Suchergebnisse

This article analyses the interplay between politics and law in the recent attempts to strengthen the humanitarian commitment to saving lives in mare liberum. Despite a long-standing obligation to aid people in distress at sea, this so-called search and rescue regime has been marred by conflicts and political standoffs as states were faced with a growing number of capsising boat migrants potentially claiming international protection once on dry land. Attempts to provide a legal solution to these problems have resulted in a re-spatialisation of the high seas, extending the states' obligations in the international public domain based on geography rather than traditional functionalist principles that operated in the open seas. However, inadvertently, this further legalisation has equally enabled states to instrumentalise law to barter off and deconstruct responsibility by reference to traditional norms of sovereignty and maritime law. In other words, states may be able to reclaim sovereign power by becoming increasingly norm-savvy and successfully navigating the legal playing field provided by the very expansion of international law itself. Thus, rather than being simply a space of non-sovereignty per se, mare liberum becomes the venue for a complex game of sovereignty, law and politics.

AbstractThis article discusses the concept of misrecognition to analyse international legal ordering in the practice of colonial treatymaking. As critical interventions to the debate on recognition have made clear, recognition is about exclusion as much as it is about inclusion. The most obvious example is the nineteenth-century applications of the standard of civilisation, where the European Family of Nations introduced the criterion of 'civilisation', which excluded non-European entities as sovereigns and legitimised their colonisation. But at the same time colonial treaties included the 'savage rulers' as signatory powers, and thus legal persons within the international legal order that at once excluded them. This contribution to the Special Issue discusses these treatymaking practices as a practice of misrecognition; not because it misrecognises some natural, essential, or true identity of the indigenous entities, but as a misrecognition of the international order's own conditions of possibility through practices that simultaneously constitute that order and undermine its constitutive conditions. A rereading of Hegel's famous master–slave metaphor through the concept of misrecognition sheds light on the reversals and contradictions of the colonial legal enterprise and reveals the aporia of the contemporary international legal order by showing the void at its heart.

Every year between 100,000 and 120,000 migrants attempt to irregularly cross the Mediterranean to reach European shores in hope of political asylum or just a better life. In this working paper Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen and Tanja Aalberts take on the complicated politics and law of 'rescue at sea', and the legal duty to render assistance to migrants in distress at sea that falls upon all sovereign states. Yet, exactly because this takes in international waters, the precise division and content of this sovereign responsibility remains contested and subject to varying interpretations. As a result, the drowning migrant finds herself subject to an increasingly complex field of governance, in which participating states may successfully barter off and deconstruct responsibility by reference to traditional norms of sovereignty and international law. This working paper is the first in a special series linked to the DIIS research initiative 'Shifting Sovereignties & Power'. The present paper was presented at the first international workshop in this framework titled 'Sovereignty, Territory and Emerging Geopolitics' held at DIIS, 3-4 May 2010

Rituals are customarily muted into predictable routines aimed to stabilise social orders and limit conflict. As a result, their magic lure recedes into the background, and the unexpected and disruptive elements are downplayed. Our collaborative contribution counters this move by foregrounding rituals of world politics as social practices with notable disordering effects. We engage a series of 'world pictures' to show the worlding and disruptive work enacted in rituals designed to sustain the sovereign exercise of violence and war, here colonial treatymaking, state commemoration, military/service dog training, cyber-security podcasts, algorithmically generated maps, the visit of Prince Harry to a joint NATO exercise and border ceremonies in India, respectively. We do so highlighting rituals' immanent potential for disruption of existing orders, the fissures, failures and unforeseen repercussions. Reappraising the disordering role of ritual practices sheds light on the place of rituals in rearticulating the boundaries of the political. Rituals can generate dissensus and re-divisions of the sensible rather than only impose a consensus by policing the boundaries of the political, as Rancière might phrase it. Our images are essential to the account. They help disinterring the fundamentals and ambiguities of the current worldings of security, capturing the affective atmosphere of rituals.