An analysis of the role of the interplay between formality and informality in shaping the current state of international law.

In 2000 all federal German ministries were ordered to avoid international obligations as much as they could. The directive stipulated that negotiators should explore alternatives to formal undertakings based on international law. Bureaucrats in other administrations report similar expectations if not explicit directives. This new attitude toward international obligations reflects both the availability of novel ways for governments to interact across political borders, as well as new concerns about international legal tools, especially the formal international institutions. This preference for informal lawmaking suggests that international cooperation can be achieved without recourse to international legal tools and that the informality offers significant benefits to some governments. The aims of this paper are to explore some of the new modalities for international cooperation that avoid the formal tools of international law, and then to reflect on the motivations for their use as well as on the consequences of their proliferation.

Exploring theoretical foundations for the distribution of shared responsibility, this book provides a basis for the development of international law.

Poverty, inequality, and dispossession accompany economic globalization. Bringing together three international law scholars, this book addresses how international law and its regimes of trade, investment, finance, as well as human rights, are implicated in the construction of misery, and how international law is producing, reproducing, and embedding injustice and narrowing the alternatives that might really serve humanity. Adopting a pluralist approach, the authors confront the unconscionable dimensions of the global economic order, the false premises upon which they are built, and the role of international law in constituting and sustaining them. Combining insights from radical critiques, political philosophy, history, and critical development studies, the book explores the pathologies at work in international economic law today. International law must abide by the requirements of justice if it is to make a call for compliance with it, but this work claims it drastically fails do so. In a legal order structured around neoliberal ideologies rather than principles of justice, every state can and does grab what it can in the economic sphere on the basis of power and interest, legally so and under colour of law. This book examines how international law on trade and foreign investment and the law and norms on global finance has been shaped to benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of others. It studies how a set of principles, in the form of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), that could have laid the groundwork for a more inclusive international law without even disrupting its market-orientation, were nonetheless undermined. As for international human rights law, it is under the terms of global capitalism that human rights operate. Before we can understand how human rights can create more just societies, we must first expose the ways in which they reflect capitalist society and how they assist in reproducing the underlying terms of immiseration that will continue to create the need for human rights protection. This book challenges conventional justifications of economic globalization and eschews false choices. It is not about whether one is "for" or "against" international trade, foreign investment, or global finance. The issue is to resolve how, if we are to engage in trade, investment, and finance, we do so in a manner that is accountable to persons whose lives are affected by international law. The deployment of human rights for their part must be considered against the ubiquity of neoliberal globalization under law, and not merely as a discrete, benevolent response to it.

Examines the difficulties in applying international law to recent armed conflicts known as 'new wars'.

This book reviews the practice of shared responsibility in multiple issue areas of international law, to assess its application and development.

By considering different international legal sources, including humanitarian law, human rights and criminal law, this book seeks to identify the rules applicable to International Military Missions engaged in different actions in the context of peace operations.

The author examines the legitimacy o Canada's participation in acts of non-defensive aggression in light of Canada 's international obligations and international law. He contends that in the domestic terrain, constitutional conventions, practices, and applicable laws as factors that shape Canada's decisions to participate in international conflicts, must also be critically reconsidered.

This is the first in-depth study of the foreign and defence policies of the Coalition, a government that saw the Conservatives restored to power for the first time since the Iraq War and the Liberal Democrats enter government for the first time. It explores the idea of Britain as a ‘Great Power’ since 1945 to show how the Coalition’s policies fitted into wider historical understandings of Britain’s role in the world. Drawing on a range of evidence from the time of the Coalition, it shows that this period was one of continued change in British foreign policy. The Coalition conducted the first strategic defence review since 1998, significantly reduced the funding allocations for defence and foreign affairs, raised overseas aid spending to record levels, engaged in overseas military action in two sovereign states (and were denied a chance to participate in another), as well as a wide array of other policies. This book argues that evaluating these events and the historical background of the Coalition is critical to understanding the current crises gripping British politics.

Drawing upon and extending his inaugural Lipsey Lectures, Debraj Ray looks at coalition formation from the perspective of game theory. Ray brings together developments in both cooperative and noncooperative game theory to study the analytics of coalition formation and binding agreements.