This article examines how powerful policy actors defend themselves against opponents' strategies of conflict expansion through a case study of the Alberta oil sands subsystem. In response to changes in the key issues surrounding the oil sands subsystem, the provincial government along with industry have pursued a strategy of engaging...
This article offers a new interpretation of The Gift written by Marcel Mauss. It provides a contextual interpretation of the formation of Mauss' thinking about the international relations in the question of German reparations paid to the Allies. The article starts by showing the intellectual origins of the concept of...
This paper opens the analysis of treaties in the security field to sociological and hermeneutic analyses of international lawmaking practices. In a legal world where tensions exist between legal regimes, it claims that the interpretive quality of past treaties determines which legal rules survive and which ones disappear when new...
The International Criminal Court is considemring adding "aggression" to the crimes for which individuals can be prosecuted by the Court. Michael Glennon's recent article on the subject criticizes this effort from many angles, but a close consideration of his objections shows that each of them misses its target. I use...
Canada's aboriginal peoples are one of the constituencies most affected by the oil sands boom that has swept across northeastern Alberta in western Canada since the mid-1990s. This paper considers the reaction of these First Nations to exploiting the oil sands. It argues that the conventional view of the First...
Traditional accounts in both the international law and international relations literature largely assume that great powers like the United States enter into international legal communities in order to resolve global cooperative programs or to advance objective state interests. Contrary to these accounts, this article suggests that an incumbent regime (or...
The proponants of international courts (ICs) expect that creating formal legal institutions will help to increase respect for international law. International relations scholars question such claims, since ICs have no tools to compel state compliance. Such views are premised on the notion that states have unique preferences that ICs must...
President Barack Obama is escalating an ambitious, U.S.-directed covert war, relying on Special Forces and high-tech strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other countries to track down and eliminate Al Qaeda leaders and militants around the world. Meanwhile, administration officials in Washington are attempting to create a legal framework for...
This paper examines secularism in Senegal from a legal viewpoint and traces the history of the deliberate manner in which the Senegalese constitution was constructed to ensure the secular orientation of the state. The author emphasizes that Senegalese secularism is not anti-religious, but rather emphasizes mutual tolerance among diverse religious...