International, Politics, Philosophy (IPP)

Gilad Ben-Nun (Global & European Studies Institute (GESI) – University of Leipzig)

This paper explains how the Non Refoulement Principle (Art. 33 of the 1951 Refugee Convention), seen today as the bedrock of modern international legal refugee protection, was drafted. It provides a plausible explanation as to why UN member States agreed to limit their National Sovereignty in this regard, focusing on a network analysis of the drafter’s circles. The existence of a humanitarianly-minded coalition of State-delegates, during the Refugee Convention’s Travaux préparatoires, facilitated the creation of this vital international legal tool. The impact of the drafters’ work came to the fore some six decades after their fruitful joint efforts, during the current refugee crisis on the High Seas of the Mediterranean. A second point of reference in this lecture will concentrate on the methodological approaches to the interpretation of treaties- between historical approaches and textual readings – and explain why these methodological issues are crucial as they directly influence the lives of thousands of African migrants. Thanks to the historical reading by the European Court for Human Rights, who broke ranks with the American and Australian Supreme Court in their textual reading of Non Refoulement, European Navies exchanged their ‘push back’ operations in the Mediterranean Sea, and in favour of search and rescue operations – in contrast to both the Australian and American Coast Guards.

Discutant : Benjamin Boudou (Sciences Po-CERI)

Lieu : CERI, salle Jean Monnet, 17.00-19.00

Renaud-Philippe Garner (Univ. Toronto)

In this paper, I seek to close a gap in Michael Walzer’s argument for the moral equality of soldiers. Specifically, I seek to show that Walzer’s argument for the moral equality of soldiers depends upon an implicit analysis of the function of excuses. I provide this analysis of excuses: a triadic relationship between moral norms, a background of normality and excuses. I then use this analysis to show that Jeff McMahan’s argument for the moral inequality of soldiers rest upon an implausible view of excuses, namely that the conditions of war merely constitute excuses for failing to comply with ordinary, or peacetime, morality. I argue that the conditions of war are best understood as providing a new background of normality rather than a set of excuses. To show this, I identify five conditions that separate the normality of war from the normality of peace.

Discutant: Yoel Mitrani (Sciences Po)

Lieu : CERI, salle Jean Monnet

Laura Dickinson (George Washington University)

This paper grapples with the impact of new military technologies on two bodies of law governing the use of force overseas (1) the domestic constitutional and statutory allocation of power between the President and Congress in U.S. law; (2) international humanitarian law. Unmanned aerial systems, often referred to as drones, as well as other increasingly automated weapons systems, are so radically reshaping the nature of war that they are distorting and changing time-worn legal calculations about the decision to use force abroad, as well as the way force is used once that decision is made. Moreover, the growing use of contractors, who invent, maintain, and in many cases operate these technologies, enhances this effect. By minimizing U.S. casualties and augmenting more conventional air campaigns, drones and contractors together reduce the political costs of engagement, making it easier for states to contemplate using force abroad. Perhaps even more significantly, in the United States these new methods and means of warfare enable legal arguments that change the balance of power between Congress and the President enshrined in domestic law – tilting it toward the President. At the same time, deploying these new technologies fragments authority and diffuses decision-making, which now often involves multiple actors who are removed from the actual battle. As a result, responsibility for the calculations governed by international humanitarian law is harder to pinpoint. Thus, even putting aside the vigorous debate about the scope and content of humanitarian law as it applies to the U.S. terrorist targeting program and the campaign against terrorism more broadly, we can see that the increasingly automated means of conducting that campaign, combined with the prominent role for contractors, diminishes the restraining power of international humanitarian law. To illustrate these points, the paper will focus on three examples in which the U.S. President did not receive explicit Congressional authorization for the use of force: the Kosovo intervention in 1999, the intervention in Libya in 2011, and the current campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Discussant: Roger-Philippe Garner (Univ. of Toronto)

Ecole Doctorale, 199 boulevard Saint Germain
3ème étage
17.00-19.00

Christelle Rigual (The Graduate Institute Geneva)

Pratiques discursives de (non)intervention: une archéologie (1648–1815)

Few studies are dedicated to the concept of non-intervention, which is frequently equated with states’ sovereignty-deduced right to independence. The paper consequently questions how, historically and discursively, the notion of nonintervention emerged and evolved. The research, investigating ‘How has the conceptual system of (non)intervention been articulated and (de)constructed in international discursive practices between 1648 and 1815?’ will be conducted as a Foucauldian archaeology. This theoretical framework suggests looking at the relations, continuities and discontinuities around discursive formations; here the one of ‘non-intervention’ defined as the ‘external (non)interference in the internal affairs of a political entity’. Assumptions guiding the research suggest that 1) concepts of nonintervention and sovereignty did not emerge in a neat package during the Peace of Westphalia; 2) these concepts might have been disconnected and have evolved differently though time. Empirically, the paper qualitatively investigates several bodies of discourses (international treaties, lawyers, politicians and historians) around
key historical junctures from the Peace of Westphalia to the Congress of Vienna, to uncover discursive practices having governed understandings of (non)intervention through time. This contribution fills the gap in our knowledge on the concept of nonintervention, contributing to the literature of International Relations and shedding a renewed light on key contemporary events.

Discutante : Amélie Ferey (Sciences Po)

Lieu : 199 boulevard Saint Germain, école doctorale, 3ème étage

Rita Abrahamsen and Michael Williams (the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa)

The Corporate Security Development Nexus: Assembling Security in a Post-Political Era

Across the globe, security is increasingly provided and governed by complex assemblages of public and private, global and local actors. Some of the most important examples of such contemporary security assemblages are in the resource-extraction sector, where novel combinations of development agencies, resource corporations, and NGOs are engaged in security provision and governance. These assemblages represent more than new forms of security; they are also reflect a new kind of ‘post-political’ politics, and give rise to a new assembled geopolitics.

Jeudi 5 Mars 2015, 17.00-19.00

Lieu : CERI, 56, rue Jacob
salle du rez-de-chaussée

Philippe Bonditti (Sciences Po)

Jus Post Bellum and Externally Imposed Regime Change

Stefano Recchia (Cambridge)

Influential contemporary theorists of jus post bellum, including Brian Orend, Gary Bass, Michael Walzer, and Michael Doyle, suggest that external interveners have a duty to establish representative democratic governance structures in “genocidal states” that have recently experienced large-scale, politically motivated violence against civilians. Against this view, I argue that regardless of a society’s recent history, efforts by foreign interveners to impose representative democracy are incompatible with the liberal internationalism that those authors profess to follow. Building on Rawls’s Law of Peoples, I argue that external peacebuilders ought to establish—forcibly if needed—“decent” governance structures that guarantee basic human rights protection and allow for meaningful popular self-determination. Yet efforts by outsiders to move beyond such decent governance structures pre-emptively resolve questions of institutional design that each people should best work out for itself, and consequently they are paternalistic to a degree that is difficult to justify from a liberal standpoint concerned with self-determination. There are also consequentialist reasons for preferring merely decent governance structures to representative democracy, unless the latter is freely chosen by the recognized representatives of the local population: the establishment of decent governance structures that build on local notions of political legitimacy facilitates the emergence of stable peace, or what Rawls calls “stability for the right reasons,” whereby a society’s members internalize the principles of justice embodied in a society’s institutions and act accordingly. By contrast, as classical liberals like J.S. Mill and Giuseppe Mazzini well understood, if outsiders impose more demanding, potentially alien notions of representative democracy on a society, it may be much more difficult to establish a self-sustaining peace.

Discutante : Marine Guillaume (CERI-Sciences Po)
Lieu: CERI, 56, rue Jacob, Paris 6, salle du conseil (4ème étage)

Taking UNFCCC Norms Seriously

Darrel Moellendorf (Goethe Universität, Frankfurt, Normative Orders)

We are urgently in need of a comprehensive climate change mitigation treaty. This urgency affects the kind of moral guidance we should expect and can reasonably propose to others. Insofar as nonideal theory is dependent on an account of ideal theory which it serves, I argue that nonideal theory is ill-suited to offer practical moral guidance in this situation. That view does not entail, however, that climate change policy must be either morally blind or governed simply by a norm of efficiency. Instead, I argue that the United Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is an important source of moral norms. There are very good normative and prudential reasons to take these norms seriously. The normative background provided by the treaty is a significant good for the collective effort of international cooperation. But also given the likely costs if the force of the background to become significantly weakened, it is reasonable for each state to want to see the UNFCCC remain in force and therefore also not to erode it through non-compliance. The strongest moral reasons to comply with the norms of the UNFCC, however, are the promissory obligation that a state assumes by ratifying the convention and the duty of fairness in an international system of energy use and climate change mitigation expressed by commitment to the right to sustainable development.

Discussant: Margaux Le Donné (Sciences Po)

Lieu: Sciences Po, Ecole doctorale, salle de réunion
199 blvrd St. Germain, 3ème étage

The International Politics of Human Rights and the R2P Cause

Monica Serrano (Colegio de Mexico) viendra présenter l’ouvrage dont elle a co-dirigé la publication avec Thomas G. Weiss.

The book discusses the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P) ten years after its definition. The book presents international debates ranging from the prevention of mass atrocities to R2P’s normative prospects. It also addresses various issues, such as the problem of sovereignty in R2P practice. The authors try to answer key questions: can R2P break or revert cycles of violence? How can one determine the appropriate duration and timing of the preventive and protective phases of R2P? What should be the target of preventive actions? They also analyze the current doctrine in state decision making, as well as try to advance the credibility of R2P’s preventive dimensions.

Discutant : Pierre Hassner (CERI, Sciences Po)

CERI, 56, rue Jacob, salle Jean Monnet
17.00-19.00

Bertrand Badie (Sciences Po, CERI), Le temps des humiliés.

Bertrand Badie viendra présenter son dernier ouvrage, Le temps des humiliés – Pathologie des relations internationales (Odile Jacob, 2014). Convoquant l’histoire et la sociologie politique, Bertrand Badie remonte aux sources de l’humiliation : la montée des revanchismes dans l’entre-deux-guerres, une décolonisation mal maîtrisée. Il montre que sa banalisation consacre l’émergence dramatique des opinions publiques et des sociétés sur la scène internationale, mais qu’elle trahit aussi l’inadaptation des vieilles puissances et de leurs diplomaties à un monde de plus en plus globalisé. Dès lors, il devient urgent de reconstruire un ordre international dans lequel les humiliés et leurs sociétés trouveront toute leur place.

Discutant : Ariel Colonomos (CNRS-CERI)

Lieu : CERI, 56, rue Jacob, Salle Jean Monnet

Christopher Kutz (Berkeley)

This paper, prepared for a colloquium on problems of state responsibility, takes up the issue of state responsibility for the costs of mitigating and adapting to global climate change. It argues that any theory of state responsibility must be integrable into individual conceptions of moral responsibility among the subjects of the states bearing the burdens of these costs. I take up the particular question whether permissions trading systems or carbon tax systems are more likely to be integrable into senses of responsibility, and argue for the superiority of the carbon tax on this (among other) grounds.

Discutante: Margaux Le Donné (Sciences Po)

Jeudi 12 Juin, 13h00-15h00
Lieu: Sciences Po, 199, blvrd St Germain, école doctorale, 3ème étage, salle de réunion
Séance organisée avec le séminaire de théorie politique de l’école doctorale