Suchergebnisse

Research in conflict studies and environmental security has largely focused on the mechanisms through which the environment and natural resources foster conflict or contribute to peacebuilding. An understudied area of research, however, concerns the ways in which warfare has targeted civilian infrastructure with long-term effects on human welfare and ecosystems. This article seeks to fill this gap. We focus on better understanding the conflict destruction of water, sanitation, waste, and energy infrastructures, which we term environmental infrastructures, by drawing on an author-compiled database of the post-2011 wars in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). While research across the social sciences has examined the targeting of civilians and environmental destruction during wars, including the issue of urbicide, we expand the study of targeting environmental infrastructure to (1) examine the role of different types of actors (international vs. subnational), (2) document the type of infrastructure targeted, form of attack, and impacts, and (3) situate increased targeting of environmental infrastructure in the changing context of war-making in the MENA. Comparatively analyzing the conflict zones of Libya, Syria, and Yemen, we show that targeting environmental infrastructure is an increasingly prevalent form of war-making in the MENA, with long-term implications for rebuilding states, sustaining livelihoods, and resolving conflicts.

My paper is about a project that will examine Switzerland's participation, during five decades, in the institutional and intellectual emancipation of the map-based sciences. I intend to provide a thematic and dispassionate account of the achievements of Swiss cartography and cartographers, and document the crucial initiatives a Swiss academic took to develop cartography worldwide. In the course of my analysis of Professor Eduard Imhof's interactions with his foreign colleagues, I will add cultural as well as technical perspectives to the interpretation of contemporary progress in the mapping sciences. For the Swiss school of cartography, the Imhof era (1920-1970) was more formative than the bet-ter-studied Dufour and Siegfried Maps period (1845-1926). Despite the contentious political environment of his time, E. Imhof (1895-1986) used his personal charisma to systematically encourage cooperation worldwide. Through the seminars he led and the International Cartographic Association he created and chaired, E. Imhof federated the cartographers from across the world. I will explain how by 1970, on the eve of the digital revolution, he had forged a common professional identity and improved modes and venues to communicate across the discipline. Eduard Imhof will thus allow us to touch on two important themes in science and society: the geography of knowledge and the adoption of new theories, standards and methods by the international scientific community.

Diskussion der Frage, inwiefern die Steuergesetzgebung der Golfstaaten und Saudi-Arabiens auf die Bankaktivitäten der internationalen Banken (Onshore- und Offshore-Aktivitäten) angewandt werden kann; gegenwärtige Besteuerungspraxis; im Anhang Abdruck des Arab Tax Treaty und Auszüge des Steuergesetzes aus Saudi-Arabien, Kuwait, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah. (DÜI-Faa)

The World Court's recent decision in the North Sea Continental Shelf Cases is a major contribution to that branch of the theory of customary international law dealing with norm-creation by means of a treaty. The Court articulated a new methodology for determining which provisions in treaties can form the basis of universally binding customary law. As the spreading network of international conventions becomes more fine-meshed, the substantive rules of international customary law may be expected to conform more and more closely to the provisions in these conventions. The World Court has implicitly recognized this process in many prior opinions, but it was not until the Continental Shelf decision that the link between treaty and custom was focused upon with precision. I shall argue in this essay that the Court used a method which might be called the rule of manifest intent, that this method differs from a more traditional approach found in the writings of publicists, and that this new method accords well with the growing need to objectify and place upon a scientific basis the methodology by which one may determine what in fact are the rules of customary law.