The concept of the common heritage of mankind is one of the most extraordinary developments in recent intellectual history and one of the most revolutionary and radical legal concepts to have emerged in recent decades. The year 1997 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the advent of the concept in the domain of public international law. Ever since its emergence, it has become evident that no other concept, notion, principle or doctrine has brought as much intensive debate, controversy, confrontation and speculation as the common heritage phenomenon did. This is because it is a philosophical idea that questions the regimes of globally important resources regardless of their situation, and requires major changes in the world to apply its provisions. In other words, the application and enforcement of the common heritage of mankind require a critical reexamination of many well-established principles and doctrines of classical international law, such as acquisition of territory, consent-based sources of international law, sovereignty, equality, resource allocation and international personality. This book aims to explore the legal theory and implications of the concept of the common heritage of mankind. It addresses almost all aspects of the concept in the light of the experience of three decades. The author takes into account the elements of the common heritage concept in the fields of jurisprudence, outer space law, the law of the sea, the law of Antarctica, international environmental law, human rights and general principles of public international law. It tries to develop a normative framework through which the concept may offer alternatives for the governance of the global commons.

Identifies the major weaknesses in the current United Nations system and proposes fundamental reforms to address each. This title is also available as Open Access.

Das englischsprachige Berghof Handbook ist das internationale Referenzwerk zum Thema Konflikttransformation. The Berghof Handbook offers both practitioners and scholars a systematic overview of the state-of-the-art of conflict transformation.

This fully up-dated, third revised edition of Conforti's thought-provoking and challenging textbook, The Law and Practice of the United Nations, provides a comprehensive legal analysis of problems concerning membership, the structure of UN organs, their functions and their acts, taking into consideration the text of the Charter, its historical origins, and, particularly, the practice of the organs. Its main focus is on the practice of the Security Council. In particular the action of the Security Council under Chapter VII has been taken into account. The legal literature on Chapter VII - a literature which has grown enormously in recent times - has also been considered. The fact that the legal aspects of the action or the inaction of the Security Council have been discussed to an unusually large extent by ordinary people at the time of the war against Iraq and even later is worth noting. The importance of the role of the United Nations, and the content of the rules governing it, has become a leitmotiv of all debates on international politics. Consequently, the opinion often held in the past, according to which it was useless to deal with the legal aspects of the United Nations activity, can be considered as obsolete.

This title was first published in 2000: Yugoslavia’s dissolved at a time when rhetoric of the New World Order was firmly established in legal and political discourse. Nevertheless, the largely positive appraisal of international law’s response to the Iraq - Kuwait conflict has not been mirrored in relation to Yugoslavia. This book evaluates the peace-making efforts of the major institutional actors, whilst focusing specifically on the Badinter Arbitration Commission, an ad hoc EC-created organ required to provide legal advice on the issues surrounding Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Initially composed of constitutional lawyers, aiming to redraft Yugoslavia’s constitution, the Commission soon faced problems of public international law. Its’ jurisprudence challenges international lawyers to reassess their state-centric conceptions of international law in a world where most conflicts, war crimes and human-rights abuses exist within rather than between States. This book is vital reading for anyone interested in international law, international relations, politics and central/eastern European studies.

“Key Documents on the Reform of the UN Security Council 1991-2019” brings together primary source documents reflecting the political, legal and academic discussions of the United Nations Security Council reform, in particular the Council’s membership and decision-making, as they have taken place since 1991. Earlier discussions from the late 1940s through 1991 are covered insofar as they offer a useful contribution to the current debate. This extensive collection, curated by a leading authority, is intended to be representative of the debate as a whole without bias, faithfully reflecting the positions of various stakeholders, global participants and civil society. This important work will be an indispensable resource for researchers and students, bringing together hundreds of documents produced during more than three decades by governments, UN bodies, universities, think tanks and individual authors in a single, comprehensive volume.

Historicizing both emotions and politics, this open access book argues that the historical work of emotion is most clearly understood in terms of the dynamics of institutionalization. This is shown in twelve case studies that focus on decisive moments in European and US history from 1800 until today. Each case study clarifies how emotions were central to people’s political engagement and its effects. The sources range from parliamentary buildings and social movements, to images and speeches of presidents, from fascist cemeteries to the International Criminal Court. Both the timeframe and the geographical focus have been chosen to highlight the increasingly participatory character of nineteenth- and twentieth-century politics, which is inconceivable without the work of emotions.

In three distinct volumes the editors bring together a distinguished group of contributors whose essays chart the history, practice, and future of international humanitarian law. At a time when the war crimes of recent decades are being examined in the International Criminal Tribunals for Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and a new International Criminal Court is being created as a permanent venue to try such crimes, the role of international humanitarian law is seminal to the functioning of such attempts to establish a just world order. The intent of these volumes is to help to inform where humanitarian law had its origins, how it has been shaped by world events, and why it can be employed to serve the future. The other volumes in this set are International Humanitarian Law: Origins and International Humanitarian Law: Challenges Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint.