Multilateralism as Terror: International Law, Haiti and Imperialism

Much of the liberal criticism of the Bush administration's prosecution of the war in Iraq has taken a legalistic form, decrying that law as 'illegal'. This criticism has often implied that US unilateralism has been definitional to the neoconservative project and the geopolitical moment, and that a contrasting and supposedly non-existent 'multilateralism' would be neither illegal nor objectionable. The overthrow of Haiti's President Jean-Bertrande Aristide in 2004 and the subsequent installing of UN MINUSTAH peace-keepers in the country was a model multilateral action, the fact of which should have problematised this model: its almost wholesale ignoring in the scholarly international law literature is therefore investigated. The intervention is understood as a successful imperialist action, and the argument made that multilateralism as much as unilateralism can easily be part of an imperialist strategy

Coerção e forma jurídica: política, direito (internacional) e o Estado

This article aims to establish a materialist theory of international law on a pashukanian basis. For that, it explores the tension in the text of the Soviet author about coercion position in defining the legal form. The sustained hypothesis is that violence is one of its basic components, which would open space for an intersection with decisionist theories and the configuration of relations between states as being juridical.O artigo pretende estabelecer uma teoria materialista do direito internacional de base pachukaniana. Para isso explora a tensão existente no texto do autor soviético a respeito da posição da coerção na definição da forma jurídica. A hipótese sustentada é de que a violência é um dos seus componentes básicos, o que abriria espaço para uma interseção com teorias decisionistas e para a configuração das relações entre estados como sendo jurídicas. &nbsp

Dreams and nightmares of liberal international law: capitalist accumulation, natural rights and state hegemony

This article develops a line of theorising the relationship between peace, war and commerce and does so via conceptualising global juridical relations as a site of contestation over questions of economic and social justice. By sketching aspects of a historical interaction between capitalist accumulation, natural rights and state hegemony, the article offers a critical account of the limits of liberal international law, and attempts to recover some ground for thinking about the emancipatory potential of international law more generally

Corridor Gothic

This article investigates the role of the corridor in Gothic fiction and horror film from the late eighteenth century to the present day. It seeks to establish this transitional space as a crucial locus, by tracing the rise of the corridor as a distinct mode of architectural distribution in domestic and public buildings since the eighteenth century. The article tracks pivotal appearances of the corridor in fiction and film, and in the final phase argues that it has become associated with a specific emotional tenor, less to do with amplified fear and horror and more with emotions of Angst or dread