The UN Peacekeepers: Being Protected by Militarised Masculinities

By Vanessa Gauthier Vela

Since the 1990s, media around the world have been reporting on various scandals that highlight sexual violence and exploitation perpetrated by UN peacekeepers and humanitarian staff. These accusations forced the UN to take action, but yet, official data shows that this phenomenon is still not decreasing. This paper underlines the gendered and racialised dynamics that can be observed in the data collected to date.

Antagonistic Recursivities and Successive Cover-Ups: The Case of Private Nuclear Proliferation

By Grégoire Mallard

“Legal recursivity” is a concept introduced by socio-legal scholars to capture the progressive elaboration of transnational rules through policy linkages at the international and domestic levels, and the associated jurisdictional expansion of international institutions to new policy areas. This paper introduces the concept of “antagonistic recursivity” to capture a dual process of recursive legal innovation and antagonistic obstruction by the same policy actors. 

Regional Security Initiatives and the UN: Multilateral Organisations in South America

By Stephanie Hofmann and Kai Michael Kenkel

Based on the observation that formal multilateral security structures are sometimes inadequate, slow to activate, outdated or simply “incomplete”, this paper examines how regional security organisations actually function as well as the specific roles that informal “dimensions” play in it.

And What about the Effects of Wartime Sexual Violence for Survivors and Their Communities?

By Mia Schöb 

Based on an inductive research on Colombian wartime sexual violence (WSV), this paper shows that to fully understand the workings of WSV, we need to complement the dominant theoretical focus on purpose and perpetrators with an examination of social and cultural meanings of WSV performances and of their consequences for surviving individuals and communities.

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The (Un)intended Consequences of Decision-Making Reforms in International Organisations

By Velibor Jakovleski

Not all reforms of international organisations (IOs) have the intended effects. For example, the WTO's “reverse consensus”, which replaced the unit veto system and was to make its dispute settlement system more representative, strengthened the authority of the Appellate Body at the expense of the member states. Using the cases of  GATT/WTO and the ILO, this paper studies the implications of changes in the supervisory decision-making rules of two IOs with different organisational structures. 

The ILO’s Role in Global Governance: Limits and Potential

By Velibor Jakovleski, Scott Jerbi and Thomas Biersteker

Using the concept of institutional layering, this paper explores efforts by the ILO’s leadership to reassert the organisation’s role in broader global policy contexts since 1998. It concludes that new layers of soft law rules and flexible governance mechanisms can potentially augment the ILO’s global standing moving forward. But its lack of representativeness and its continuing engagement of new actors demand further formal changes to the ILO’s institutional apparatus to be effective.

The Law behind Conflicting Claims: A Study on Persistent Maritime Boundary Disputes

By Umut Yüksel

This paper argues that when law is uncertain, states are likely to make overlapping claims and enter into disputes that will persist as long as they can use competing legal rules and interpretations to back their claims. It proposes and tests a causal mechanism linking legal uncertainty to specific dispute outcomes, and finds that legal uncertainty is a strong predictor of both dispute onset and duration, unlike other plausible drivers of maritime disputes such as the existence of natural resources offshore.

Spreading like Wildfire: Gendered Rumors in Conflict Cycles

By Christelle Rigual, Joy Onyesoh and Wening Udasmoro

Drawing upon interviews with conflict-affected communities in Indonesia and Nigeria, this paper argues that rumors acted as a key factor driving ethno-religious conflict through the activation of gendered social mechanisms triggering conflict escalation and retaliation. In turn, many communities acknowledged this role of rumors and demonstrated crucial skills in managing and controlling rumors to prevent further conflict escalation. Rumor control could thus play a crucial role in the prevention of conflict at the local level.

Control through Inter-Organisational Coordination Mechanisms: The Case of the UN Humanitarian Reform

By Clara Egger

Since 2005 and the UN-led reform inter-organisational coordination between IGOs and NGOs has been strongly promoted in the humanitarian field. Although aid workers feel that this reform has profoundly affected the power relations between IGOs and NGOs, the existing literature considers it as a mere technical arrangement. Combining quantitative and qualitative data, this paper shows that states use inter-organisational coordination to promote the NGOs that are the more aligned with their own foreign policy agenda.

Ignorance/Power and Global Governance

By Deval Desai

This paper analyses the political economy of indicator production. Challenging the prevailing literature on indicators as a tool of global governance, which argues that indicators are overdetermined and depoliticised, the paper argues that rule of law indicators were structured by techniques of indeterminacy, or efforts by experts who, acknowledging the complexity of the world, made the indicator provisional – an object to be piloted, or adapted to local context. Thus the politics of indicators lie not in their global production, but in their ongoing implementation.

Regime Longevity and Arbitrary Governance in Uganda  

By Rebecca Tapscott

This paper theorises uncertainty as a mode of illiberal rule in northern Uganda. It examines the relationship between the state security apparatus and informal security arrangements such as local vigilantes, civil militias and community police. It finds that in the area of security the central Ugandan state is ever-present in citizens’ imaginations. This is achieved through a strategy of rule that the author terms “institutionalised arbitrariness”, in which violence is institutionalised in the state’s governing system but remains unpredictable from the perspective of ordinary citizens.
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An Historical Perspective on Ethical Review of the Social Sciences in Uganda and the Implications for 21st Century Knowledge Production

By Rebecca Tapscott

Unlike biomedical research ethics committees (RECs), social sciences RECs in the Global South have as yet received little attention from researchers. This paper looks at the comparatively sophisticated and broad-reaching REC system in Uganda. It examines what economic, social, political, and cultural factors have been privileged and marginalised by the RECs since they were founded in 1990, and, as a result, what influence RECs exert on social sciences research, and the political implications of these findings.

Criminalizing Resistance: The Cases of Balata and Jenin Refugee Camps

By Alaa Tartir

The Palestinian Authority (PA) adopted donor-driven security sector reform (SSR) as the linchpin of its post-2007 state-building project. This paper tackles the consequences of the PA’s security campaigns in Balata and Jenin refugee camps from the people’s perspective through a bottom-up ethnographic methodological approach. These voices from below problematise and examine the security campaigns, illustrating how and why resistance against Israel has been criminalized.

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Effective? Locally Owned? Beyond the Technocratic Perspective on the European Union Police Mission for the Palestinian Territories

By Alaa Tartir and Filip Ejdus

The European Union Police Mission for the Palestinian Territories was established in 2006 to contribute to the establishment of effective policing in support of an independent and democratic Palestinian state. This paper argues that the mission can be considered effective and locally owned only from a narrow technocratic perspective, which denies the political reality of continued occupation and absence of democracy.

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A Judicial Innovation? From Positive Obligation to the Family of the Disappeared Persons to the “Right to the Truth”

By Ezgi Yildiz

This paper traces the evolution of the “right to truth” in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) from the states’ positive obligation to inform the family of the disappeared persons down to the states’ duty to inform not only the close relatives but also the larger public. By examining the way a narrow obligation was transformed into an autonomous right, the paper sheds lights on the development of international legal principles and the role of courts in this regard.