State sovereignty

"In December 2006, Indonesian Health Minister, Siti Fadilah Supari,
shocked the world when announcing her government would no longer be sharing
samples of the H5N1 avian flu virus, collected from Indonesian patients, with the
World Health Organization, at a time when global fears of a deadly influenza
pandemic were running high. For observers of Southeast Asian politics, the
decision reinforced the view of the region as made up of states determined to
protect their national sovereignty, at almost all costs. This established view of the
region, however, generally neglects the variable and selective manner in which
sovereignty has been invoked by Southeast Asian governments, or parts thereof,
and fails to identify the conditions shaping the deployment of sovereignty. In this
paper, it is argued that Siti’s action was designed to harness claims of sovereignty to
a domestic political struggle. It was a response to the growing fragmentation and, in
some cases, denationalisation of the governance apparatus dealing with public
health in Indonesia, along with the ‘securitisation’ of H5N1 internationally. The
examination of the virus-sharing dispute demonstrates that in Southeast Asia
sovereignty is not so much the ends of government action, but the means utilised by
government actors for advancing particular political goals."

""Although much literature on human trafficking focuses on sex trafficking, a great deal of human trafficking results from migrant workers, compelled - by economic deprivation in their home countries - to seek better life opportunities abroad, especially in agriculture, construction and domestic work. Such labour migration is sometimes legal and well managed, but sometimes not so – with migrant workers frequently threatened or coerced into entering debt bondage arrangements and ending up working in forced labour situations producing goods for illicit markets. This book fills a substantial gap in the existing literature given that labour trafficking is a much more subtle form of exploitation than sex trafficking. It discusses how far large multinational corporations are involved, whether intentionally or unintentionally, in human trafficking for the purposes of labour exploitation. They explore how far corporations are driven to seek cheap labour by the need to remain commercially competitive and examine how the problem often lies with corporations’ subcontractors, who are not as well controlled as they might be. The essays in the volume also outline and assess measures being taken by governments and international agencies to eradicate the problem.

Table of contents
Introduction - Antonela Arhin and Ato Quayson
Foreword: Corporate Liability for Violations of International Human Rights Law - Mohamed Y. Mattar
1. Trafficking for Labour Exploitation: Getting the Responses Right - Roger Plant
2. The Commodification of Human Smuggling and Trafficking - Louise Shelley
3. Child Labour Migrants or Victims of Labour Trafficking: A Segmental Approach - Antonela Arhin
4. Displacing Childhood: Labour Exploitation and Child Trafficking in Sport - Darragh McGee
5. Labor Migration, Human Trafficking and Multinational Corporations within the ECOWAS Region: challenges and opportunities - Ndioro Ndiaye
6. Adults or Children? The Case of Trafficking of Children for Purposes of Exploitative Labour in the Fishing Industry in Ghana - Daniel Kweku Sam
7. Doing Canada's Dirty Work: A Critical Analysis of Law and Policy to Address Labour Exploitation Trafficking - Bethany Hastie
8. Minimum Wage --An Ally in the Fight Against Human Trafficking for Labour Exploitation? - Anne Pawletta and Philipp Schwertmann
9. Responding to Labour Trafficking: Suggestions from Experiences of Local Service Providers - Amy Stevens, Romesh Hettiarachchi and Sung Hyun Yun
10. The Programmatic Approach to combating Trafficking in Human Beings - Ruud Hilgers"""

The "Greek crisis" was officially inaugurated on May 2010 with the loan the Greek government took from the IMF-European Union-European Central Bank troika, the largest a country had ever taken (€110 bn). Since then, the social implications of this crisis have been dramatic. The form and the scale of social phenomena observed today in Greece and particularly in Athens--e.g., extreme poverty and inequality, profound police violence, organized racist violence--are unprecedented for the country. Nevertheless, a diachronic examination of some socio-spatial aspects of Athens reveals that the social character of the current crisis has been taking shape for some time. This article aims shed light on the social shape of the crisis by outlining three such socio-spatial dimensions as they materialized in the case of Athens during 1990s and 2000s: first, the emergence of new forms of social exclusion and inequality; second, the vast project of urban (re)development and the new spatialities it produced, and third the emergence of novel forms of political and xenophobic violence.

"The aim of this essay is to demonstrate that the penetration and reception of the theories of natural law were linked to the strategies implemented by a small state, whose survival seemed dependent on the application of a neutrality policy capable of safeguarding commercial activity, and somehow even on the evoked foundation of a federal system with other small states.

Works by Antinori (1711) and Averani (1721-22) in particular and, most especially, those by Buondelmonti (1737, 1741 and 1755) reveal that a process of selecting  natural law theories was under way; balanced as a result of the expected European circulation of these Tuscan works, this selection process was sometimes politically oriented towards dealing with the questions of succession, at other times to drawing an up-to-date picture of civil society, and at still other times to advocating the neutrality option and a specific role for neutral nations in international relations.

An early result that emerged by my research is that different members of the ruling class used Grotius’s teaching relating to international relations to promote and pay tribute to the Grand Duchy within the international political society. The image of the Tuscan Grand Duchy appears to have been founded on the steady public appreciation of the principle stare pactis: thanks to this norm of conduct, the Tuscan ruling class tried to earn their small neutral State a reputation for impartiality and, above all, trustworthiness.
"

""The Report presents insights which illuminates the intertwinements of European regulatory policies and global governance arrangements. By pinning down the exact nature of the interaction between these two levels, the EU’s dilemma becomes obvious: On the one hand, stronger global governance can be a chance, through which the EU can clarify its own raison d’être of increased integration to the wider world. On the other hand, the design of the European project is being challenged by more assertive global structures. This is especially the case in relation to the WTO regime, which is constraining the decisional autonomy of the EU, regarding the appropriateness of its content and its external effects. Thus, the regulation of services in the EU and the WTO are discussed in the first section of this report. Section two focuses on labour standards, which are analysed from different angles in order to clarify the functions of the WTO and the ILO, multinational companies as well as other private actors within this specific field. The final section deals with the legitimacy problematic of transnational governance.

Table of contents:

Introduction
Christian Joerges and Poul F. Kjaer

Section One: Freedom of Services

Chapter 1
The Multiple Understandings of Conflict between Trade in
Services and Labour Protection
Alexia Herwig
Chapter 2
Competing in Markets, not Rules:
The Conflict over the Single Services Market
Susanne K. Schmidt
Chapter 3
Competitiveness and Labour Protection: A Comment
Markus Krajewski
Section Two: Labour Standards
Chapter 4
WTO and ILO: Can Social Responsibility be maintained
in International Trade?
Josef Falke
Chapter 5
Reframing RECON: Perspectives on Transnationalisation and
Post-national Democracy from Labour Law
Claire Methven O’Brien
Chapter 6
Transnational Governance and Human Rights: The Obligations of
Private Actors in the Global Context
Regina Kreide
Section Three: The Legitimacy of Transnational Governance
Chapter 7
Legitimacy through Precaution in European Regulation of GMOs?
From the Standpoint of Governance as Analytical Perspective
Maria Weimer
Chapter 8
The Justice Deficit of the EU and other International Organisations
Jürgen Neyer
Chapter 9
Towards Normative Legitimacy of the World Trade Order
Alexia Herwig and Thorsten Hüller
Chapter 10
From Utopia to Apology – The Return to Inter-state Justice
in Normative IR Scholarship: Comments on Neyer and
Herwig & Hüller
Jens Steffek""

The US national response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks accelerated the adoption and refinement of a new repertoire of protest policing we call ‘strategic incapacitation’ now employed by law enforcement agencies nationwide to police protest demonstrations. The occupation movement which formally began 17 September 2011 was the most significant social movement to utilise transgressive protest tactics in the United States in the last 40 years and posed a substantial challenge to law enforcement agencies. This research seeks to better understand the implementation of strategic incapacitation tactics through a detailed analysis of the policing of the first 2 months of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests in New York City. Original data for this study are derived from 2-week-long field observations made in New York City during the first and second month anniversaries of the OWS occupation in Zuccotti Park. These are supplemented by activist interviews, activist accounts posted on OWS websites, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds as well as news reports, official police documents, press releases and interviews with legal observers.

This paper will explore how Western thought around development, security and peace in post-interventionary societies has led the liberal peacebuilding agenda to imagine a distorted version of reality in the countries where intervention takes place, not only in terms of space, but also with regard to time. Such societies are imagined into the past by liberal peacebuilders: owing to a normative understanding of development as a positive linear temporal phenomenon combined with the idea of certain political systems and civil society arrangements as ‘traditional’ and outdated, the intervened are regarded as being in need of updating. The semiotic association between tradition and datedness leads to an argument that the agency of the population of a post-interventionary society, and the sovereignty of the state nominally governing them, can be suspended temporarily, as if for maintenance to occur. At this stage, space becomes fluid and malleable, as the liberal peacebuilding agenda is projected and the nature of the intervened society ceases to reflect its history, culture and physical borders. However, Sri Lanka has resisted fiercely against this project, implementing its own illiberal version of peace and contesting to retain its control over its own sovereignty. This paper will discuss the issues of time, space, agency and sovereignty in the context of peacebuilding, finding that all of these concepts are manipulated by both liberal and illiberal peace projects.

""This paper compares two related corporate accounts of enacting sovereignty with Taiwan Aborigines: one as external threat to the nation, one as ancestor of the nation. First, Mitsubishi corporate webpage histories constitute mythic origin narratives about how their patriotic founder Yataro Iwasaki helped the Japanese government transport munitions and troops to Taiwan in 1874 and the government rewarded him with 30 ships, starting their close relationship. These narratives about this state-centered assemblage omit why Japan sent the military expedition, which ostensibly was a punitive expedition against Paiwan Aborigines for the 1871 massacre of 54 Ryukyu Islanders, but was actually part of the new Meiji state’s annexation of the Ryukyu Islands. Second, it analyses the Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines which was founded in 1994 by the wealthy chair of the Shung Ye Group, a Taiwan-based Mitsubishi-affiliated conglomerate. The museum is a private assemblage organized around hero narratives in which the chair demonstrates his patriotism by rescuing Taiwan Aborigines and their cultures. The museum contributes to the Taiwan-centered identity project which challenges One-China sovereignty claims over Taiwan.

Free copies of the article are available at:
le to download at: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Hkygq7yYtkw4R87bnjBt/full"