The responsibility to protect and the use of force: remaking the procrustean bed?

The emergence of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) owed much to the need to enhance the UN’s ability to act forcibly in the face of the most extreme cases of gross human suffering. Too often in the past such responses were emasculated or thwarted by the necessity to successfully navigate the UN Charter’s prescriptions over the use of force, by the unwillingness of member states to provide military forces, or by a combination of the two. In accepting that certain types of inhuman activity can lead to the legitimate use of force within the UN Charter framework, the adoption of R2P appeared to resolve at least some of these problems, and as such it offered hope to those wishing to see the UN adopt a more assertive response to the grossest of human rights abuses. But, using stalemate over Syria as its backdrop, this article demonstrates the dubiousness of the claim that such a normative development can ever trump the hard edged political and strategic factors which determine when states will accept and/or participate in the use of force, and it suggests a radical solution to the dangers inherent in R2P’s intimate association with military intervention

El principio de la buena fe como principio hermenéutico en la convención de Viena sobre la compraventa internacional de mercaderías

Treball Final de Grau en Dret. Codi: DR1052. Curs acadèmic 2015-201

Bridging of cryptic Borrelia cycles in European songbirds

The principal European vector for Borrelia burgdorferi s.l., the causative agents of Lyme disease, is the host-generalist tick Ixodes ricinus. Almost all terrestrial host-specialist ticks have been supposed not to contribute to the terrestrial Borrelia transmission cycles. Through an experiment with blackbirds, we show successful transmission by the widespread I. frontalis, an abundant bird-specialized tick that infests a broad range of songbirds. In the first phase of the experiment, we obtained Borrelia-infected I. frontalis (infection rate: 19%) and I. ricinus (17%) nymphs by exposing larvae to wild blackbirds that carried several genospecies (Borrelia turdi, B. valaisiana, B. burgdorferi s.s.). In the second phase, pathogen-free blackbirds were exposed to these infected nymphs. Both tick species were able to infect the birds, as indicated by the analysis of xenodiagnostic I. ricinus larvae which provided evidence for both co-feeding and systemic transmission (infection rates: 10%-60%). Ixodes frontalis was shown to transmit B. turdi spirochetes, while I. ricinus transmitted both B. turdi and B. valaisiana. Neither species transmitted B. burgdorferi s.s. European enzootic cycles of Borrelia between songbirds and their ornithophilic ticks do exist, with I. ricinus potentially acting as a bridging vector towards mammals, including man.This research was supported by the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders Belgium (grant G0.049.10) and the University of Antwerp (KP BOF UA 2015). The molecular work was done under the frame of COST action TD1303 EurNegVec. Dieter Heylen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders Belgium (FWO). This study received some financial support from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia by the strategic program of MARE (MARE - UID/MAR/04292/2013) and the fellowships to Ana Claudia Norte (SFRH/BPD/108197/2015 and SFRH/BPD/62898/2009).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

'World opinion' and the founding of the UN: Governmentalizing international politics

While 'world opinion' is a staple in political discourse, the concept has received little attention in IR. Locating it along the 'realist-idealist' divide, existing studies have conceptualized 'world opinion' empirically, as an aggregative or intersubjective phenomenon, annexed or opposed to state sovereignty, and embodying a normative standard. Drawing on Luhmann's conception of public opinion and Foucault's governmentality approach, this article reconceptualizes 'world opinion' discursively (functionally and semantically), as a medium of communication that enables post-sovereign forms of international governance irrespective of an inherent normativity. The alternative conception of 'world opinion' is illustrated in the discourse of the emerging United Nations in the early 1940s. In this context, 'world opinion' addressed problems concerning the failure of the League of Nations, total war, and threats to 'civilization'. With public opinion research as a technical backdrop, 'world opinion' underwrote governmentalities of international policing, welfare and rights liberalism, post-colonial pastoralism, and pedagogical panopticism in response to these problems. Copyrigh