Washington University Global Studies Law Review (original) (raw)
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The employment of international law in U.S. foreign policy has been observed with ambiguity by many scholars, particularly when it comes to confronting terrorism. The beginning of the twenty first century has already witnessed a global war on terror and its techniques. Consequently, doubts have been assumed regarding the role of U.S. leadership in global affairs due to mishandling of international legal rules in dealing with terrorism. The conflict between power and international law is not new, however, now has become emperor’s cloth. The twenty first century may resist an unconditional privilege of the realists that politicization of international law is the best use of international law not the legalization of international politics. The global war on terror and other geopolitical factors of global landscape have alarmed the realists’ approach of abusing international law and have indicated that legalization of international relations would be better for U.S. foreign policy and i...
'War on Terror' and Hegemony: International Law-Making Regarding Terrorism After 9/11
DergiPark (Istanbul University), 2012
The focus of analysis in this article is the process of hegemonic law-making regarding terrorism utilizing unilateral power and the collective legitimization function of the UN. In order to explore how hegemony influences the development of international legal norms concerning the use of force and terrorism, the article examines the ways in which the United States as a prevailing actor in the international system has sought to translate its political power to develop a new norm of preemption and to impose international legal obligations on states with regards to the suppression of terrorism through the United Nations Security Council's Chapter VII resolutions after September 11 terrorist attacks.
America's War on Terror: Rattling International Law with Raw Power?
The need for more dramatic targets has led to the new and somewhat exaggerated emphasis on a unilateral right of pre-emptive self-defence by the United States. What is most striking about the new US policy is that it portrays state-sponsored terrorism and rogue states possessing weapons of mass destruction as a new problem, and unilateral action as the only way of dealing with them. It is dangerous to marginalise the UN and increase the role of multilateral global coalitions or unilateral action in policing "evil-doing" as this has the potential to supplant what initially was designed as the role of the United Nations. If decisions regarding the use of force become nationalised, this may lead to anarchic, piecemeal, random, and unilateral enforcement of the desirable shared goal of stamping out terrorism.
Law & Social Inquiry, 2019
Since 2001, we have witnessed the development of a counterterrorism war paradigm built to advance claims about the post-9/11 scope and discretion of US executive power and to articulate specific interpretations of national security interests and strategic objectives in the "war on terror." What makes this a paradigm rather than merely a conglomeration of evolving policies is the cohesiveness and mutual reinforcement of its underlying rationales about the rights of the US government to prosecute a territorially unbounded war against an evolving cast of enemies. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of a juridical field, the article focuses on how officials who constructed a legal framework for this paradigm, rather than disregarding international law wholesale, have engaged in interpretations and crafted rationales to evade some international humanitarian law (IHL) rules and norms while rejecting the underlying logic or applicability of others. This article traces the counterterrorism war paradigm's development and explains how it now competes with and threatens to supersede the customary law principles enshrined in IHL.
International Law at Crossroads : the impact of September 11
2002
Planck-Institut für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht Stalin 2. The September 11 Attacks as Crimes against Humanity 3. Terrorists Acts and the Crime of Aggression a) Aggression as a crime under international law b) Aggression and non-state actors 4. Terrorism and the ICC a) The state of the law b) No need for reform VI. Conclusions 1 On September 11 and its aftermath, see Antonio Cassese, Terrorism is also Disrupting Some
2 This dissertation was submitted in partial fulfillment of the Masters Degree course in International Relations and was written in 2010 and has not yet been updated; although I intend to do so at a later date -subsequently new facts have emerged and today in July 2013 Guantanamo remains open. Copyright Martin E Ridley may be reproduced for Academic purposes 3 'Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory (truth) since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed'. Harold Pinter -Nobel Prize in Literature, acceptance speech 2005 1 1 Pinter,