised on the rule of law, the primary purpose of the United Nations today remains the maintenance of international peace and security and the abolition of the "scourge of war." In March 2003, the U.S. and its allies invaded Iraq, a member State of the United Nations, in order to disarm it and change the regime of Saddam Hussein. The war shook the United Nations and leading capitals around the world and exposed the tension between competing visions of world order. The stark incompatibility between these visions in turn prompted calls for both normative and institutional reform within the United Nations. First, was the structure of the Charter itself, and the body of international law on which it depends, still the correct framework by which to view and assess new and emerging threats in a post-September 11 world? Second, how could the 1945 UN peace and security architecture be made to work more effectively to respond to new threats and lessen the impetus for powerful States to "go it alone"? The essays in this volume address the question whether there is a compelling argument for a new collective security agenda, whether the Secretary-General's 2003 High Level Panel dreamed the right dreams and saw the right nightmares, and whether normatively and institutionally we are in fact moving towards a new collective security paradigm. Peter G. Danchin International Law http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/18 http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/18 Tue, 05 May 2009 08:16:54 PDT Modern critiques of international human rights law force us to confront at least two conceptual puzzles in the area of the claims of culture and religion. The first concerns the two concepts, often run together, of the secular (or secularism) and freedom, and the question of how rights--e.g. the right to freedom of conscience and religion--mediate between these purportedly universal or objective positions and the imagined subjective claims of particular religious or cultural norms. The second concerns the question of what we mean by "human equality" and how this idea relates to deeply-situated issues of collective identity and culture. Such claims raise complex and difficult conflicts between equality norms on the one hand, and religious and cultural freedom norms on the other. It is argued that a value pluralist approach to such questions opens the possibility of less dogmatic and binary accounts of reason and religion in viewing both as human institutions and social practices requiring modes of justification and accountability. This requires the constant search for forms of accommodation, mutual understanding, and overlapping consensus between actual religious communities and the normative claims of rights discourse understood in value pluralist and philosophically hermeneutic terms. In order for this to occur, however, the primary obstacle is the inability of Western rights theorists to see their culture as one amongst others. Peter G. Danchin International Law Human Rights Law http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/17 http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/17 Tue, 05 May 2009 08:16:53 PDT This chapter challenges and problematizes the convergence thesis between sovereignty and human rights which is argued to rest on only a partial understanding of the liberal tradition in international law, a position commonly referred to as "liberal anti-pluralism." While relying on a contingent and thus contestable conception of individual autonomy, liberal anti-pluralist accounts do not in fact seek to challenge the rationale for public law or public reason itself. To the contrary, such accounts advance a vision of "universal" or "global" social order governed by a "neutral" public law which limits the freedom of its subjects pursuant to the single "trumping" or "covering" value of individual freedom itself. The difficulty with such a conception of social order, however, is that it now itself poses a danger to freedom and diversity by threatening to eviscerate the law's existing limits on the demands of international social order on the liberty of its subjects. It does so by effectively eliminating the public-private distinction and by redefining fundamental rights to mean only, or ultimately, the rights of autonomous individuals. On this view, the very idea of sovereignty as a mediating device between a wide diversity of "private" or "national" political communities and ways of life and a "public" or "inter-national" community dissolves ultimately to be replaced by a universal or global law. Similarly, the idea of collective subjects as rights-holders - whether "peoples," "nations," or "minorities" asserting various claims rights to self-determination - is rejected, or at least premised on the notion that the rights of groups are derivative of or contingent on the rights of their members. On this view, sovereignty becomes a human right and thereby loses its traditional intersubjective and value pluralist function in international law: i.e., to maintain the conditions necessary for peaceful coexistence between different ways of life as opposed to their merging into that single form of life we have known since at least the late nineteenth century as civilization. The chapter considers how to make sense of these distinctions and asks whether the problem may be that, in order to justify and maintain these oppositions, we need to qualify liberal theory by something other than itself. If so, what are the implications of this insight for both national and international public law? Peter G. Danchin International Law http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/16 http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/16 Tue, 05 May 2009 08:16:01 PDT This chapter provides an introduction to the analytical and historical aspects of the concept of collective security in international law. Taking the examples of Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 during the League of Nations and the complaint brought by Hyderabad against India at the very inception of the United Nations in 1948, the chapter traces the complex dialectics of normativity and concreteness in debates concerning collective security. Mirroring the normative and institutional dilemmas underlying the two cases of Ethiopia and Hyderabad, it is observed that the questions of "external threats" (the threat or use of force between States) and "internal threats" (what today is referred to as the "responsibility to protect") were the two most controversial issues in the post-2004 UN reform process. The High-Level Panel's recommendations should in this respect be seen as responses to a breakdown beginning in the early 1990s of the pragmatic compromise lying at the heart of the UN Charter. This can be seen in two directions: first, as a result of an instrumental autonomy argument which asserts that the sovereign right of self defence includes the right to carry out pre-emptive strikes; and second, as a result of an instrumental communitarian argument which views sovereignty as an anachronistic obstacle to humanitarian objectives and thus outweighed by the need to protect fundamental human rights. In order to counter these two trends, the non-instrumental or cultural aspects of international law are indispensible for any robust account of collective security in the relations between States. Peter G. Danchin International Law http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/15 http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/15 Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:28:05 PST This Essay advances an argument for rethinking the current terms of engagement of U.S. foreign policy with international law and institutions so as to avoid the current two extremes of power politics and imperial moralizing. First, it is necessary to distinguish between force and the status of political domination on the one hand, and consensus and the status of normative meaning on the other. While it may be possible for a superpower to exercise factual authority and control over foreign states and peoples through sheer assertions of force and will, the attainability of such a situation should not be confused with the ideals of justice or political community. At bottom, the move from Realpolitik to legal formalism rests on a simple idea: while certain views of the good may reasonably be denied, it is inherently unreasonable to deny the autonomy of others as "reason-giving" and "reason-receiving" subjects. In the absence of a basic "right to justification," inherently-contested questions of how it may be possible to conceive and organize an international political community do not arise. To appreciate why such a notion of mutual respect should commend itself to us, we must first understand how and why current rationalistic accounts of state interests and state freedom are inherently unreasonable. Second, and as a corollary to this, in asserting any claim to "universal right" the boundaries and finitude of all forms of modern natural law reasoning must be acknowledged. The unavoidability of pluralism and reasonable disagreement argues for a form of social ethics, i.e. the idea that all moral norms be intersubjectively contested and justified. The first argument explains and justifies the move to international law; the second explains and justifies the need for international regimes and institutions. Peter G. Danchin International Law http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/14 http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/14 Thu, 23 Oct 2008 05:20:27 PDT Peter G. Danchin International Law Human Rights Law http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/13 http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/13 Tue, 05 Aug 2008 09:06:49 PDT This Article presents a critique of the historical evolution of the right to freedom of religion in international law. In identifying certain conceptual tensions between liberal and value pluralist accounts in the literature, a general theoretical argument is advanced. Beyond standard Enlightenment narratives of individual freedom of conscience, this argument notices a second, more complex narrative of genuine pluralism in the evolving conception of religious freedom in international legal thought. This suggests that there is no simple, but rather a complex mapping of individual toleration in international law and no single path to modernity or to the formation of the secular, but rather many paths and forms of accommodation and consensus. The implications of this understanding of religious freedom are considered in three areas: first, in contemporary anxieties regarding liberal accounts of "the state" as the subject of international law; second, in the recognition that the notion of sovereignty itself relies on a theory of value pluralism which restrains liberal "anti-pluralism"; and third, in the doubts increasingly voiced both within and beyond Anglo-American jurisprudence concerning the dangers and contingency of a project which uncritically advances a single account of individual autonomy as a universal moral norm in the vastly more diverse religious and cultural nomos of international law. Peter G. Danchin International Law http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/12 http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/12 Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:38:05 PDT Peter G. Danchin Human Rights Law Freedom of Religion http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/11 http://works.bepress.com/peter_danchin/11 Tue, 03 Jun 2008 05:15:06 PDT Peter G. Danchin Human Rights Law