Opposing International Justice: Kenya’s Integrated Backlash Strategy Against the ICC

The government of Kenya has employed a wide range of strategies to undermine the recently-dismissed prosecutions of President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto before the International Criminal Court (ICC). This Article argues that these strategies are part of an integrated backlash campaign against the ICC, one that encompasses seemingly unrelated actions in multiple global, regional and national venues. We identify three overarching themes that connect these diverse measures— politicizing complementarity, regionalizing political opposition, and pairing instances of cooperation and condemnation to diffuse accusations of impunity. By linking its discrete acts of opposition to these three themes, the government ultimately increased the effectiveness of its campaign against the Court. Our findings provide new evidence to analyze others instances of backlash against international courts and institutions

Opposing International Justice: Kenya’s Integrated Backlash Strategy Against the ICC

The government of Kenya has employed a wide range of strategies to undermine the recently-dismissed prosecutions of President Uhuru Kenyatta and Deputy President William Ruto before the International Criminal Court (ICC). This Article argues that these strategies are part of an integrated backlash campaign against the ICC, one that encompasses seemingly unrelated actions in multiple global, regional and national venues. We identify three overarching themes that connect these diverse measures— politicizing complementarity, regionalizing political opposition, and pairing instances of cooperation and condemnation to diffuse accusations of impunity. By linking its discrete acts of opposition to these three themes, the government ultimately increased the effectiveness of its campaign against the Court. Our findings provide new evidence to analyze others instances of backlash against international courts and institutions

Non-Gaussian curvature distribution of actin-propelled biomimetric colloid trajectories

We analyze the motion of colloids propelled by a comet-like tail of polymerizing actin filaments. The curvature of the particle trajectories deviates strongly from a Gaussian distribution, implying that the underlying microscopic processes are fluctuating in a non-independent manner. Trajectories for beads of different size all showed the same non-Gaussian behavior, while the mean curvature decreased weakly with size. A stochastic simulation that includes nucleation, force-dependent dissociation, growth, and capping of filaments, shows that the non-Gaussian curvature distribution can be explained by a positive feedback mechanism in which attached chains under higher tension are more likely to sna

Dynamics of viscoelastic membranes

We determine both the in-plane and out-of-plane dynamics of viscoelastic membranes separating two viscous fluids in order to understand microrheological studies of such membranes. We demonstrate the general viscoelastic signatures in the dynamics of shear, bending, and compression modes. We also find a screening of the otherwise two-dimensional character of the response to point forces due to the presence of solvent. Finally, we show that there is a linear, hydrodynamic coupling between the in-plane compression modes of the membrane and the out-of-plane bending modes in the case where the membrane separates two different fluids or environments

Relativistic drag forces on black holes from scalar dark matter clouds of all sizes

We use numerical simulations of scalar field dark matter evolving on a moving black hole background to confirm the regime of validity of (semi)analytic expressions derived from first principles for both dynamical friction and momentum accretion in the relativistic regime. We cover both small and large clouds (relative to the de Broglie wavelength of the scalars), and light and heavy particle masses (relative to the black hole size). In the case of a small dark matter cloud, the effect of accretion is a non-negligible contribution to the total force on the black hole, even for small scalar masses. We confirm that this momentum accretion transitions between two regimes (wave and particlelike) and we identify the mass of the scalar at which the transition between regimes occurs

Constitutional Analogies in the International Legal System

This Article explores issues at the frontier of international law and constitutional law. It considers five key structural and systemic challenges that the international legal system now faces: (1) decentralization and disaggregation; (2) normative and institutional hierarchies; (3) compliance and enforcement; (4) exit and escape; and (5) democracy and legitimacy. Each of these issues raises questions of governance, institutional design, and allocation of authority paralleling the questions that domestic legal systems have answered in constitutional terms. For each of these issues, I survey the international legal landscape and consider the salience of potential analogies to domestic constitutions, drawing upon and extending the writings of international legal scholars and international relations theorists. I also offer some preliminary thoughts about why some treaties and institutions, but not others, more readily lend themselves to analysis in constitutional terms. And I distinguish those legal and political issues that may generate useful insights for scholars studying the growing intersections of international and constitutional law from other areas that may be more resistant to constitutional analogies

Vacuum Polarization and Energy Conditions at a Planar Frequency Dependent Dielectric to Vacuum Interface

The form of the vacuum stress-tensor for the quantized scalar field at a dielectric to vacuum interface is studied. The dielectric is modeled to have an index of refraction that varies with frequency. We find that the stress-tensor components, derived from the mode function expansion of the Wightman function, are naturally regularized by the reflection and transmission coefficients of the mode at the boundary. Additionally, the divergence of the vacuum energy associated with a perfectly reflecting mirror is found to disappear for the dielectric mirror at the expense of introducing a new energy density near the surface which has the opposite sign. Thus the weak energy condition is always violated in some region of the spacetime. For the dielectric mirror, the mean vacuum energy density per unit plate area in a constant time hypersurface is always found to be positive (or zero) and the averaged weak energy condition is proven to hold for all observers with non-zero velocity along the normal direction to the boundary. Both results are found to be generic features of the vacuum stress-tensor and not necessarily dependent of the frequency dependence of the dielectric.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures, Revtex style Minor typographic corrections to equations and tex

The influence of cosmic rays in the circumnuclear molecular gas of NGC1068

We surveyed the circumnuclear disk of the Seyfert galaxy NGC1068 between the frequencies 86.2 GHz and 115.6 GHz, and identified 17 different molecules. Using a time and depth dependent chemical model we reproduced the observational results, and show that the column densities of most of the species are better reproduced if the molecular gas is heavily pervaded by a high cosmic ray ionization rate of about 1000 times that of the Milky Way. We discuss how molecules in the NGC1068 nucleus may be influenced by this external radiation, as well as by UV radiation fields.Comment: 6 pages. Conference proceeding for the workshop on "Cosmic-ray induced phenomenology in star-forming environments" held in Sant Cugat, Spain, on April 16-19, 201

Effective Area-Elasticity and Tension of Micro-manipulated Membranes

We evaluate the effective Hamiltonian governing, at the optically resolved scale, the elastic properties of micro-manipulated membranes. We identify floppy, entropic-tense and stretched-tense regimes, representing different behaviors of the effective area-elasticity of the membrane. The corresponding effective tension depends on the microscopic parameters (total area, bending rigidity) and on the optically visible area, which is controlled by the imposed external constraints. We successfully compare our predictions with recent data on micropipette experiments.Comment: To be published in Phys. Rev. Let