Browsing by Subject "International law"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    The globalization of childhood: the role of law and norms in the global abolition of the death penalty for child offenders.
    (2010-07) Linde, Robyn Michele
    This dissertation examines how an idea that begins in one part of the world becomes a global norm that almost all states in the international system obey. It investigates the processes of normative development and global diffusion through the study of a single norm: the prohibition of the death penalty for child offenders under the age 18. The dissertation traces the life cycle of this norm from its origins to its rapid global spread in the 1960s and 1970s to the present, when it has been internalized by most countries while also strongly contested by a handful of others. Through case studies of the death penalty policies of China, Ethiopia, France, Japan, Kenya, Pakistan, Tanzania, Tunisia, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as through institutional case studies of UNICEF and Amnesty International, I argue that abolition of the death penalty for child offenders diffused as a key part of a globalized childhood. This globalized childhood originated in parts of Europe and the United States and spread via the colonial powers of Britain and France. In the last few decades of the 20th century, international law addressing children homogenized state policies, further crystallizing the norm against the child death penalty. By considering how states incorporate a specific norm into their domestic value system and legal framework, I explain how such factors as state structure, international pressure, domestic-level actors (such as NGOs and social movements) and law produce human rights change and catalyze international transformation.
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    Indigenous global politics.
    (2009-11) Lightfoot, Sheryl Rae
    The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples passed the United Nations General Assembly on September 13, 2007. This document articulates the minimum international standard on indigenous peoples' rights that nation states are obligated to recognize and protect. It took more than thirty years of intense effort by the indigenous rights movement to achieve passage of the Declaration. This dissertation explores how indigenous politics at the global level compels a new direction of thought in International Relations. I argue that indigenous global politics is a perspective of International Relations that complicates the structure of international politics in new and important ways, challenging both Westphalian notions of state sovereignty and the (neo-)liberal foundations of states and the international system. A case study of the international indigenous peoples' movement and the development of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples demonstrates how attempts to secure indigenous rights at the international level are helping to forge new articulations of the concepts of sovereignty, the state, and territoriality. I have also detected a peculiar pattern of state response to these changes, a pattern that was previously undetected, unexamined and thus also unnamed in International Relations. I have termed this puzzling pattern "over-compliance," by which I mean that a state's indigenous rights policy behavior goes above and beyond its international commitments. My qualitative case studies of Canadian and New Zealand indigenous rights "over-compliance," based on original field research, analyze both the potential and the limits of the challenges posed by indigenous global politics. My research identifies several mechanisms that explain both legal "over-compliance" with treaty standards and de facto policy under-compliance, including the domestic and international strength of transnational indigenous movements and coalitions, and changes within a state's domestic political discourse regarding indigenous reconciliation.
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    International law and global justice: why institutional features of international law matter to discussions of global justice.
    (2011-08) Davidovic, Jovana
    Do the structure and processes of the institution of international law limit the actions that can be justly performed in the international arena and how? This question can be separated into two steps: First, is there a reason to think that some proposed individual principle of global justice is necessarily incompatible with international law? Second, does that give us a reason to think that that proposed principle is wrong, i.e. that we ought not to act in accord with it? I argue that some of the time the answers to both of these questions are `yes'. If we can without too much controversy develop a set of conditions necessary for international law and develop an analysis of international law based on those necessary conditions, we can answer the first question. If we can give a principled account of which types of solutions to global justice dilemmas require compatibility with international law, we can answer the second of the two questions. Together these two answers can help us in narrowing not simply and not primarily the field of policy options, but in fact the field of philosophical and theoretical options. My primary aim, then, is to suggest an appropriate place for the institution of international law in discussions of global justice. I argue that the necessary features of the institution of international law can and should be used to reject some and accept other principles of global justice. The necessary features of international law I start from are the rule-of-law conditions. My second aim is to show how this argument would work with respect to some particular problems of global justice, like those raised by the principle of the moral equality of combatants in war and secession.