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To ensure political survival, autocrats must prevent popular rebellion, and political repression is a means to that end. However, autocrats face threats from both the inside and the outside of the center of power. They must avoid popular rebellion and at the same time share power with strategic actors who enjoy incentive to challenge established power-sharing arrangements whenever repression is ordered. Can autocrats turn repression in a way that allows trading one threat off against the other? This chapter first argues that prior research offers scant insight on that question because it relies on umbrella concepts and questionable measurements of repression. Next, the chapter disaggregates repression into restrictions and violence and reflects on their drawbacks. Citizens adapt to the restriction of political civil liberties, and violence backfires against its originators. Hence, restrictions require enforcement, and violence requires moderation. When interpreted as complements, it becomes clear that restrictions and violence have the potential to compensate for their respective weaknesses. The complementarity between violence and restrictions turns political repression into a valuable addition to the authoritarian toolkit. The chapter concludes with an application of these ideas to the twin problems of authoritarian control and power-sharing.
In recent years the framings of global health security have shifted while the structures governing global health have largely remained the same. One feature of the emerging re-ordering is the unresolved allocation of accountability between state and non-state actors. This brings to critical challenges to global health security to the fore. The first is that the consensus on the seeming shift from state to human security framing with regard to the global human right to health (security) risks losing its salience. Second, this conceptual challenge is mirrored on the operational level: if states and non-state actors do not assume responsibility for health security, who or what can guarantee health security? In order to address global health security against the backdrop of these twenty-first Century challenges, this article proceeds in three parts. First, it analyses the shortcomings of the current state-based World Health Organization (WHO) definition of health security. Second, taking into account the rising pressures posed to global health security and the inadequacy both of state-based and of ad hoc non-state responses, it proposes a new framing. Third, the article offers initial insights into the operational application of beyond state responses to (health) security challenges.
This cross-country comparison of administrative responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in France, Germany and Sweden is aimed at exploring how institutional contexts and administrative cultures have shaped strategies of problem-solving and governance modes during the pandemic, and to what extent the crisis has been used for opportunity management. The article shows that in France, the central government reacted determinedly and hierarchically, with tough containment measures. By contrast, the response in Germany was characterized by an initial bottom-up approach that gave way to remarkable federal unity in the further course of the crisis, followed again by a return to regional variance and local discretion. In Sweden, there was a continuation of 'normal governance' and a strategy of relying on voluntary compliance largely based on recommendations and less - as in Germany and France - on a strategy of imposing legally binding regulations. The comparative analysis also reveals that relevant stakeholders in all three countries have used the crisis as an opportunity for changes in the institutional settings and administrative procedures.
Points for practitioners
COVID-19 has shown that national political and administrative standard operating procedures in preparation for crises are, at best, partially helpful. Notwithstanding the fact that dealing with the unpredictable is a necessary part of crisis management, a need to further improve the institutional preparedness for pandemic crises in all three countries examined here has also become clear. This should be done particularly by way of shifting resources to the health and care sectors, strengthening the decentralized management of health emergencies, stocking and/or self-producing protection material, assessing the effects of crisis measures, and opening the scientific discourse to broader arenas of experts.
Since 2013, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights can examine individual communications under the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). This opens up the possibility to interpret Covenant provisions in a thorough manner. With regard to forced evictions and the right to housing under Article 11 ICESCR, one can discern a fast-developing approach concerning the proportionality analysis of evictions, entailing the establishment of specific criteria that may guide such analysis. This paper seeks to delineate these developments and will also shed light on possible general trends on the topic of limitations within the Committee’s emerging jurisprudence. In doing so, the paper will address if, and how, the developing proportionality analysis under the individual complaints procedure takes into consideration multi-discriminatory dimensions of State measures and how it specifically relates to or incorporates other ICESCR-concepts, such as minimum core obligations or the reasonableness review under Article 8(4) OP ICESCR.
International law is constantly navigating the tension between preserving the status quo and adapting to new exigencies. But when and how do such adaptation processes give way to a more profound transformation, if not a crisis of international law? To address the question of how attacks on the international legal order are changing the value orientation of international law, this book brings together scholars of international law and international relations. By combining theoretical and methodological analyses with individual case studies, this book offers readers conceptualizations and tools to systematically examine value change and explore the drivers and mechanisms of these processes. These case studies scrutinize value change in the foundational norms of the post-1945 order and in norms representing the rise of the international legal order post-1990. They cover diverse issues: the prohibition of torture, the protection of women’s rights, the prohibition of the use of force, the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, sustainability norms, and accountability for core international crimes. The challenges to each norm, the reactions by norm defenders, and the fate of each norm are also studied. Combined, the analyses show that while a few norms have remained surprisingly robust, several are changing, either in substance or in legal or social validity. The book concludes by integrating the conceptual and empirical insights from this interdisciplinary exchange to assess and explain the ambiguous nature of value change in international law beyond the extremes of mere progress or decline.
This chapter takes the ongoing conflict in South Sudan as a starting point for assessing the concept of transitional justice as such and its implementation in the country in particular. Following a brief description of the conflict and the peace processes, the author sheds light on the shortcomings of the established concept of transitional justice in the situation at hand. Then, the author outlines the alternate concept of transformational justice und takes a closer look at its implications on the situation in South Sudan. The author highlights existing initiatives of transformative justice and is very much in favour of their victim-centered approach.
While the concept of transitional justice and its range of measures have gained importance on an international level to come to terms with major crimes of the past, colonial crimes and mass violence committed by Western actors have not been addressed by transitional justice so far. In this chapter, the Herero’s and Nama’s struggle for justice for the genocide on their ancestors by Germany from 1904 – 1908 and the arising challenges are set in relation to conceptual debates in the field of transitional justice. Building on current debates in the field, suggesting more structural and transformative conceptualizations of transitional justice and an approach ‘from below’, it is argued that decolonial activism of formerly colonized communities and transitional justice debates can inform each other in a dialogic and fruitful form to formulate suggestions for a process towards post-colonial justice.
Transitional Justice
(2022)
This publication deals with the topic of transitional justice. In six case studies, the authors link theoretical and practical implications in order to develop some innovative approaches. Their proposals might help to deal more effectively with the transition of societies, legal orders and political systems.
Young academics from various backgrounds provide fresh insights and demonstrate the relevance of the topic. The chapters analyse transitions and conflicts in Sierra Leone, Argentina, Nicaragua, Nepal, and South Sudan as well as Germany’s colonial genocide in Namibia. Thus, the book provides the reader with new insights and contributes to the ongoing debate about transitional justice.
At different times and places, civic engagement in nonviolent resistance (NVR) has repeatedly shown to be an effective tool in times of conflict to initiate societal change from below. History teaches us that there have been successes (Mahatma Gandhi in India) and failures (the Tiananmen Square protests in China).
Along with the recognition of the duality between transformative potential and stark consequences, the historical development of NVR was accompanied by the emergence of scholarly debate, fractured along disputes around purpose, character and effectivity of nonviolent actions taken by civil society stakeholders engaged in making their voices heard. One of the field’s current points of interest is the examination of the long-term effects of NVR movements resulting in societal transformation on the stability and adequacy of a subsequently altered or emerging democracy, suggesting that NVR contributes positively to the sustainable and representative design of an egalitarian governing system.
The conclusion of the Nepalese civil war in 2006 should pose as an unambiguous example for the illustration of this phenomenon, but simultaneously raises the question why there was no successful implementation of a transitional process focusing on the needs of the victims.
This paper aims to contribute a different approach to transitional justice, one in which political decisions are rocketed to the forefront of the research. Theory asserts that, after a transition to democracy, it is the constituency who defines the direction a country will take. Therefore, pleasing them should be at the fore of the responses taken by those in power. However, reality distances itself from theory. History provides us with many examples of the contrary, which indicates that the politicization of transitional justice is an ever-present event. The first section will outline current definitions and obstacles faced by transitional justice, focusing on the implicit ties between them and the aforementioned politicization. An original categorization of Transitional Justice as a method of analysis will also be introduced, which I denominate Political Opportunism. The case of Argentina, a country that is usually described as a model to export but that after 35 years is still dealing with the consequences brought by the contradictions of using several methods of justice, will then be reinterpreted through this perspective. At the end of the paper, the inevitable question will be posed: can this new angle be exported and implemented in every transition?