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Problems with election fraud and election integrity are of increasing interest in both established and transitional democracies. In many transitional democracies, independent electoral management bodies (EMBs) have been championed as a key institutional reform measure to successfully strengthen election integrity. However, empirical findings regarding the impact of EMB institutional design on election integrity are mixed. While regional studies have found a positive impact of independent EMBs on election integrity in Latin America and Africa, global comparative studies appear to show that EMB institutional design is either negatively, or only very weakly related to election integrity. In this paper, we examine the effects of EMB institutional design on election integrity using the new Varieties of Democracy dataset and data from the International IDEA. We find that the mixed findings on EMB institutional design are due to the differences between transitional and established democracies on the one hand, and regimes with low and high quality of government on the other. The paper concludes with a reflection on results and a discussion of implications of these findings for the debate on electoral reform in Ireland.

This article explores the link between political and military strategy and tactics in the work of Friedrich Engels. Though widely praised for his understanding of military affairs, Engels' interlocutors have tended to be dismissive of his political works. By exploring his politics through the lens of his military writings this article challenges the view that Engels was a mechanical materialist and political fatalist thinker. It argues that his military writings cannot be understood apart from his political works, and that, whatever the historical limitations of the specific conclusions to which he came, his method in these writings illuminate his profound grasp of the relationship between strategy and tactics at both the military and political levels.

From the social contract theory of Hobbes and Locke to the United Nations Charter, the sovereign state has formed the fulcrum of political order and law. Yet in the Anthropocene, this humanist political containment fails to grapple with humanity's dangerous enmeshment with the ecological systems of planet Earth. This article addresses one aspect of this dilemma by focusing on the international law and governance of biodiversity, which presents a "blue screen" biosphere: A material simulation that enables a double disappearance of biodiversity from the text of international law and from the actuality of the world. Through a critique of the figure of the "natural resource," the article finds that the founding texts of international environmental law entrench a twofold humanism-As-statism that simultaneously supports the geopower of the state to facilitate the capitalist appropriation of the nonhuman and imports the modern metaphysics of the human domination of nature into international customary law. Such legal-political ontologies block a path to a more hopeful system of global ecological law and governance based on the "rights of nature" that might be able to honor the intrinsic value of the biosphere as a rich, agentic, and communicative whole, fundamental to the Earth's survival.

Scholars have debated whether citizenship regimes in Western democracies aretracking a liberal universalistic path or continue to follow distinctive nationaltraditions. This essay argues that the Australian case does both through a distinctiveliberal nationalist architecture. Increasingly since the 1970s, Australian citizenshipacquisition and status have largely followed a civic nationalist or liberal universalistformulation. However, this has been executed within a broader liberal nationalistapproach to national identity and culture that accommodates these aspects of nationallife. The essay discusses the idea of liberal nationalism as a political architecture ofdifferentiated domains, Australia's construction of this architecture, and howAustralia's two recent citizenship tests illustrate this framework in action. It concludeswith some thoughts on the symbolic significance of citizenship tests for liberallegitimacy and the future of the liberal nationalist project.

Thinking about 'after' and 'afterwards' in world politics necessitates thinking about complex, ambiguous and socially disruptive processes, practices, and methods of governance. Focused on locating the 'afterwards' in moments of world politics marked by ongoing, and consistently unsuccessful, responses to crisis, conflict, and questions of social, political, and economic legitimacy, this themed section spotlights two areas of particular concern. First, the section asks what it might mean to theorise 'after', and 'afterwards', in world politics. Second, it explores what opportunities are afforded in thinking about the relationship between 'afterwards' in terms of postcoloniality, governmentality, and the machinery of state building. Interested in diverse ways with 'thresholds', and the ambiguity of threshold environments, this section demonstrates the necessity of thinking about complex, ambiguous, and socially disruptive processes, practices, and methods of governance, including how the enduring impacts of past 'events' encroach upon the present in intimate and significant ways, influencing the lives, and life chances, of people throughout the world.

The responsibility to rebuild needs to be re-elevated to prominence as an integral component of R2P: conceptually, normatively and operationally; and its institutional homes in the UN system and the Secretary-General's role clarified. The 2009 three pillar formulation of R2P works well in most contexts, but is problematic in that it buries and loses sight of the critical importance of the original ICISS third 'responsibility to rebuild' and reconstruct war-raved societies to the point of being viable and self-sustaining once again. We derive some key lessons from the major international interventions of the twenty-first century and recall the context in which R2P was originally formulated in order to highlight the distinctive features of its contribution to international policy. We then describe three dimensions of the responsibility to rebuild - recovery, reconstruction and reconciliation - and the strategies and steps needed for the rebuilding agenda. Recalling that Security Council authorisation of R2P coercive operations is a nonnegotiable prerequisite, we suggest that the responsibility to rebuild can be reintroduced and implemented through the administrative and political leadership roles of the Secretary-General.

As promised, China brought a World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute against the USA and the European Union (EU) respectively regarding their anti-dumping laws, which continue to authorize the application of the so-called non-market economy (NME) methodology. This case was initiated one day after the expiry of paragraph 15(a)(ii) of China's WTO Accession Protocol on 11 December 2016. Through a preliminary analysis of China's claims in the request for consultation with the EU, this article argues that the expiration of paragraph 15(a)(ii) has terminated the right of WTO members to use surrogate prices or costs for price comparison in anti-dumping actions against China solely based on their national market economy criteria. The use of surrogate prices or costs must now comply with the relevant WTO rules applicable to all WTO members. On this basis, the challenged EU measure is likely to be found WTO inconsistent. Towards this end, WTO members may continue to label China as a NME for political or other reasons under their national laws. However, whatever this label may entail, it no longer justifies the application of the NME methodology.

Kant's account of "the radical evil in human nature" in the 1793 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone is typically interpreted as a reworking of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. But Kant does not talk about Augustine explicitly there, and if he is rehabilitating the doctrine of original sin, the result is not obviously Augustinian. Instead, Kant talks about Stoic ethics in a pair of passages on either end of his account of radical evil and leaves other clues that his argument is a reworking of an old Stoic problem. "Radical evil" refers to the idea that our moral condition is—by default and yet by our own deed—bad or corrupt; and that this corruption is the root (radix) of human badness in all its variety, ubiquity, and sheer ordinariness. Kant takes as his premise a version of the Stoic idea that nature gives us "uncorrupted starting points" (Diogenes Laertius 7.89). What sense can be made of the origin of human badness, given such a premise? Kant's account of radical evil is an answer to this old Stoic problem, which requires a conception of freedom that is not available in his Stoic sources.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) Panel Report in Australia - Anti-Dumping Measures on A4 Copy Paper (Australia - A4 Copy Paper) marks a significant development of the multilateral rules on anti-dumping. Under certain circumstances, WTO agreements permit members to impose anti-dumping measures to counteract the injurious effect of dumping on domestic industries, typically through import duties. The Report is the first to examine in detail when an anti-dumping authority may determine that a "particular market situation" exists in the country of exportation under Article 2.2 of the WTO Anti-Dumping Agreement, potentially justifying the imposition of elevated remedial duties. The Report also develops the jurisprudence on how such remedies may be calculated, expounding the use of benchmark costs for the calculation of a constructed normal value (CNV) under Article 2.2.1.1. These doctrinal questions are central to the longstanding debate over how far the Anti-Dumping Agreement allows anti-dumping measures against state intervention and market distortions. On both fronts, the Australia - A4 Copy Paper panel created flexibilities for WTO members to respond to government-induced distortions. In doing so, the Report deviates considerably from the course set by the Appellate Body in the landmark EU - Biodiesel decision, which seemed to confine anti-dumping measures to responding to private action.1 At the same time, the panel left open several important issues relating to the adoption of CNVs and the use of benchmarks for their calculation, leaving wide latitude for investigating authorities to inflate dumping margins in practice.

Women fleeing Myanmar in 2015 were trapped on the Andaman Sea for months when States in the region closed off places of disembarkation. Among the horrors of starvation and unsanitary conditions experienced on the boats, they faced additional risks of sexual violence. These women fled from a situation in Myanmar that severely curtailed their rights, including gender violence that is being tried as genocide at the International Court of Justice, and were exposed to further violations while fleeing. Through interviews with survivors of the journey and those who assisted them, this article describes the experiences of these women at sea. It outlines the failure of States to apply customary principles of international law and related regional standards to protect these women. From a feminist legal theory perspective, it explores the reasons for these failures and recommends reforms that guarantee better protection at sea for women in the future.

The multiple interpretations in international law of ICHL's neutrality vis-à-vis religion in the case of sites with multiple religious/historical layers and the concept of "specially affected" state are explored with the latest issue of the transformation of Hagia Sophia into a mosque in mind.

Machine learning algorithms reshape how people communicate, exchange, and associate; how institutions sort them and slot them into social positions; and how they experience life, down to the most ordinary and intimate aspects. In this article, we draw on examples from the field of social media to review the commonalities, interactions, and contradictions between the dispositions of people and those of machines as they learn from and make sense of each other.

For scholars of Southeast Asia interested in human rights, Myanmar is a country that 'has it all.' I use this tongue-in-cheek expression to suggest the myriad ways that the country remains mired in structural challenges that inform its current human rights problems. In this paper, I point out the country's most glaring structural challenges and link these to its most pressing human rights problems. A brief section about Myanmar in the context of COVID-19offers the same conclusion as the rest of the article: while there is variance in the actors targeted and the degree of suppression, the underlying patterns of oppression remain unchanged over time.

Almost everything that we do, we do by doing other things. Even actions we perform without deliberation or conscious planning are composed of 'smaller', subsidiary actions. But how should we think of such subsidiary actions? Are they fully-fledged intentional actions (in the sense of things that we do for reasons) in their own right? In this paper I defend an affirmative answer to this question, against a recently influential form of scepticism. Drawing on a distinctive kind of 'action-demonstrative' representation, I show that the sceptic's arguments do not go through.