The notion of progress in international law discourse

The notion of progress performs a powerful role in international law discourse. The determination that a certain development constitutes “progress” impacts the production of knowledge, policy-making, allocation of resources, or access to power. The objective of the dissertation is to explore what makes a given development appear as constituting progress in international law. It is an investigation of how meaning about progress may be produced and an investigation of the consequences of the production of such meaning. The Dissertation argues that, although progress is a convenient rubric to describe international law events (arguments, developments, actions, and so on), it is a notion that is ultimately devoid of meaning unless placed in the context of a story of how things were, how things are, and how they need to be -- a “progress narrative”. Progress narratives are by definition non-objective and compete/exclude other progress narratives. International law discourse tends to deny or mask the non-objective character of its progress narratives. Although progress narrative may be a useful discursive form, the de-mystification of such narratives may be an equally productive and meaningful form of international law argument and one that gives access to a different horizon of action and intellectual possibility.Exploring the Frontiers of International La

How refugees are interpreted in public debates in different countries

This paper presents work in progress from a comparative qualitative analysis of political discourses on the admission or rejection of refugees in different countries around the world. Despite being subject to the norms and principles of international law that require states to open their borders to refugees seeking safety from persecution and serious human rights violations, states differ significantly in terms of their refugee policies and their justifications for these policies. In our project, we compare political discourses on the admission of refugees in different countries. We also try to account for country differences by drawing on the notion of “discursive opportunity structures”. We illustrate how different discursive opportunity structures might have shaped the political discourses in two of our six country cases: The Turkish discourse on Syrian refugees and the Chilean discourse on Venezuelan migrants

Hermeneutics of Ceteris Paribus in the African Context

This article has provided a philosophical discourse approach in deconstructing Ceteris Paribus (CP) as applied in contemporary Africa. The concept of CP, which affirm the notion of ‘all things are equal’ does not always hold true in the real world. The author has gone beyond the normal interpretation of the word shock, which is making it impossible for the CP concept to hold true in reality. The paper has unraveled critical discourses spanning corruption element as a key factor in the current state of Africa’s economic malaise. It is therefore incumbent on African scholars and professionals to continue their strides in promoting critical hermeneutic space, pursued through empirical endeavours or otherwise in support of developing a philosophy that is based on pragmatism for the enhancement of economic methodology, focused on the continent’s pathway of (sustained) economic development

Human rights, property and the search for ‘worlds other’

While some accounts of rights and property paradigms see property as an inherent incident of a colonizing form of human rights law and discourse, others draw out the contradictions between them, suggesting that human rights and property have opposing impulses towards inclusion and exclusion respectively. While not rejecting the insights of either of these positions, the author argues that a fundamental ambivalence lies at the heart of human rights law and discourse demonstrating both oppressive and emancipatory potential. This ambivalence is, the author argues, also internal to the Western property concept – a claim facilitating a renewed emphasis upon property's inclusory potential as an institutional foundation for a more eco-humane and vulnerability-responsive ordering of legal relations

Tales of function and form: the discursive legitimation of international technocracy

It has become commonplace to say that, in the past, international governance has been legitimated mainly, if not exclusively, by its welfare-enhancing ‘output’. There has been very little research, however, on the history of legitimating international governance by its output to validate this point. In this essay I begin to address this gap by inquiring into the origins of output-oriented strategies for legitimating international organizations. Scrutinizing the programmatic literature on international organizations from the early 20th century, I illustrate how a new and distinctive account of technocratic legitimation emerged and in the 1920s separated from other types of liberal internationalism. My inquiry, centring on the works of James Arthur Salter, David Mitrany, Paul S. Reinsch and Pitman B. Potter, explores their respective conceptions of ‘good functional governance’, executed by a non-political international technocracy. Their account is explicitly pitched against a notion of ‘international politics’, perceived as violent, polarizing, and irrational. The emergence of such a technocratic legitimation of international governance, I submit, needs to be seen in the context of societal modernization and bureaucratization that unfolded in the first half of the 20th century. I also highlight how in this account the material output of governance is intimately linked to the virtues of the organizational form that brings it about

Perceptions of Intellectual Property:A Review

In “The right to good ideas: patents and the poor”, The Economist depicts two driving forces in the contemporary discourse on IP and globalization. The one is interested in advancing the knowledge economy, an approach based on the belief that knowledge is the driving factor behind economic growth. The other resides on a belief that IP is a major means to advance the process of globalization. While the former is strongly motivated by new economic growth theory, as for example advanced by Stanford professor Paul Romer, the latter is based on typical anti-globalization arguments, such as for example the position that the IP system helps multinational companies to build up monopolies to the detriment of the poor, drives small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and local business in developing countries out of business and increases prices for consumer products, be they pharmaceuticals or software. The purpose of this review is to help understand the current discourse on intellectual property, to grasp underlying themes, assumptions and connotations associated with the term “IP”, so as to identify paths leading to a more comprehensive understanding of IP and the opportunities and pitfalls it may provide

Net neutrality discourses: comparing advocacy and regulatory arguments in the United States and the United Kingdom

Telecommunications policy issues rarely make news, much less mobilize thousands of people. Yet this has been occurring in the United States around efforts to introduce "Net neutrality" regulation. A similar grassroots mobilization has not developed in the United Kingdom or elsewhere in Europe. We develop a comparative analysis of U.S. and UK Net neutrality debates with an eye toward identifying the arguments for and against regulation, how those arguments differ between the countries, and what the implications of those differences are for the Internet. Drawing on mass media, advocacy, and regulatory discourses, we find that local regulatory precedents as well as cultural factors contribute to both agenda setting and framing of Net neutrality. The differences between national discourses provide a way to understand both the structural differences between regulatory cultures and the substantive differences between policy interpretations, both of which must be reconciled for the Internet to continue to thrive as a global medium

Human rights and the law: the unbreachable gap between the ethics of justice and the efficacy of law

This paper explores the structure of justice as the condition of ethical, inter-subjective responsibility. Taking a Levinasian perspective, this is a responsibility borne by the individual subject in a pre-foundational, proto-social proximity with the other human subject, which takes precedence over the interests of the self. From this specific post-humanist perspective, human rights are not the restrictive rights of individual self-will, as expressed in our contemporary legal human rights discourse. Rights do not amount to the prioritisation of the so-called politico-legal equality of the individual citizen-subject animated by the universality of the dignity of autonomous, reasoned intentionality. Rather, rights enlivened by proximity invert this discourse and signify, first and foremost, rights for the other, with the ethical burden of responsibility towards the other

Wellbeing and reproductive freedoms: assessing progress, setting agendas

Wellbeing, Rights and Reproduction Research Paper II