Search results for " International Relations"
showing 10 items of 626 documents
The European Courts and the Security Council: Between "Dédoublement Fonctionnel" and Balancing of Values
2009
The recent case law of various international tribunals facing questions related to UN Security Council resolutions shows the clear tendency to grant primacy to the UN legal order. This trend, far from being well founded on formal arguments, appears to be a tribute to a legal order perceived as superior, and, at the same time, is revealing of the ‘value oriented’ approach followed by the courts. Such an approach can be categorized from a theoretical perspective in the light of Scelle's theory of relations between legal orders, whereby the courts implement in their respective legal orders values stemming from the UN legal order. Various critical remarks can be advanced in relation to this att…
The Dignity in Free Speech: Civility Norms in Post-Terror Societies
2016
ABSTRACTIt is difficult to strike a balance between protecting freedom of speech and ensuring public safety. The attacks on 22 July 2011 in Norway, and the fear of terrorist acts inspired by public utterances on the Internet, have caused many to question whether and how we should regulate hate speech. In this article, we analyse the main arguments from the debate on freedom of speech in post-terror Norway, termed the ‘liberal’ and ‘harm’ (or ‘balance of harms’) arguments respectively. We propose a set of civility norms that may serve to uphold the wide freedom of speech advocated by the liberal argument, while being attentive to the real ethical challenges emphasised by the harm argument.
The World Bank’s Early Reflections on Development: A Development Institution or a Bank?
2009
Until the late 1960s, the World Bank presented itself as an institution devoted to making sound and directly productive project loans. Yet, during its very early years, some discussions developed inside the Bank regarding the possibility of issuing different types of loans, namely (i) loans aimed at tackling social issues ("social loans"), and (ii) loans aimed at providing foreigncurrency to address disequilibria in the balance of payments ("impact loans"). This paper brings together historical analysis and theories of organization development to study the housing issue as a case in point. The analysis reveals that the Bank was unwilling to lend for housing programs not because these were n…
Blockchain Securities, Insolvency Law and the Sandbox Approach
2018
Blockchain is a new technology that is based on an algorithm which allows participants of an IT network to process, store and share data across multiple points without the need for any intermediary, at least in order to ensure the integrity of the data dealt with. This technology is simplifying financial markets—many organizations are launching initial coin offerings to facilitate the financing of new business ventures; moreover, ‘securities’ that are issued in such a digital form can be bought and sold in the secondary market without the intervention of the traditional intermediaries. However, this use of blockchain could give rise to many problems which, in this article, will be analysed …
The Border Effect in Spain
2005
This paper analyses the border effect in Spain using a unique dataset on intranational trade flows over the period 1995–98. The results indicate that, after controlling for market size and distance, Spanish regions trade around 22 times more with the rest of Spain than they do with OECD countries. Moreover, the size of the Spanish bias is lower in the case of the Spanish regions’ exports than in the case of imports, although the difference is not statistically significant in most cases. Finally, the border effect is not uniform across Spanish regions.
Is the Border Effect an Artefact of Geographical Aggregation?
2011
The existence of a large border effect is considered as one of the main puzzles of international macroeconomics. We show that the border effect is, to a large extent, an artefact of geographic concentration. In order to do so we combine international flows with intra-national flows data characterised by a high geographic grid. At this fine grid, intra-national flows are highly localised and dropping sharply with distance. The use of a small geographical unit of reference to measure intra-national bilateral trade flows allows to estimating correctly the negative impact of distance on shipments. When we use sector disaggregated export flows of 50 Spanish provinces in years 2000 and 2005 split…
Visegrad Euroscepticism: Discursive Nodal Points in Eurosceptic Discourses Surrounding External Actions of the European Union
2018
Increasing support for Eurosceptic parties and movements can be observed in the European Union’s (EU) member states since 2009, when the economic crisis heavily affected the continent. This process has happened also within Central and Eastern European countries, especially in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary (collectively referred to as the Visegrad Group countries, or V4 for short). The goal of this paper is an analysis of far-right Eurosceptic politicians and their attitudes towards EU external actions. Using the Thomas Diez concept of discursive nodal points (DNPs) and examining European Parliament (EP) debates, literature about V4 Euroscepticism and media reports, this p…
Finnish–Chinese investment negotiation: power positioning and search for common ground
2018
This article explores what kind of a role ‘the rise of China’ plays in negotiation and searches for common ground between Finnish and Chinese representatives in the context of Chinese investment, t...
Intellectual Structure of the Belt and Road Initiative Research: A Scientometric Analysis and Suggestions for a Future Research Agenda
2020
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has attracted increasing attention worldwide since its inception in 2013. Although the research is fast increasing in terms of publications, there is a lack of knowledge about the intellectual structure, research trends, and appropriate theories underpinning. Using bibliometric data from 1583 articles from 2013 to 2019 in the Web of Science and Scopus databases, we used bibliometric techniques and scientometric analyses to identify and analyze the intellectual structure, hotspots, and emerging trends in this field. We identified 18 clusters that we categorized into three groups for thematic discussion. Research gaps and future research directions were …
Institutions, crises, and political confidence in seven contemporary democracies. An elite-mass analysis
2017
There is ample consensus in the literature that institutional confidence by the public is needed in democracies and at the same time elites, particularly political elites, need to share this confidence in their guidance of state institutions, if political stability in established democracies and the consolidation of new democracies are desired. The research takes the form of a quantitative analysis based on the World Values Surveys and the elite surveys (parliamentarians) conducted in 2006 (before the financial crisis) and in 2012–2013 (post the crisis when apparently, the worst of the economic crunch had lessened up) in the 7 countries selected. We explore what lies at the base of politica…