Cadmus

Abstract
Women play a crucial role in many activities essential for coping with climate change. Indian women appear to be more vulnerable than men to differential impacts of climate change because they share most of the household managing responsibilities but have limited access to participation in decision making and governance. Most of the policies for climate change adaptation and mitigation do not specifically address the vulnerability of women. The National Action Plan for Climate Change (NAPCC), formulated to shape future discourse of climate change adaptation and development, recognizes the differential impacts of climate change on society, but incorporates merely a few gender specific measures. The paper suggests gender specific measures for each mission of the NAPCC to make the adaptation and development process more inclusive and sustainable in India.
Climate change has the potential to turn into a ‘crisis for humankind’ as its potential multiple impacts can exacerbate the scarcity of natural resources, crop failure, hunger, malnutrition and disease, and can undermine economic growth and development in the long run.¹ The core challenge of climate change is the structural impact on the fragile and vulnerable sections of the society which have limited or the least capacity at both social and individual levels to cope with climate catastrophes. Climate change would have severe implications for the progress of mankind and well-being of individuals, which are the main planks of human security. Contrary to the conventional notion of security, human security encompasses an inclusive agenda of human development including life, livelihood, access to food and water, health, and environmental sustainability. Thus, fundamental elements of human security are explicitly and implicitly interlinked with vulnerabilities induced by climate change. Women comprise a considerable percentage of the world’s poorest and disadvantaged people, and therefore, are likely to be disproportionately affected by the adverse impacts of climate change.² They are marginalized and deprived of the basic right to a decent life in our society due to various social, cultural, political and economic constraints. They share the maximum of burdens in managing the households, but have relatively less or limited access to health care, employment, economic opportunities, political participation and role in decision making pro cesses. Compared to their responsibilities, better access to resources and opportunities would make them less vulnerable to climate-change-induced development challenges and natural calamities. India is one of the countries that is most vulnerable and risk prone to potential impacts of climate change. Indian women score lowest on some development indicators. Such factors could particularly have serious implications for the well-being of women.
From the gender point of view, men and women have different roles and responsibilities, which result in differences in vulnerability and ability to cope with change.³ Furthermore, vulnerabilities among women are also due to their limited adaptive capacity that stems from predominating issues like illiteracy, inequality in social rights, inadequate access to information and resources, and limited health care facilities.⁴ India is at the 112th position in the Global Gender Gap Index that examines the gap between men and women in four fundamental categories: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival and political empowerment.⁵ India figures very low on both the HDI and GDI as it ranks 134 and 114 respectively. Wages for women in India are much lower compared to those of men.⁶ Forty-nine percent of Indian women live in poverty and only 36 percent participate in the labor force.^* In terms of health and survival, according to NFHS-3, more than one-third of Indian women were suffering from Chronic Energy Deficiency during 2005-06, over half the women in the 15-49 age group suffered from Iron Deficiency Anemia. 59 percent of pregnant women are anemic.^{7, 8} As far as political empowerment is concerned, though women’s participation in panchayats (rural local government) has increased due to the 33 percent reservation scheme in India (now Government of India has extended up to 50 percent), their representation in parliament and state assemblies of many states has not gone beyond eight and ten percent respectively.9 Women’s participation in decision making process is also limited.
Apart from these unfavourable indicators, various social and household responsibilities contribute to women’s vulnerabilities. Women are largely responsible for household management and water and fuel collection in their communities, which are difficult, time-consuming tasks due to environmental changes. Generally women fulfill these tasks and engage in work outside their homes. Climate change can cause a rise in sea level, affecting livelihoods from fishing in which women are equally involved. Fresh water supply may also be affected due to intrusion of saline water into freshwater systems. Land inundation damages infrastructure, roads and houses. Inundation also results in large-scale migration that increases hardship for women.^† Women are more likely to suffer heat stress due to biological reasons.‡ Climate change will affect people’s health. Generally women look after their children and elderly family members when they are sick. If such demands on them increase, women will be less able to pursue income-generating activities.^§
Climate-change-induced natural disasters affect women and men differently. The cyclone and flood of 1991 in Bangladesh killed two-three times as many women as men, and in districts worst hit by tsunami, more women were killed than men.10 Many other reports have focused on how women have been disadvantaged across caste, class, and occupations in the tsunami relief and recovery operations by conventional gender norms or gender-neutral/blind state policies. Moreover, women have less access to resources that are essential for disaster preparedness and mitigation, and rehabilitation. An increase in extreme events puts extra burden of devastation and destruction on women, who have to keep the family together after floods and storms, and put food on the plate.¹¹
Gendered divisions of labor often result in overrepresentation of women in agricultural and informal sectors, which are more vulnerable to climate change. Many poor women are also actively engaged in agricultural activities, including paddy cultivation and fishing, which will be affected by changing weather patterns in India. Loss of livelihood will increase their vulnerability and marginalization.¹² Indian women, in general, are also responsible for tasks such as food collection and energy supply for the household as well as many care-giving tasks such as caring for the children, sick, elderly, the home and assets.¹³ For instance, in hill and mountain regions, and in arid and semi-arid areas where forests have disappeared and agriculture remains poor, women spend between six and ten hours daily collecting the resources they need to meet their basic survival needs.¹⁴

Jyoti Parikh, Executive Director of IRADe; Fellow, World Academy of Art & Science
Dinoj Kumar Upadhyay, Research Analyst, IRADe
Tanu Singh, Research Analyst, IRADe
* See UNDP, UNDP in India, Empowered Lives, Resilient Nations, 2010, p-13.
† See Jyoti Parikh, Towards A Gender-Sensitive Agenda for Energy, Environment and Climate Change, Expert Group Meeting on “The impact of the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action on the Achievement of the Millennium Development Goals”, United Nations Office at Geneva, November 2009, p-3
‡ See Jyoti Parikh, Gender and Climate Change Framework for Analysis, Policy & Action, Integrated Research and Action for Development, 2007, p-21.
§ See Yianna Lambrou and Grazia Piana, Gender: The Missing Component of the Response to Climate Change, Food and Agriculture Organisations of United Nations, Gender and Population Division, Sustainable Development Department, April 2006, p-36.
1. German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU), World in Transition: A Social Contract for Sustainability (Berlin: WBGU, 2011), 33.
2. Alyson Broody, Justina Demetriades and Emily Esplen, Gender and Climate Change: Mapping the Linkages: A Scoping Study on Knowledge and Gaps (Sussex: Institute of Development Studies, 2008).
3. “Policy Brief: People-Centred Climate Change Adaptation: Integrating gender issues,” Food and Agriculture Organization, 2010 ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/a1395e/a1395e00.pdf
4. Jyoti Parikh, “Is Climate Change a Gender Issue?” UNDP 2010 data.undp.org.in/Gndr_CC.pdf
5. World Economic Forum, The Corporate Gender Gap Report 2010 (Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2010), 4 members.weforum.org/pdf/gendergap/report2010.pdf
6. Govind Kelkar, “Development Effectiveness through Gender Mainstreaming,” Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 44 (2005): 4690-4699.
7. Naresh Saxena, “Hunger, Under-Nutrition and Food Security in India,” Working Paper 44, CPRC-IIPA 2010 www.dfid.gov.uk/r4d/PDF/Outputs/ChronicPoverty_RC/CPRC-IIPA44.pdf
8. T. Nandakumar et al., Food and Nutrition Security Status in India: Opportunities for Investment Partnerships (Manila: Asian Development Bank, 2010) www.adb.org/Documents/Papers/ADB-Working-Paper-Series/ADB-WP16-Food-and-Nutrition-Security-Status-India.pdf
9. Planning Commission, Government of India, “Gender empowerment,” in State Development Report: Himachal Pradesh 2011 planningcommission.nic.in/plans/stateplan/sdr_hp/sdr_hpch10.pdf
10. Kenneth Hewitt, “The Social Nature of Exposure, Vulnerability and Responses to Disaster” MRI International Workshop, Vienna, 2009.
11. Jyoti Parikh and Fatma Denton, “Gender and Climate Change,” Tiempo no. 47 (2003).
12. United Nations Development Programme, Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World (New York: UNDP, 2007/08).
13. Elaine Enarson, Gender and Natural Disasters (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2000).
14. Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), State of India’s Environment: The Citizen’s Fifth Report (New Delhi: CSE, 1999).

Entropy and Economics

John Scales Avery — Sun, 13 May 2012 13:03:39 +0000

Abstract
In this essay, human society is regarded as a “superorganism”, analogous to colonies of social insects. The digestive system of the human superorganism is the global economy, which ingests both free energy and resources, and later excretes them in a degraded form. This process involves an increase in entropy. Early in the 20th century, both Frederick Soddy and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen discussed the relationship between entropy and economics. Soddy called for an index system to regulate the money supply and a reform of the fractional reserve banking system, while Georgescu-Roegen pointed to the need for Ecological Economics, a steady-state economy, and population stabilization. As we reach the end of the fossil fuel era and as industrial growth falters, massive unemployment can only be avoided by responsible governmental action. The necessary steps include shifting labor to projects needed for a sustainable economy, dividing the available work fairly among those seeking employment, and reforming the practices of the financial sector.

1. Human Society as a Superorganism, with the Global Economy as its Digestive System
A completely isolated human being would find it as difficult to survive for a long period of time as would an isolated ant or bee or termite. Therefore, it seems correct to regard human society as a superorganism. In the case of humans, the analog of the social insects’ nest is the enormous and complex material structure of civilization. It is, in fact, what we call the human economy. It consists of functioning factories, farms, homes, transportation links, water supplies, electrical networks, computer networks and much more. Almost all of the activities of modern humans take place through the medium of these external “exosomatic” parts of our social superorganism.^*
The economy associated with the human superorganism “eats” resources and free energy. It uses these inputs to produce local order, and finally excretes them as heat and waste. The process is closely analogous to food passing through the alimentary canal of an individual organism. The free energy and resources that are the inputs of our economy drive it just as food drives the processes of our body, but in both cases, waste products are finally excreted in a degraded form.

Almost all of the free energy that drives the human economy came originally from the Sun’s radiation, the exceptions being geothermal energy which originates in the decay of radioactive substances inside the earth, and tidal energy, which has its origin in the relative motion of the Earth-Moon system. However, since the start of the Industrial Revolution, our economy has been using the solar energy stored in fossil fuels. These fossil fuels were formed over a period of several hundred million years. We are using them during a few hundred years, i.e., at a rate approximately a million times the rate at which they were formed.
The total ultimately recoverable resources of fossil fuels amount to roughly 1260 terawatt-years of energy (1 terawatt-year = 1012 watt-years – 1 TWy is equivalent to 5 billion barrels of oil or 1 billion tons of coal). Of this total amount, 760 TWy is coal, while oil and natural gas each constitute roughly 250 TWy. In 1890, the rate of global consumption of energy was 1 terawatt, but by 1990 this figure had grown to 13.2 TW, distributed as follows: oil, 4.6; coal, 3.2; natural gas, 2.4; hydropower, 0.8; nuclear, 0.7; fuel wood, 0.9; crop wastes, 0.4; and dung, 0.2. By 2005, the rate of oil, natural gas and coal consumption had risen to 6.0 TW, 3.7 TW and 3.5 TW respectively. Thus, the present rate of consumption of fossil fuels is more than 13 terawatts and, if used at the present rate, fossil fuels would last less than a century. However, because of the very serious threats posed by climate change, human society would be well advised to stop the consumption of coal, oil and natural gas well before that time.
The rate of growth of new renewable energy sources is increasing rapidly. These sources include small hydro, modern biomass, solar, wind, geothermal, wave and tidal energy. However, these sources currently account for only 2.8% of total energy use. There is an urgent need for governments to set high taxes on fossil fuel consumption and to shift subsidies from the petroleum and nuclear industries to renewables. These changes in economic policy are needed to make the prices of renewables more competitive.
The shock to the global economy that will be caused by the end of the fossil fuel era will be compounded by the scarcity of other non-renewable resources, such as metals. While it is true (as neoclassical economists emphasize) that “matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed”, free energy can be degraded into heat, and concentrated deposits of minerals can be dispersed. Both the degradation of Gibbs free energy into heat and the dispersal of minerals involve increase of entropy.

2. Frederick Soddy
One of the first people to call attention to the relationship between entropy and economics was the English radiochemist Frederick Soddy (1877-1956). Soddy won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1926 for his work with Ernest Rutherford demonstrating the transmutation of elements in radioactive decay processes. His concern for social problems then led him to a critical study of the assumptions of classical economics.
Soddy believed that there was a close connection between Gibbs free energy and wealth, but only a very tenuous connection between wealth and money. He was working on these problems during the period after World War I, when England left the gold standard, and he advocated an index system to replace it. In this system, the Bank of England would print more money and lend it to private banks whenever the cost of standard items indicated that too little money was in circulation, or conversely destroy printed money if the index showed the money supply to be too large.
Soddy was extremely critical of the system of “fractional reserve banking” whereby private banks keep only a small fraction of the money that is entrusted to them by their depositors and lend out the remaining amount. He pointed out that, in this system, the money supply is controlled by the private banks rather than by the government, and also that profits made from any expansion of the money supply go to private corporations instead of being used to provide social services. Fractional reserve banking exists today, not only in England but also in many other countries. Soddy’s criticisms of this practice cast light on the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 and the debt crisis of 2011.
As Soddy pointed out, real wealth is subject to the second law of thermodynamics. As entropy increases, real wealth decays. Soddy contrasted this with the behavior of debt at compound interest, which increases exponentially without any limit, and he remarked: “You cannot permanently pit an absurd human convention, such as the spontaneous increment of debt [compound interest] against the natural law of the spontaneous decrement of wealth [entropy]”. Thus, in Soddy’s view, it is a fiction to maintain that being owed a large amount of money is a form of real wealth.
Frederick Soddy’s book, Wealth, virtual wealth and debt: The solution of the economic paradox, published in 1926 by Allen and Unwin, was received by the professional economists of the time as the quixotic work of an outsider. Today, however, Soddy’s commonsense economic analysis is increasingly valued for the light that it throws on the problems of our fractional reserve banking system, which becomes more and more vulnerable to failure as economic growth falters.

3. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
The incorporation of the idea of entropy into economic thought also owes much to the mathematician and economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906- 1994), the son of a Romanian army officer. Georgescu-Roegen’s talents were soon recognized by the Romanian school system, and he was given an outstanding education in Mathematics, which later contributed to his success and originality as an economist.
Between 1927 and 1930 the young Georgescu studied at the Institut de statistique in Paris, where he completed an award-winning thesis: On the problem of finding out the cyclical components of phenomena. He then worked in England with Karl Pearson from 1930 to 1932, and during this period his work attracted the attention of a group of economists who were working on a project called the Harvard Economic Barometer. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship to join this group, but when he arrived at Harvard, he found that the project had been disbanded. In desperation, Georgescu-Roegen asked the economist Joseph Schumpeter for an appointment to join his group. Schumpeter’s group was in fact a remarkably active and interesting one, which included the Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief, and there followed a period of intense intellectual activity during which Georgescu-Roegen became an economist.
Despite offers of a permanent position at Harvard, Georgescu-Roegen returned to his native Romania in the late 1930s and early 1940s in order to serve his country. He served as a member of the Central Committee of the Romanian National Peasant Party. His experiences at this time led to his insight that economic activity involves entropy. He was also helped to this insight by Borel’s monograph on Statistical Mechanics, which he had read during his period of stay in Paris.
Georgescu-Roegen later wrote: “The idea that the economic process is not a mechanical analogue, but an entropic, unidirectional transformation began to turn over in my mind long ago, as I witnessed the oil wells of the Plosti field of both World Wars’ fame becoming dry one by one, and as I grew aware of the Romanian peasants’ struggle against the deterioration of their farming soil by continuous use and by rains as well. However it was the new representation of a process that enabled me to crystallize my thoughts in describing the economic process as the entropic transformation of valuable natural resources (low entropy) into valueless waste (high entropy).” After making many technical contributions to economic theory, Georgescu-Roegen returned to this insight in his important 1971 book, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1971), where he outlines his concept of bioeconomics. In a later book, Energy and Economic Myths (Pergamon Press, New York, 1976), he offered the following recommendations for moving towards a bioeconomic society:
• the complete prohibition of weapons production, thereby releasing productive forces for more constructive purposes;
• immediate aid to underdeveloped countries;
• gradual decrease in population to a level that could be maintained only by organic agriculture;
• avoidance, and strict regulation if necessary, of wasteful energy use;
• abandon our attachment to “extravagant gadgetry”;
• “get rid of fashion”;
• make goods more durable and repairable; and
• cure ourselves of workaholic habits by rebalancing the time spent on work and leisure, a shift that will become incumbent as the effects of the other changes make themselves felt.
Georgescu-Roegen did not believe that his idealistic recommendations would be adopted, and he feared that human society was headed for a crash.

John Scales Avery, University of Copenhagen, Denmark; Fellow, World Academy of Art and Science
* The terms “exosomatic” and “endosomatic” were coined by the American scientist Alfred Lotka (1820-1949). A lobster’s claw is endosomatic – it is part of the lobster’s body. The hammer used by a human is exosomatic − like a detachable claw. Lotka spoke of “exosomatic evolution”, including in this term not only cultural evolution but also the building up of the material structure of civilization.

Research Integrity: A Vital Condition for Science & Scholarship

Pieter J. D. Drenth — Sun, 13 May 2012 12:30:33 +0000

Abstract
Research misconduct is a serious threat to science and to society. A variety of Codes of Conduct for research integrity have been developed in Europe by universities, academies of sciences and funding organisations, but this has resulted in a patchwork of codes and procedures, which hampers international collaborative research. ALLEA and ESF have taken the initiative to achieve more international harmonisation by developing a European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. This paper presents a description of this Code, including the principles of scientific integrity, the violations of these principles, suggestions for good practices, and recommendations on how to deal with allegations of misconduct. This Code is a canon for self-regulation. Hopefully, it will establish standards across Europe that can eventually be held valid and implemented world-wide.

1. Misconduct in Science and Scholarship
During the last few decades an increasing number of unacceptable cases of misconduct in science and scholarship have been reported in the press. This is certainly due to the fact that the world of scientific and scholarly research has become more transparent and subject to critical control by the public press. But one cannot help thinking that there is an increasing prevalence of various forms of misconduct. Scientists are under mounting pressure to perform and to publish. Output scores, citation and h-indices are becoming increasingly important factors for appointments, tenure decisions, promotions and funding. The commercialisation of science, the harder competition for restricted funds, more opportunities through internet and an inadequate peer-review system for complex research projects have given rise to a climate in which scientists are too easily tempted to engage in unacceptable behaviour and to commit infringements upon the norms of proper and responsible research.

Hard data on the exact prevalence of scientific misconduct are not so easy to get; reports and surveys are probably quite inaccurate. Scientists, and certainly the leadership of universities and research institutes exercise a natural reserve when it comes to exposing research misconduct. They are inclined to defend their profession, tend to keep the dirty laundry indoors, want to protect individuals, or are afraid to become the subject of public vilification. Moreover, given the far reaching consequences, one must be very sure of their facts when making charges. It could even lead to costly legal procedures, as Deyo et al. have shown in a case in which the pharmaceutical industry lobby applied undue pressure on researchers who intended to publish data that it found unwelcome.¹ It should also be recognised that the definition of various forms of misconduct is not always clear and unequivocal, and that the demarcation line between unacceptable and still acceptable behaviour is often vague and debatable. Nevertheless, some empirical data have become available lately, leading to the conclusion that major research misconduct may occur rather infrequently (Steneck, the principal advisor of the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) in the USA estimates between .1 % and 1% of funded research projects), but that in absolute terms it is given the scale of present day research, anything but a rare phenomenon. Steneck’s estimate implies between 150 and 1500 cases per annum in the USA and between 100 and 1000 cases per annum in Europe. In addition, the fear expressed by some (among others the Presidents of European Academies in a modest survey that I conducted in 2000) who noticed far more small-scale fiddling with results and tampering with data does not seem unfounded.
Besides its reservations for reasons described above, the scientific world has also underestimated or scaled down the extension of research misconduct. Serious misbehaviour was seen as very exceptional and imputed to particular, probably even disturbed, researchers. Cases discussed in the press were considered anecdotal and blown up incidents. Science cherished the hope that self-regulation and the peer-review system would keep things under control. It was only fairly recently that the scientific world has come to the conclusion that such optimism is not justified, and that we deal with a serious development that could potentially undermine the very foundation of science and scholarship.
The effects of research misconduct are harmful indeed. Of course, in the first place, for science itself, incorrect theories are not disproved, false insights are not invalidated and deceptions continue. Individuals or the society at large may also suffer. Wrong applications may be defended, wrong treatments or drugs may be recommended and wrong decisions may be taken. In the third place trust in science will be subverted. As a result of disclosed cases of misconduct the general public will lose confidence in science as a useful source of information and a dependable base for decision making.
Therefore, given its occurrence and its injurious effects research misconduct is a serious threat for science itself as well as for the society at large. A proper and well accepted definition of (forms of) misconduct, reliable means of identification, and effective corrective actions deserve a high priority on the agenda of research institutes, universities, academies and funding organs. Besides, international scientific collaboration has increased sharply during the last decades, not in the least stimulated by electronic communication means and internet. Universities and research institutes as well as national funding organisations vigorously stimulate such international collaboration, and many international funding bodies (e.g. Framework Programmes of the European Commission) accept this as a mandatory condition.
Of course, the requirements of scientific integrity apply equally strongly in international collaborative research. And it will be clear that a common agreement on norms, rules and standards within the collaborating parties is a prerequisite for the furthering of research integrity and for proper dealing with cases (allegations) of misconduct. And that is a serious difficulty. Many countries lack a coherent and generally accepted policy and approach in this field. Definitions, standards, procedures of dealing with allegations, and sanctions often differ between countries. Codes and rules of good practice vary or are even non-existent. It became evident that we need an international approach and agreement on norms and standards for scientific integrity and on ways of dealing with recurring misconduct. Supra-national scientific organisations, such as All European Academies (ALLEA), the European Federation of National Academies of Sciences and Humanities and the European Science Foundation (ESF), and also international learned societies with individual members, such as Academia Europaea and the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS) should see the importance of this challenge and take up this gauntlet.

2. Coordination Initiatives
Codes of Conduct for research integrity are and have been developed by universities, research institutes, academies of sciences, funding organisations and national governments. As indicated above, however, this has resulted in a patchwork of codes and procedures, which is most inconvenient in (international) collaborative research. A number of initiatives to achieve more international harmonisation have been taken in recent years.
First of all, a series of World Conferences on research integrity may be mentioned. This first conference (Research Integrity: fostering responsible research) took place in Lisbon on Sept. 17-19, 2007. The second world conference in Singapore (July 21-24, 2010) resulted in the Singapore Statement on Research Integrity, emphasising four principles (honesty, accountability, professional courtesy, and good stewardship) and fourteen responsibilities (integrity and good practices). The third conference is planned for the year 2013 in Montreal, Canada.
The second initiative took place at the European level and resulted in a European Code of Conduct that will be discussed in the next section in some more detail.
As a follow up of the Lisbon Conference, ALLEA and ESF decided to combine forces and to prepare a project ‘European Coordinated Approach to Research Integrity (ECARI)’. Objectives of this project were to share information and experiences, to provide a vehicle for benchmarking best practices, to stimulate the development of appropriate structures, and to encourage the development of common approaches across Europe. Within the framework of this project ESF, together with the Spanish National Research Council CSIC, organised a workshop on research integrity (From Principles to Practice, Madrid, Nov. 17-18, 2008), and started a Member Organisation Forum on Research Integrity with the objectives ‘to serve as a platform for the exchange of information on attempts and initiatives to ensure research integrity and to prevent misconduct, and to encourage organisations which do not yet have appropriate structures to initiate debates in their respective communities on adequate models’. The following four working groups were created with the task each to address one particular aspect of the problem area in question:
• WG 1 ‘Raising awareness and sharing information’ (chair: Sonia Ftacnikova (SK)). The task of this working group was to develop and implement activities to continue raising awareness and sharing information on good practices to promote and safeguard research integrity.
• WG 2 ‘Code of Conduct’ (chair: Pieter Drenth (NL)). This working group was to develop a Code of Conduct which defines core values to be pursued and norms to be complied with in responsible research, and which could be used as a template for national or institutional codes of conduct in Europe.
• WG 3 ‘Setting up national structures’ (chair: Maura Hiney (IE)). This working group had to analyse and make proposals for setting up national and institutional structures to promote good research practices and deal with research misconduct.
• WG 4 ‘Research on scientific integrity’ (chair: Livia Puljak (HR)). This working group had to develop and promote research programmes to map out what is already known and to better understand research misconduct (occurrences, contributing factors, effectiveness of various measures, etc.).
Each of the four working groups produced an interim report. Their insights and conclusions were integrated in a final report Fostering Research Integrity in Europe that appeared in March 2011 (www.esf.org). An executive summary had already been published earlier (June 2010) under the same title. The report hopes to offer a comprehensive strategy for promoting and safeguarding integrity in scientific and scholarly research and practice nationally and in the wider European context.

3. The European Code of Conduct
The Code of Conduct proposed by Working Group 2 emerged from a series of discussions both within WG2 and ALLEA on the basis of a preliminary discussion paper.² Evaluation and feedback were given by ALLEA’s Standing Committee on Science and Ethics and by representatives of ALLEA’s Member Academies at a special meeting in Berne (June 29-30, 2009). Each subsequent version was discussed and commented on by WG2. Pursuing this dual path of consultation and feedback the final proposal of the ESF Member Organisation Forum has also met with the general approval of the European National Academies associated in ALLEA. This is an important achievement, since in the further promotion and implementation of this code both the national funding organisations (strongly represented in ESF) and the national academies have to play an important role.
We present a few elements from the European CoC below.^{*, 3}

3.1 Principles
The Code starts with the formulation of 8 principles of scientific integrity. These principles have a fundamental and universal character. They apply to all countries and all disciplines and should be observed in pure research as well as applied settings. They include:
(1) Honesty in presenting research goals and intentions, in precise and nuanced reporting on research methods and procedures, and in conveying valid interpretations and justifiable claims with respect to possible applications of one’s own or other’s research results.
(2) Reliability in performing research (meticulous, no carelessness, no inattention), and in communication of the results (fair and full and unbiased reporting).
(3) Objectivity: founding interpretations and conclusions on facts and data capable of proof, transparency in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data, and general verifiability of the scientific reasoning.
(4) Impartiality and independence from commissioning or interested parties, from ideological or political pressure groups, and from economic or financial interests.
(5) Open communication in discussing the work with other scientists, in contributing to public knowledge through publication of the findings, in honest communication with the general public. This openness presupposes a proper storage and availability of data, and accessibility for interested colleagues.
(6) Duty of care for the object of research, be it a human being, animal, the environment or a product of culture. Research on human subjects should always rest on the principle of respect.
(7) Fairness in providing proper references and giving due credits to the work of others, in treating colleagues with integrity and honesty.
(8) Responsibility for future science generations: The education of young scientists and scholars requires binding standards for mentorship and supervision.

3.2 Violations
The Code continues defining and describing various forms of violation of these principles. Since the principles are universal, so are the condemnations of their violations. Here again we deal with universal basic standards. There is no room for cultural conditioning or contextualisation. These violations include the following:
(1) Fabrication: making up results and recording or reporting them as if they were real.
(2) Falsification: manipulating research processes or changing or omitting data.
(3) Plagiarism: the appropriation of other people’s ideas, research results or words without giving proper credit.
(4) Minor misdemeanours (a little tampering with data, leaving out an unwelcome observation, a selective citation) may not lead to formal investigations, but are just as damaging given their probable frequency, and should be corrected by teachers and mentors.
(5) Misconduct also includes improper dealing with infringements, such as negligence, attempts to cover up misconduct, and reprisals on whistle blowers.
The first two infringements, fabrication and falsification, are the most serious. Plagiarism seems to be of a different order since it is expected to be more injurious to colleague scientists than to science as such. However, progress in present day science depends very much on open communication and discussion among fellow scientists and on a well-functioning peer-review system. And, if scientists should hesitate or refuse to take part in this open debate for fear of not being recognised or being taken advantage of, the quality of science would suffer.
The response to these violations must be proportionate to the seriousness of the misconduct: as a rule it must be demonstrated that the misconduct was committed intentionally, knowingly or recklessly, and proof must be based on the preponderance of evidence. Research misconduct should not include honest errors or differences of opinion. Misbehaviour such as intimidation of students, misuse of funds and other behaviour that is already subject to universal legal and social penalties are unacceptable as well, but we prefer this not to be classified as ‘research misconduct’ in stricto sensu, since it does not affect the integrity of the research record.

3.3 Good Practices
In addition to the principles and the violations thereof, the European CoC discusses and advises on many other forms of objectionable practices in scientific research. Many of them also undermine public trust in science and have to be taken just as seriously. We may think of the following categories:
(1) Data practices: including data management and storage, placing data at the disposal of colleagues who want to replicate the findings, adequate preservation of original data.
(2) Proper research procedures: The choice of an improper research design, carelessness in experimentation and calculations, which can lead to gross errors, may be classified under this heading, although the walls between dishonesty and incompetence are rather thin here.
(3) Responsible research procedures: Deviations from desired practices include insufficient care for research subjects, insufficient respect to human subjects, animals, the environment, or cultural heritage, violating protocols, ignoring the requirement of informed consent, insufficient privacy protection, and improper use of laboratory animals, or breach of trust and confidentiality.
(4) Publication-related conduct: including authorship practices. Unacceptable are claiming or granting undeserved authorship and denying deserved authorship, inadequate allocation of credit. Breaching publishing rules, such as repeated publications, salami-slicing of publications, insufficient acknowledgement of contributors or sponsors, or a too long delay of publication falls within this category as well.
(5) Reviewing and editorial issues: including independence and conflict of interests, personal bias and rivalry, appropriation of ideas.
As said, it is difficult to formulate universal guidelines here. Many practices are subject to different traditions and legislative regulations and may differ over countries, even over disciplines. In the European CoC we have confined ourselves to a listing of recommendations on good practices. Some of them do have universal character since they join in with rules adhered to by science publishers and formulated by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Others do not. Anyway, the regulations to be agreed on should be part of any national or institutional system of Good Practice Rules.

3.4 Dealing with allegations of misconduct
It is generally accepted that the primary responsibility for investigating and handling cases of misconduct lies in the hands of the leadership of the institution where the accused researcher works, i.e. university or research institute. Such institutions should be supported by a confidential standing committee, counsellor or ombudsman. In a few European countries (serious) allegations are dealt with by a national body (e.g. governmental body or Academy of Sciences). In many other countries such a national body has an advisory function or may act as a court of appeal.
Requirements for a proper procedure include a due and fair process, uniform and sufficiently rapid, and leading to proper outcomes and sanctions. The CoC lists a number of such principles for dealing with cases of misconduct, that are in line with general recommendations developed by the OECD.
In international collaboration, partners should agree to conduct their research according to the same standards of research integrity, as developed in the European CoC. They should bring any suspected deviation from these standards to the immediate attention of the project leader(s). Cases of suspected misdemeanour should then be investigated according to the policies and procedures of the partner with the primary responsibility for the project.
In more formal large scale collaborative projects (e.g. funded by the European Commission) one is advised to follow the recommendations of the Co-ordinating Committee of the OECD Global Science Forum (2009) that describe the procedures for investigating allegations of research misconduct. The European CoC suggests to use a boiler plate text for International Agreements (Appendix OECD report, 2009), which should then be embodied in the formal documents for the collaborative project.⁴

4. Final Remarks
It should be understood that this Code is not a body of law. It does not have a legal character but intends to be a canon for self-regulation. The scientific community is responsible for the formulation and reinforcement of the principles and virtues of scientific and scholarly research, and for proper corrective actions when scientific integrity is threatened.
In this report on the European Code of Conduct often the words ‘science’ and ‘scientific’ have been used. What is meant throughout is the broad field of science and scholarship. The Code applies to natural and life sciences, as well as to social sciences and humanities. These disciplines differ in method and content, but have a fundamental characteristic in common: they depend on argument and evidence, based on observations of nature, or of humans and their actions and products.
The objective of the European Code of Conduct is to stimulate and further the emergence of institutional settings that enforce research integrity. The Code could be a basis for the development or improvement of national or institutional codes of ethics and could set a benchmark for proper behaviour in collaborative research. Hopefully, this Code will achieve to set standards across Europe that can, eventually, be held valid and be implemented world-wide.

Pieter J. D. Drenth, Past President and Honorary President, All European Academies (ALLEA); Fellow, World Academy of Art & Science; Chairman of the Working Group ‘Code of Conduct’ of the ESF Member Organisation Forum on Research Integrity
* The full text of the Code can be found in the ESF publication (www.esf.org).
1. Richard Deyo et al., “The messenger under attack – intimidation of researchers by special interest-groups,” New England Journal of Medicine, 336 (1997): 1176-1179.
2. Pieter Drenth, “Scientific Integrity, a discussion paper,” KNAW/ALLEA, 2009.
3. Pieter Drenth, “Research integrity; protecting science, society and individuals,” European Review 18, no.3 (2010): 417-426, and in Drenth, P.J.D. (2012), “The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity,” In Nicholas Steneck and Tony Mayer, Promoting Research Integrity in a Global Environment, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte,. Ltd, chapter 22.
4. Investigating Research

Law in Transition Biblioessay: Globalization, Human Rights, Environment, Technology

Michael Marien — Sun, 13 May 2012 11:48:42 +0000

Abstract
As globalization continues, many transformations in international and domestic laws are underway or called for. There are too many laws and too few, too much law that is inadequate or obsolete, and too much law-breaking. This biblioessay covers some 100 recent books, nearly all recently published, arranged in four categories. 1) International Law includes six overviews/textbooks on comparative law, laws related to warfare and security, pushback against demands of globalization, and gender perspectives; 2) Human Rights encompasses general overviews and normative visions, several books on how some states violate human rights, five items on how good laws can end poverty and promote prosperity, and laws regulating working conditions and health rights; 3) Environment/Resources covers growth of international environmental law, visions of law for a better environmental future, laws to govern genetic resources and increasingly stressed water resources, two books on prospects for climate change liability, and items on toxic hazards and problems of compliance; 4) Technology, Etc. identifies eight books on global crime and the failed war on drugs, books on the response to terrorism and guarding privacy and mobility in our high-tech age, seven books on how infotech is changing law and legal processes while raising intellectual property questions, biomedical technologies and the law, and general views on the need for updated laws and constitutions. In sum, this essay suggests the need for deeper and timely analysis of the many books on changes in law.FOREWORD
This “frontier frame” assembles catalog information on recent books that focus on international law and comparative law, with special attention to human rights, environmental law and technologies making current laws obsolete. It serves as a companion to “Taming Global Governance Idea Chaos: A ‘Frontier Frame’ for Recent Books” (CADMUS, 1:3, Fall 2011), which surveyed some 100 titles mostly published in the past three years.
Some 100 titles are also cited here, virtually all published in the past three years. Attention to domestic and global legal issues appears to be a major trend, and one might think that “global governance” and “global law” would be closely linked. Yet there is surprisingly very little overlap, and less than a dozen titles are cited in both essays. In other words, books on global governance say little on global law, and vice versa!

Most books identified here are published by prestigious US/UK university presses such as Harvard (8), Stanford (8), Cambridge (9), Oxford (5), Pennsylvania (5), New York University (5), MIT (5), Columbia (4), and Princeton (4), but the authors come from a wide range of developed-world countries. No references are known, however, to books on globalizing law published in other countries or languages. As global governance proceeds, and as law slowly becomes more globalized, one should expect a wider range of voices on transitions in law that are underway, as well as desirable “good society” ideals.
Items are arranged in four major categories:
1. INTERNATIONAL LAW (Overviews, Textbooks, Comparative, Security, Pushback, Gender)
2. HUMAN RIGHTS (General, Visions, State Crime, Anti-Poverty, Work and Health)
3. ENVIRONMENT/RESOURCES (General, Visions, Resources, Other Issues)
4. TECHNOLOGY, ETC. (Global Crime, Terrorism/Security/Privacy, Infotech, Biotech, Normative Visions)

1. INTERNATIONAL LAW
OVERVIEWS: Laws, rules, regulations, and guidelines are issued to guide human behavior in a great number of areas (arguably too many areas, at least in some countries). As global problems emerge, along with an increasingly globalized economy aided by new communications technologies, international laws need strengthening, along with new laws. Perhaps the best starting point is Law Without Nations edited by Austin Sarat et al. (Stanford, 1/11, 256p), which examines ways in which the growing internationalization of law affects domestic national law, the relationship between cosmopolitan legal ideas and understandings of national identity, and how law divorced from nations would clear the ground for more universalist grounds for law. Pushing this ideal further, in States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals (Columbia, 1/09, 384p), Jacqueline Stevens of University of California, Santa Barbara imagines a world without national laws of birthright citizenship, family inheritance, state-sanctioned marriage, and private land.
TEXTBOOKS: Four textbooks provide introductory overviews. International Law: Contemporary Issues and Future Developments edited by Stanford R. Silverburg (Westview, 3/11, 656p) covers R2P and universal jurisdiction, international political economics, the International Court of Justice, humanitarian law, the environment, and terrorism. International Law in World Politics: An Introduction by Shirley V. Scott (Lynne Rienner, 2nded, 2010, 509p) discusses multilateral treaties, intergovernmental organizations and non-state actors, human rights, use of force and arms control, and humanitarian law. International Law: Classic and Contemporary Readings edited by Charlotte Ku and Paul Diehl (Lynne Rienner, 3rded, 2009, 509p) explains international legal process, implementation and compliance issues, international legal structures, protecting human rights and the environment, managing the ocean and outer space commons, and future evolution of the international legal system. Law in Many Societies: A Reader edited by Lawrence M. Friedman et al. (Stanford, 4/11, 368p) recognizes that law is increasingly global and cross-national, and shows how law relates to society in different times and places.

COMPARATIVE: Continuing the comparative theme, The Handbook of Comparative Criminal Law edited by Kevin Jon Heller and Markus Dubber (Stanford, 12/10, 720p) explores criminal law systems in 16 countries, noting similarities and differences in design of criminal codes, protected rights, and specific offenses. Law and Long-Term Economic Change: A Eurasian Perspective edited by Debin Ma and Jan Luiten van Zanden (Stanford, 7/11, 368p) covers different legal regimes in Western Europe, East and South Asia, and the Middle East, insofar as the nature and evolution of legal regimes, ownership and property rights, courts, and dynamics of legal transplantations through processes such as colonization. Asian Legal Revivals: Lawyers in the Shadow of Empire by Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth (Chicago, 11/10, 288p) discusses the role of colonial experiences and the increasing importance of law and lawyers in South and Southeast Asia. Eurolegalism: The Transformation of Law and Regulation in the European Union by R. Daniel Kelemen (Harvard, 4/11, 328p) points to the advent of regulation through litigation with the growth of the EU, causing detailed and judicially enforceable rules—often framed as “rights”—that are backed with public enforcement litigation. Upgrading the EU’s Role as Global Actor by Michael Emerson et al. (Centre for European Policy Studies, 1/11, 100p) analyzes the changing position of the EU since acquiring a legal personality, and whether these developments lead to upgrading EU’s presence in conventions of international law. Constitutional Theocracy: Law in a Non-Secular World by Ran Hirschl (Harvard, 11/10, 290p) views an emerging new legal order at the intersection of two global trends: rising popular support for theocratic governance and the spread of constitutionalism or judicial review, exploring religion-and-state jurisprudence in dozens of countries (seen as a prudent strategy allowing opponents of theocratic governance to bring it under check and protect against radical religion).
SECURITY: War and War Crimes by James Gow (Columbia, 11/10, 256p) notes that military strategies increasingly embrace justice and law as crucial components of success, how militaries can maintain a sense of legitimacy, and when a war act becomes a war crime. However, New Battlefields, Old Laws: Critical Debates on Asymmetric Warfare edited by William C. Banks (Columbia, 10/11, 304p) argues that changing patterns of global conflict are forcing a rethink of traditional laws of war; gaps in the laws of war leave modern battlefields largely unregulated, emboldening non-state combatants to exploit forbidden strategies. The Challenge of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons edited by David Krieger of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (Transaction, 5/09, 242p) explores the role of international law in facilitating abolition, while noting little meaningful progress toward disarmament. Securing Freedom in the Global Commons by Scott Jasper (Stanford, 3/10, 312p) points to an ever-expanding range of threats to global security and regulation by international law of outer space, international waters and airspace, and cyberspace.
PUSHBACK: Not surprisingly, international law conflicts with national laws, especially an issue for the waning US hegemon, which often employs “selective self-exemption”. Meeting the Enemy: American Exceptionalism and International Law by Natsu Taylor Saito (NYU Press, 3/10, 384p) describes how the US has supported the international legal system while also distancing itself from many international law principles and institutions, which leads to decreasing effectiveness of the global rule of law. Also see Taming Globalization: International Law, the U.S. Constitution, and the New World Order by John Yoo and Julian Ku (Oxford, 1/12, 280p), which reconciles demands of globalization by reconceptualizing the Constitution and embracing mediating devices. In The Perils of Global Legalism (Chicago, 10/09, 280p), Eric A. Posner warns of a dangerously naïve tendency toward legalism—an idealistic belief that law can be effective in the absence of legitimate institutions of governance.
GENDER: Sex and World Peace by Valerie M. Hudson et al. (Columbia, 2/12, 256p) argues that the systemic insecurity of women acts to unravel the security of all, and notes discrepancies between national laws protecting women and enforcement of those laws, as well as inequitable family laws. Constituting Equality: Gender Equality and Comparative Constitutional Law edited by Susan H. Williams (Cambridge, 8/11, 378p) examines constitutional doctrines across a range of different countries and gender equality issues in constitutional drafting, including domestic incorporation of international law and rights provisions. Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights edited by Kamala Kempadoo (Paradigm, 2nded, 3/11, 304p) updates recent developments in law, policy, and international agreements. Legalizing Prostitution by Ronald Weitzer (NYU, 12/11, 288p) draws on research in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany to develop “best practices” that can serve as a model for other nations. Women’s Human Rights: The International and Comparative Law Casebook by Susan Deller Ross (Pennsylvania, 8/09, 688p) describes the deprivation and violence women suffer due to discriminatory laws and customs, provides legal tools for change, and shows how human rights treaties can be used to obtain new laws and court decisions.

2. HUMAN RIGHTS
GENERAL: International Human Rights Law: An Introduction by David Weissbrodt and Connie de la Vega (Pennsylvania, 8/10, 448p) surveys development of human rights as a domain of international law, summarizing principles and practices relevant to equality, life, slavery, fair trial, detention, torture, privacy, health, food, housing, clothing, environmental health, peace, self-determination, and security from terrorism. Human Rights Lawyering: Cases and Materials by Ralph G. Steinhardt et al. (Westlaw, 2009) emphasizes enforcement of human rights law in several settings, demonstrating its linkages to labor law, refugee law, humanitarian law, corporate law, environmental law, and international economic law. Universal Human Rights and Extraterritorial Obligations edited by Mark Gibney and Sigrun Skogly (Pennsylvania, 1/10, 296p) presents a brief for a more complex and updated approach to protecting human rights worldwide, in that globalization is challenging fundamental principles of international law. Similarly, Human Rights for the 21st Century: Sovereignty, Civil Society, Culture by Helen M. Stacy (Stanford, 2/09, 304p) finds that human rights abuses still continue at “an alarming rate,” and proposes a new ethical and legal framework to fill gaps in current approaches.
VISIONS: Looking even further ahead, 2048: Humanity’s Agreement to Live Together by J. Kirk Boyd (Berrett-Koehler, 4/10, 222p; www.2048.berkeley.edu) argues that provisions of the far-ranging 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights are inadequate, and proposes an enforceable International Convention in place by the 100th UDHR anniversary that safeguards basic freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want and from fear, and freedom for the environment. But is this the best framing? In A Quest for Humanity: The Good Society in a Global World (University of Toronto, 12/11, 252p), Canadian sociologist Menno Boldt describes “significant inadequacies of human-rights doctrine as a blueprint for social order” and how it “lacks the authenticity to be accorded the status of constitutional supremacy that trumps all other laws and community moral standards”. Rather, we need a morality based on “an authentic universal humane ethical principle that will inspire common cause and commitment to individual liberty and social justice…an ethic of universal and equal human dignity and humanity as the basis for international relations and cooperation…a global moral social order founded on the absolute principle and the concept of humane mutuality [that] embodies the universal aspiration of humankind.” Obviously, an ongoing discussion and debate on these different views are needed.
STATE CRIME: Nation-state regimes are often the cause of human rights violations, as argued in State Terrorism and Human Rights: International Responses since the Cold War by Paul Wilkinson (Routledge, 10/10, 240p), documenting responses based on democratic principles and the rule of law, with proposals for a more effective protection of human rights. Political Repression: Courts and the Law by Linda Camp Keith (Pennsylvania, 12/11, 336p) explores tools of state repression and international human rights norms that can serve as a constraint. State Crime: Current Perspectives by Dawn L. Rothe and Christopher Mullins (Rutgers, 11/10, 368p) asserts that current media and political discourse on crime has long ignored crimes committed by states themselves, despite their greater financial and human toll. Crimes Against Humanity: Historical Evolution and Contemporary Application by M. Cherif Bassiouni (Cambridge, 5/11, 850p), President Emeritus of the International Human Rights Law Institute, examines evolution of crimes against humanity since WWI, criminal tribunals, and the International Criminal Court. Genocide: A Normative Account by Larry May (Cambridge, 3/10, 300p) explores the crime of genocide in international criminal law and expands its definition to include cultural genocide and ethnic cleansing. The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics by Kathryn Sikkink (W.W. Norton, 9/11, 342p) argues that prosecutions are a powerful political tool, and that state leaders in Europe, Latin America, and Africa have lost their immunity from any accountability for their human rights violations—a shift that is affecting the behavior of political leaders worldwide. (As of February 2012, however, Syria’s Bashar Assad does not seem to have gotten the message.) The Sun Climbs Slow: The International Criminal Court and the Struggle for Justice by journalist Erna Paris (Seven Stories Press, 4/09, 400p) describes US opposition to a permanent ICC and the developing tension between unchallenged political power and rule of international law. Human Rights Regimes in the Americas edited by Monica Serrano of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect and Vesselin Popovski of the UNU Institute for Sustainability and Peace (UNU Press, 3/10 280p) finds that the Americas have seen considerable progress in human rights, yet abuses of rights and challenges to the rule of law have taken on a different and more elusive character.
ANTI-POVERTY: Freedom from Poverty: NGOs and Human Rights Praxis by Daniel P.L. Chong (Pennsylvania, 6/10, 232p) points out that NGOs modify human rights practices by taking up the cause of subsistence rights, promoting access to economic goods into national laws, and using legal instruments to build social movements and guide development work. Solomon’s Knot: How Law Can End the Poverty of Nations by Robert D. Cooter and Hans-Bernd Schafer (Princeton, 1/12, 328p) argues that ineffective private and business laws are the root cause of poverty, and that effective property, contract, and business laws help unite capital and ideas. Similarly, Pillars of Prosperity: The Political Economy of Development Clusters by Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson (Princeton, 9/11, 432p) states that rich and peaceful countries avoid repressive government, have a tax system for a broad base with widespread compliance, and also have a legal infrastructure that enforces contracts and property rights in line with the rule of law. Reinforcing these views, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East by Timur Kuran (Princeton, 12/10, 384p) shows that slow economic development of the Middle East is not due to colonialism, geography, or Muslim attitude, but Islamic legal institutions that promote low trust, rampant corruption, and weak civil societies. Also, One Billion Rising: Law, Land, and the Alleviation of Global Poverty edited by Roy L. Prosterman et al. (University of Amsterdam Press, 8/09, 450p) notes that most of the world’s poorest people lack ownership of−and rights to−the land that forms their principal source of livelihood, and that land reform and related legal work have transformed the lives of millions of families.
WORK AND HEALTH: Working Conditions Laws: Report 2010 (Geneva: International Labor Office, 2/11, 72p) provides a global comparative analysis of national working conditions standards in over 100 countries, including minimum wages, working hours and holidays, maternity protection, and significant global trends. Regulating for Decent Work: New Directions in Labor Market Regulation edited by Sangheon Lee and Dierdre McCann (ILO, 8/11, 380p) discusses issues such as regulation of precarious work, responses to neoliberal ideologies, new types of labor markets, effectiveness of legal norms, and labor market uncertainty. Equality at Work: The Continuing Challenge (ILO, 8/11, 92p) is the global report under the follow-up to the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work in 2011, showing that discrimination is becoming more varied than ever, and that “pay equality remains an elusive goal”. The Employment Relationship: A Comparative Overview by Giuseppe Casale (ILO, 12/10, 320p) explores definitions, laws, and practices in various regions, finding that globalization has increased the need for employee protection because changes in the world of work have modified traditional employment relations, such that it is increasingly difficult to determine who is in a legally defined relationship. Litigating Health Rights: Can Courts Bring More Justice to Health? (Harvard, 5/11, 208p), edited by Alicia Ely Yamin of the Harvard Law School Global Health and Human Rights program and Siri Gloppen, notes a “tremendous growth” in the number of health rights cases in the last 15 years, as regards access to health services and essential medications; case studies of advancing the right to health by holding governments accountable include Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, and South Africa.

New Paradigm for Global Rule of Law

Winston Nagan & Garry Jacobs — Sun, 13 May 2012 11:43:28 +0000

Abstract
Law is both a condition and a consequence of social development, an outcome of the broader social process, a form of social organization which channels social energies based on the relative strength of past practice and precedent, the present balance of power and emerging social values. Values are the bedrock of social process and the driving force for social activism. Historically, law evolves as a mechanism for conflict avoidance and resolution founded on the practical management of conflict and higher values, made possible by the implicit acceptance and internalization of the authority component of collective expectations. Established law acts as a conservative force of the status quo subject to continuous pressure to evolve from the changing public conscience and social values. Lasswell’s comprehensive model of social process highlights the contribution of multiple participants to the evolution of law at the macro and micro level, including the role of individual value demands and the potential assertive power of the human community as a whole. The article explores the potential role of non-states in changing international law regarding the legality of nuclear weapons. An appreciation of the integral relationship between law, politics and society is essential to a fuller understanding of social, power and legal processes and the goal of universalizing peace and human dignity.
Law is a powerful instrument for social development. At the same time it is itself a product of social development. The objective of this paper is to formulate a paradigm of law and development that will foster realization of the values essential for addressing global issues and the positive evolution of the human community. Law is a response to the problems that emerge from the social process and from the process of social development. Human problems represent conflicts between values that change over time. Effective solution to human conflicts depends on our ability to arrive at clarity and consensus regarding those values which are most conducive to human progress.^{1, 2, 3, 4} An appreciation of how law has developed historically in response to past conflicts may serve as a guide to understanding its present status and possible future directions. This historical focus must include not only the formulation of law, but also its actual practices and outcomes. This is apparent when we consider that the eradication of discrimination or corruption depends as much on the prescription and application of prevailing law as it does on the prescription of new law.
Law is both a condition and a consequence of social development. All aspects and dimensions of society impact on and are influenced by the rule of law. For example, in recent months, the European financial crisis has exerted strong pressure for modification of the laws governing financial management of EU member states as well as the powers and responsibilities of national and European institutions to address the challenges posed. Changes in law and public policy relating to the financial management of banks and central banking institutions constitute important components of the policy response. Similarly, rapid advances in technology and communications impact on laws relating to regulation of the Internet and intellectual property. Political activism, like the Arab Spring, Moscow Winter, Occupy Wall Street Movement, has thrown into question the constitutional legitimacy of governments and the fundamental rights of citizens. Soaring levels of unemployment have compelled changes in labor and social welfare policies and greater government responsibility for the economy. The Fukushima disaster has led to changes in law and public policy regarding nuclear energy in Germany and Switzerland and raised legal issues related to the rights of sovereign nations to environmental protection from the actions of their neighbors. These are just a few of the many aspects of social change which influences and is influenced by the prescription and application of law. An appraisal of the relevant trends and conditions which have influenced legal outcomes against the values that are claimed and preferred requires acute analysis not only of past precedent and the present balance of interests and forces; it must also take into account the likely direction of their future development.
Law does not evolve in a vacuum. It evolves with human agents as interest articulators and authoritative and controlling decision makers. It evolves as an important dimension of the wider quest of society for more effective institutional arrangements to fulfill the goals of the collective. The global challenge is to formulate creative strategies that will facilitate the most rapid and satisfactory progress for global society as a whole. A greater theoretical understanding of the relationship between law and social development and the processes governing their interaction and evolution should enable us to arrive at practical measures to resolve present conflicts and advance the collective human agenda.

1. Law as Outcome of Social Process
As an aspect of social organization, law is a mechanism for channeling social energies and interests. At any point in time, law consists of a more or less precarious balance between the past, present and future. Application and development of law are social processes that are influenced by multiple forces: the force of past precedent, established custom, and accepted tradition; the force of present political, economic and social power; the force of emerging aspirations; and ideas about the shaping and the sharing of the basic values for which there is a demand for acceptance.
Values are the bedrock of the social system and a driving force for social development. They represent the quintessence of society’s acquired knowledge and convictions regarding the essential principles for survival and sustained human accomplishment. Law reflects the arena of important values in society and the precise points at which there is contention between conflicts about those values. For example, when sophisticated, rapid-fire, automatic weapons are involved in tragic instances of mass homicide, public outrage in the US rises once again to challenge antiquated constitutional protection for citizens’ rights to bear arms, a right originally instituted at a time when ‘arms’ referred to single shot, mussel-loaded flint lock pistols and muskets.^* Thus, legal choices go to determine what to conserve, what to bury, what to affirm and what to enhance. Since values are changing rapidly in the modern era, social change leads to changes in understanding of the law as well as reconstruction of its prescriptions, application and enforcement over time. Growing support for government curbs speculative investments by banks and huge compensation packages for bank executives, which reflects changing social attitudes toward the social responsibilities of banks as institutions of public trust. Law is a continuing process of authoritative and controlling decision-making within which the community seeks to defend and secure the common interest. It is a continuing challenge for the present and the future.
The founding of the United Nations Organization (UN) illustrates this process of interaction and precarious balancing and its evolution over time.† Although conceived and cast in the highest idealistic terms of universal human values, the real basis on which the UN was founded was the overwhelmingly dominant physical, economic and political power of the allied nations which emerged victorious in World War II. The UN can be seen as an outcome of a global conflict. The UN Charter creating a semblance of democracy and universality in the composition of the General Assembly nevertheless concedes effective power concentrated almost exclusively in the Security Council, in which the five permanent members possess absolute power to act in concert on behalf of the world or in opposition to one another in pursuit of their own narrow self-interests. The basis for this undemocratic arrangement was the old concept of national sovereignty, a legacy of three centuries of nationalistic consolidation and competition, which already showed signs of irrelevance to cope with the emerging problems of an increasingly globalized world. Nationalism, power and idealism were combined in a formula that was sufficiently prescient to avoid world war for the last 65 years, yet increasingly powerless and inept to cope with the emerging problems of the 21st century.

2. Evolution from Coercion to Rule of Law
Historically, the threat and use of coercion have played a central role in determining the outcome of social processes. Conflict and coercion are outcomes of the social process. These outcomes we may identify and map as a process of effective power.^‡,5 Conflicts about effective power are reflected in the issue of States’ rights and abolition of slavery in America. These issues were resolved on the battlefields at Gettysburg, Shiloh and Vicksburg. The liberation of Libya in 2011 from four decades of dictatorship was similarly resolved by force of arms. If all social relations were exclusively a function of conflict, then the strongest would inevitably prevail on the basis that might is right. However, as societies evolve they generate understandings about managing power and develop strategies for conflict resolution. As conflict becomes increasingly expensive and destructive, protagonists frequently determine that the costs of conflict may exceed the potential gains. At this point the power brokers would look for ways to stabilize conflict and manage fundamental decision making by agreement and understanding. As democracy and human rights become more prevalent as sources of authority, they support tolerance and subordinate exclusive resort to naked power, both internally and internationally. Thus, the Arab Spring in Egypt, for example, achieved peacefully what their neighbors achieved by violence. Law evolves as a sublimated alternative to physical coercion, but legal authority retains the capacity for coercion as its ultimate foundation and reinforcement. Social authority comes to replace physical coercion as the primary means for resolving conflicts, but its power is accepted and respected because it retains an explicit or implicit capacity for physical enforcement, as well as the use of authority as a base of power.
Legal authority evolves as an alternative mechanism for conflict avoidance and resolution founded on higher values such as peace, collective security, human rights, justice and due process. Law evolves as an instrument to manage the politics of conflict based on authorized decisions and agreed upon rules of social order. Law is not the only social institution that plays this role. Money also became an important factor in the transition from violence to social order, providing economic incentives, rewards and punishments to protagonists to eschew resort to force. Historically, money has been used to resolve disputes, appease aggressors, compensate victims, propitiate antagonists, and incentivize competitors. But as governance and law evolved as recognized authorities, coercive force progressively gave way to social convention, legislation and jurisprudence as the principal means for dispute resolution. This evolution from physical violence to social power to authorized competence and higher values is an affirmation of the value basis of law. It replaces the principle that might is right and applies value-based principles to affirm the rights and enhance the power of the weaker segments of society.
This process is evident in the field of international relations where the habitual resort to war between nation-states that characterized European affairs for centuries has now been effectively replaced by an institutionalized political and legal framework. In the words of Dutch security expert Rob de Wijk, “War in Europe has become unthinkable.” Similarly, though with less absoluteness, establishment of the UN system after the Second World War has replaced periodic conflicts between nation-states, widespread imperialistic ambitions and colonialism with treaty negotiations across the conference table, debate in General Assembly and Security Council, judicial inquiries, international commissions, arbitration, mediation, binding and non-binding resolutions, and countless other mechanisms for channeling energies from coercive violence into political, legal and intellectual processes. This transition from violence to law continues today in both national and international contexts.
Law involves an implicit acceptance and internalization of social authority which is reflected in the constitutionalization, that is to say, the acceptance of the allocation of fundamental decision making authority for society which generates shared expectations about the shaping and sharing of human values. Law codifies the most enduring values which emerge as social norms and customary practices accepted by the community, often representing the “living law” of the society.⁶ Indeed, public acceptance of basic expectations is a crucial aspect of law. Unless the community accepts the legitimate authority of its authorized decision makers and their prescription, application and enforcement of law, such authority may lose its authoritative foundation and be compelled to resort to coercive force to maintain the status quo. Unless those laws reflect accepted norms and expectations, such acceptance is unlikely. Thus, rule of law is based on the major expectations which the community holds about the exercise of authority and control in the common interest. Law as codified strives to be the embodiment of the basic values reflected in the public conscience of what the collective of human beings agree to accept, that is to say, the collective fundamental expectations about authority, control, and the respect for basic values.⁷

Winston P. Nagan, Member, Board of Trustees, World Academy of Art & Science; Director, Institute for Human Rights, Peace & Development, University of Florida, USA
Garry Jacobs, Chairman of the Board, World Academy of Art & Science; Vice-President, The Mother’s Service Society, India
* Amendment II of the United States Constitution – The Second Amendment was adopted on December 15, 1791, along with the rest of the United States Bill of Rights. It is the part of the Bill of Rights that protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms. The right to keep and bear arms, often referred as the right to bear arms or to have arms, is the assertion that people have a personal right to fire arms for individual use, or a collective right to bear arms in a militia, or both.
† The United Nations Organization was founded in 1945 after World War II to replace the League of Nations, to stop wars between countries, and to provide a platform for dialogue.
‡ More generally on the relation of law to social process see Lasswell and McDougal, “The Relation of Law to Social Process: Trends in Theory about Law,” University of Pittsburg Law Review 465 (1976).
1. Myres McDougal, William Reisman & Andrew Willard, “The World Community: A Planetary Social Process,” Faculty Scholarship Series Paper 753 (1988) digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/753 The most recent expression of the idea of a global social process and how to map it is found in the article.
2. Myres McDougal, “International Law and the Future,” Faculty Scholarship Series Paper 2662 (1979) digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/2662
3. Harold Lasswell, “The Inter-relations of World Organization & Society,” Yale Law Journal 55 (1946): 889-909 digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/3120/
4. Harold Lasswell, “Future Systems of Identity in the World Community,” in The Future of the International Legal Order eds. Cyril Black & Richard Falk (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).
5. Harold Lasswell & Myres McDougal, Jurisprudence for a Free Society: Studies in Law, Science and Policy Vol. II, Appendix IV (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1992), 1439-1488. Lasswell and McDougal provide a detailed outline and map of “The Community Power Process: An Outline for Policy-Oriented Inquiry”.
6. Louis D. Brandeis, “The Living Law,” Illinois Law Review 10, no.7 (1916): 461.
7. Myers McDougal, Harold Lasswell & William Reisman, “The World Constitutive Process of Authoritative Decision,” in McDougal & Reisman, International Law Essays (New York: Foundation Press, 1981). The establishment of control conjoined by authority reflects the emergence of basic constitutional understandings and processes. A comprehensive description is given.

From European Union to World Union: Building Effective and Democratic Global Governance – ACTION for a World Community for Food Reserves

John McClintock — Sat, 12 May 2012 19:53:09 +0000

Abstract
Sovereignty-sharing has placed European countries in a position to resolve their common problems through law, not war. As a result, the EU member states now live in peace together and take peace, justice and order for granted. The system of global governance is dysfunctional – some states are failing and the Security Council lacks legitimacy. Humanity does not have a mechanism to resolve its global problems through law, making it difficult – if not impossible – to resolve global problems such as famine, hunger, climate change, war and terrorism, nuclear proliferation, regulation of corporations – including banks, destruction of fish stocks, and population. Sharing of sovereignty at the global level can address these problems, starting in the area of food security, then proceeding to climate management and other fields. Shared sovereignty can eliminate famine and hunger globally.

1. Introduction: The European Union is a Success Story
The European Union, despite past and present crises, is one of the success stories of our time and shows that countries can work together to resolve common problems. The European Union is democratic – each and every member country has a say on the rules and the European Parliament must also give its consent. This is in stark contrast to the United Nations where there is no Parliament and only 15 countries have a seat in the Security Council.
Secondly, the European Union is able to hold its member countries to the rules. Once rules are made they become ‘binding and enforceable.’ Again, this is very different from the United Nations in which the law may be binding but is not enforceable. If a government of an EU member state does not respect the rules, it has to answer for itself in front of the judges of the European Court of Justice.

2. The Cleaning of the River Rhine: An Example of what Sovereignty-Sharing can Achieve
The quintessential feature of the European Union is that its member countries share sovereignty in a limited number of areas. What does this somewhat theoretical notion mean in the real world?
The cleaning of the Rhine River − the busiest waterway in the whole of Europe − is a practical example of what can be achieved when countries share sovereignty. The river flows through Germany and France and empties itself at the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Many cities and industries, such as the coal mines of the Ruhr Valley, occupy its banks. For hundreds of years the river was used as a free sewer and the level of pollution was very high. The last salmon disappeared in 1935.
After the Second World War, there was an effort to clean it up. Governments of the countries concerned formed the International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine. But despite the International Commission’s best efforts, pollution steadily worsened. When it came to governments taking action, the International Commission – like all inter-governmental organisations − could exhort but could not oblige.
In 1986, a chemical factory caught fire and water from the fire hoses washed twenty tonnes of pesticides into the river. There was extensive damage and thousands of fish were killed.
After this disaster, the International Commission drew up the Rhine Action Plan Against Chemical Pollution. Among other measures, it proposed a strict regime on chemical discharges and that toxic substances be transported only in double-walled vessels. But the fundamental problem remained – while the governments were under a moral obligation to implement the proposals, they were not under any legal obligation to do so.
One year later, however, the European Union (then the European Community) decided that it should adopt the plan as part of its broader programme to clean up Europe’s environment. Thereupon, the plan became part and parcel of European Union law and, as a result, had the status of ‘binding and enforceable law.’ From this point on, if a government did not keep up with the plan, it risked having to appear in front of the Court of Justice.
This meant that having previously paid lip-service to cleaning up the river, the governments finally started to take their responsibilities seriously. The river was soon cleaned up and fish returned to water.
This is a practical example of what happens when governments keep up their promises. Official rhetoric can be transformed into action. But without the sharing of sovereignty in a new legal framework of the European Union, it is likely the Rhine would have remained a polluted and dirty sewer.

3. A Sovereignty-Sharing World Community?
But could the same arrangement be made global? Could Europe’s system be adopted by the world as a whole? We believe it could – to everybody’s great benefit.^*
We are proposing that what has been done in Europe can now be done for the world as a whole. Essentially, we are proposing that – incrementally and gradually – countries share parts of their sovereignty and that they use the pool of shared sovereignty to make, through a democratic process, rules that are binding and enforceable.
This is an ambitious idea and I have tried to explain it in some detail in my book entitled The Uniting of Nations: An Essay on Global Governance, published by Peter Lang in 2010 (third edition).
A putative World Community has to start in a particular area. But which one? Cleaning up rivers, as in the case of the Rhine? Nuclear disarmament? Global poverty? Climate change? In our view, we could begin in the domain of global food security.

4. Global Food Security
When food prices are volatile, many problems ensue. Food becomes unaffordable − leading to acute hunger, malnutrition and death. The first to suffer are poor families, irrespective of whether they are in poor or rich countries. (We should not forget that some families in the United States and in the European Union find it difficult to afford enough to eat.)
Hungry people quickly become angry and in recent years, due to food price volatility, the world has witnessed many food riots (e.g. Haiti, Bangladesh, Cameroon 2007; Egypt, Tunisia 2011). People have been killed and buildings set on fire.
But price volatility has effects that are more pernicious than unaffordable prices. Farmers need price stability to invest in their farms to make them more productive. A reluctance to invest in farming is the last thing that the world needs; it needs the opposite: farmers who are confident about the future of farming and are willing to invest in their farms. Farmers will then be in a position to feed a growing world population and to adjust their farming methods to the exigencies of climate change. Stable price thus becomes a necessity.

5. What can Governments do to avoid Unaffordable Food Prices?
What can a country do when the price of food escalates on its national market and its citizens start to find the price unaffordable? If the country is rich, it can go to the world market, purchase food and import it. By purchasing on the world market, the country may push up the world market price for everybody else, which may cause difficulties to other countries that need to import.
If a country is an agricultural exporter – such as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Thailand and the United States – then it can restrict its exports of food. This will stop the price of food from escalating on the national market. Of course, it means that less food is offered to the world market and the price on the world market may increase. A national solution can bring, in its wake, a global problem.

What about countries that are neither rich enough to augment their supplies from the world market nor are agricultural exporters? Such countries – there are many, many of them − can appeal to the United Nation’s World Food Programme (WFP) for food aid. If the WFP has funds, it buys food from the market and gives it to the government.
There are several problems with food aid. Firstly, it takes time to process applications, to purchase grain and to ship it to the affected country. Food aid can arrive months after the crisis has passed. Secondly, the WFP is reliant on donations of money from governments. Sometimes they give enough, but sometimes they do not. This has led to tragedies. For example, it was reported in June 2009 that:

‘The United Nations World Food Programme is cutting food aid rations and shutting down some operations as donor countries that face a fiscal crunch at home slash contributions to its funding.’
‘In recent weeks the WFP has quietly started reducing rations and closing down distribution operations to conserve cash. It reduced emergency food aid rations in Rwanda, for example, from 420 g to 320 g of cereals per person a day…The cost of food commodities such as corn and soya bean has surged this week to levels not seen since the start of the food crisis in late 2007.’¹

Thirdly, by its very reliance on the market for supplies of grain, the organisation may be as much part of the problem as part of the solution. The WFP frequently needs to buy when markets are tightening. But to buy on a tightening market simply bids up the price for everybody else.
The fourth problem is a legal one: there is no accountability. It is impossible to hold countries to their promises to give funds. It is also impossible to properly investigate countries when there are allegations of corruption in the use of food aid. The WFP has no powers to investigate allegations or to bring charges against individuals.
Clearly, the world has not yet found an effective answer to the problem of food price volatility.

6. When Stocks are Low, Prices Tend to be Volatile
To solve price volatility we have to be sure that we know what causes it. Why is the price of grain volatile in the first place?
The price of grain fluctuates because supply and demand change. The reader will remark: the supply and demand of all goods change – what is so special about grain?
Grain is special because a small change in supply and/or demand induces a big change in price. The reason for this is that, in the short term, both the supply of grain from farms and the demand for grain for consumption are what economists term ‘price inelastic’.
It follows that if the world is ever going to reduce volatility, we have to bring about a situation such that supply and demand are price elastic, not price inelastic.
This can be done by storing grain. If, in addition to grain being supplied by farms it can also be supplied from grain stores, then the supply of grain is no longer price inelastic. It is price elastic. By the same token, if the demand for grain is not only for consumption (i.e. for food and livestock feed) but is also for storage, then the demand for grain is no longer price inelastic. It too becomes price elastic. The fact that there are people or public agencies buying and selling grain for storage means that the market is no longer so brittle and sensitive to a slight change in the amount supplied or demanded. There is, in effect, a sort of sponge or buffer that is able to absorb changes in supply and demand without causing prices to go up and down dramatically. Prices do change, reflecting market fundamentals, but do so relatively gently and moderately.

John McClintock: Civil Servant, European Commission; Co-Founder of ACTION for a World Community for Food Reserves; The author is currently an official of the European Commission and has written this paper in his capacity as a member of ACTION. The views expressed in this paper do not implicate the European Commission in any shape or form whatsoever.
* By ‘we’, the author refers to ACTION for a World Community for Food Reserves − a not-for-profit, non-governmental organisation established in 2011 under Belgian law. See www.world-community-for-food-reserves.org
1 Javier Blas, “Funds crunch threatens world food aid,” Financial Times, 11th June 2009 www.ft.com/cms/s/0/524d50da-56ae-11de-9a1c-00144feabdc0.html

Social Evolution, Global Governance and a World Parliament

Andreas Bummel — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:05:26 +0000

Abstract
This article describes the relevance of a world parliament in the context of long-term social evolution and the crisis of global governance. It is argued that due to the development of weapons of mass destruction and complex interdependency, war has ceased to be a driver of socio-evolutionary consolidation of power at the world-system level. At the same time, there is an increasingly urgent need for global governance in spheres such as climate change mitigation or economics and finances. The author looks at how the established and now dysfunctional pattern of evolutionary change can be overcome and identifies the institution of a world parliament as an important political and psychological aspect of the evolving collective.
Social evolution can be conceived as a continuous integration and disintegration of human communities. In a continuum between cooperation and competition human communities compete for areas of settlement, natural resources, food and political authority. In the course of technological development and population growth, these social units become more differentiated and their links with each other become ever more complex.
Within these communities rules develop, that organize communal life as peacefully as possible, even though primarily to the benefit of a ruling class that commands the exercise of force and the distribution of resources. Towards other units mistrust predominates. The preparedness to use force is high. War, oppression, slavery and assimilation were characteristics of this process. From a historical perspective, democracy, human rights and (humanitarian) international law are new developments.
In the course of history, the number of units has decreased. Their maximum size and degree of organization have grown. From hunter-gatherers, nomadic pastoralists and settled communities, different forms of political organization gradually developed such as city states, principalities, dynastic realms, continental empires or today’s territorial states. At around 1,500 B.C. with an estimated world population of 50 million, maybe 600,000 political units existed.¹ Today, seven billion people are distributed amongst the 193 states in the world.
Regressions such as the breakup of the Roman Empire were followed by new processes of amalgamation. In his famous work The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias has described this development since the Middle Ages. According to Elias, states today are still engaged in a permanent competitive struggle that inherently implies the formation of ever larger power units with overarching monopoly on the use of force.²
Due to the existence and availability of nuclear weapons, the relational system between the leading states in the world has been subject to a fundamental change since the end of the Second World War. Because of the destructiveness of these weapons, up to almost complete annihilation, a direct armed conflict between the great powers as a means to solve disputes or for power expansion has become potentially suicidal. They are locked, to use the words of Wilhelm Wolfgang Schütz, in an “interdependency of perdition”.³
This means that a consolidation of the state system into one political unit as a result of violent conflict, one of the main drivers in the past, is not possible (and, of course, not desirable anyway). After a Third World War, it is reasonable to assume that not much would be left of human civilization as we know it today. This also means that until a global monopoly of the use of force has come about voluntarily, the system would remain in a dangerously instable condition. “Even if we assume that global Armageddon will not occur, it seems to be the unfortunate fate of humanity that it has to live in constant fear of this disaster,” wrote John H. Herz.⁴
The system is not only unstable from a perspective of peace and security, it also has no “capacity to govern”, an urgent problem that has already been addressed, for example, in a report by Yehezkel Dror to the Club of Rome in 1994.⁵ As yet, no improvement is in sight. Quite the contrary. The technological revolution in the course of the last two decades has resulted in an ever stronger global linkage of almost all spheres of life. Crucially important political questions and challenges have slipped out of the control of nation states. The activity of international institutions reflects the lowest common denominator of conflicting government interests. National governments, whether representative or autocratic, are keen to hold on to their traditional sovereignty, even if in reality this sovereignty no longer is in accordance with effective autonomy. This is the case, for example, with regard to the global economic and financial system, as the financial crisis since 2007 impressively shows, but above all in climate policy.
Meanwhile, there is a broad international consensus that global warming of more than two degrees Celsius in this century will have incalculable catastrophic consequences for humanity. A transformation towards a sustainable post-carbon world, however, “can only succeed if nation states put global cooperation mechanisms before their own short-term oriented interests,” as the German Advisory Council on Global Change pointed out recently.⁶
The non-existence of a governable political world community remains to be the most dangerous characteristic of today’s world system. Further evolution and long-term survival of human civilization make it necessary to develop a democratic world federation. The world will have to unite politically in order to prevent the impending disintegration of global civilization.
The core issue is not just one of power politics and structure. The challenge is much more of a cognitive and intellectual nature. According to Elias, there is an inextricable linkage between human sociogenesis and psychogenesis. The growing complexity of social relationships that is characteristic of the emergence of states and modernization, for example, came along with stronger emotional self-control, rationality and a more developed sense of shame.
Georg W. Oesterdiekhoff has reconstructed that in human history it is possible to trace “a sequentially advancing, unilinear and growing differentiation and integration of social and psychic structures”.⁷ “As the cognitive development of the individual takes place under social conditions,” said Jürgen Habermas, “there is a circular process between societal and individual learning processes”.⁸ Accordingly, Ken Wilber for instance has related the cognitive levels of consciousness that he described with “geopolitical systems levels”.⁹
In the face of the logic inherent in human evolution until now, Richard Newbold Adams and others claim, based on Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, that global government is simply impossible as Earth is faced with no external enemy, no external social unit, that makes political integration at the planetary scale necessary or at least easier. “Identity is fundamentally the binary differentiation of some set of ‘we’ from some set of ‘other’,” says Adams.¹⁰
Overcoming this mode of forming collective identity is exactly the challenge of necessary transformation. Arash Abizadeh for example points out that collective global identity could also be formed in a temporal way instead of geographically by differentiating from the past and its values. “Humanity’s own past provides a rich and terrifying repository in contrast to which cosmopolitan identity could constitute its ‘difference’”.¹¹
As a matter of fact, more and more people conceive of themselves as world citizens and as such develop a sense of solidarity with each other. To a degree these people begin to outgrow the evolutionary logic that implies that identity can only be formed by differentiation from others. They concentrate on what all human beings have in common. They do not wish to carry on as before. They include future generations into their thinking. Their thinking is fundamentally different from that of the government executives who pursue particular interests.
“Nation states as institutions have proven reluctant to cooperate in ways that compromise their sovereignty or their freedom to pursue their maximal national interest. … But it appears that individuals as a whole are more ready to cooperate in a global framework and are not as constrained by competitive national narratives,” explains Steven Kull in an analysis of international polls.¹²
The emerging view stems from what could be called a planetary consciousness. This consciousness is integral insofar as it does not suppress or deny other levels of identity and belonging but instead adds a holistic view to them that includes humanity and the planet as a whole. One of the most important pioneers of integral philosophy, Jean Gebser, has noted that such “mutations in consciousness” have always occurred in situations “when the prevalent structure of consciousness was no longer sufficient to cope with the world’s tasks.”¹³ Such a situation exists today. The political unification of the world will have to be the result of an inner revolution, a conscious evolutionary act carried out by humanity.
According to Steve McIntosh, global governance that is not based on integral consciousness is neither achievable nor desirable – “but with the rise of the integral worldview, a world federation becomes realistic and even inevitable”.¹⁴
The connection between sociogenesis and psychogenesis can also be found in McIntosh’s reflections. He argues that “every new worldview has taken shape around a political issue, and the rise of the integral worldview will be no exception”. The integral worldview, he says, needs a political platform “to produce lasting cultural evolution”. The establishment of a world parliament is probably the most obvious and most promising project for this.
The first step into the direction of a world parliament would be the establishment of a Parliamentary Assembly at the United Nations.^* This is a complex undertaking where it is easy to get lost in questions of detail. Grasping the project from an evolutionary perspective is all that matters. Because, as Habermas said, “It is possible to characterize every evolutionary boost through institutions that embody the structures of rationality of the next evolutionary stage”.¹⁵
From this point of view it is of highest importance that the assembly would consist of democratically elected representatives of the world’s population. As such the assembly would be the first political body in the history of humankind that establishes a direct connection between every single human being and the planet. Through its existence alone the assembly would contribute to the recognition of profound, one could say, revolutionary ideas, the first being the notion of the world as a community of individual world citizens. As a global voice of the world’s citizens, the assembly would embody a planetary consciousness and at the same time facilitate its growth.
The assembly and its members could become a focal point for a new, cooperative understanding of global politics. As a planetary consciousness takes root over time, the assembly could help to evolve the United Nations accordingly and push forward the political integration of the world.
In this way, the inner and outer dimensions of the global transformation – the development of consciousness on the one hand and the development of social institutions on the other – would reciprocally strengthen and stabilize each other.

This article was first published in German in Tattva Viveka (48): 64-69, August 2011.
Andreas Bummel: Chair, Committee for a Democratic U.N
* The proposal was introduced in the 2nd issue of Cadmus, see cadmusjournal.org/article/issue-2/towards-global-democratic-revolution-global-parliament-and-transformation-world-order.
1. Robert Carneiro, “The Political Unification of the World: Whether, When, and How — Some Speculations,” Cross-Cultural Research 38, no. 2 (2004): 162-177.
2. Norbert Elias‚ Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation. Zweiter Band 19th ed., (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995 [1939]).
3. Wolfgang Wilhelm Schütz, Wir wollen Überleben, Außenpolitik im Atomzeitalter (Stuttgart: DVA, 1956).
4. John Herz, Weltpolitik im Atomzeitalter (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1961).
5. Yehezkel Dror, The Capacity to Govern: A Report to the Club of Rome (Portland: Frank Cass, 1994).
6. WBGU (German Advisory Council on Global Change), ed. 2011. A Social Contract for Sustainability. Summary for policy-makers (Berlin: WBGU, 2011) www.wbgu.de.
7. Georg Oesterdiekhoff, Zivilisation und Strukturgenese. Norbert Elias und Jean Piaget im Vergleich (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000).
8. Jürgen Habermas, Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976).
9. Ken Wilber, Sex, ecology, spirituality: the spirit of evolution 2nd ed. (Boston: Shambhala, 2000).
10. Richard Newbold Adams, Energy and Structure: A Theory of Social Power (London: University of Texas Press, 1975).
11. Arash Abizadeh, “Does Collective Identity Presuppose an Other? On the Alleged Incoherence of Global Solidarity,” American Political Science Review 99, no. 1 (2005): 45-60.
12. Steven Kull, “Listening to the Voice of Humanity,” Kosmos Journal (Spring/Summer 2010): 26-29.
13. Jean Gebser, Ursprung und Gegenwart Zweiter Teil (Gesamtausgabe: Novalis Verlag, 1978 [1949]).
14. Steve McIntosh, Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2007).
15. Habermas, Rekonstruktion, 37.

Simulated ICJ Judgment: Revisiting the Lawfulness of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons

Winston P. Nagan — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 07:48:32 +0000

Abstract
The author prepared this simulated judgment at the request of Cadmus editors to demonstrate that there is ample ground for revisiting and revising the landmark 1996 advisory opinion of the ICJ on the legality of nuclear weapons. The ICJ failed to anticipate the proliferation of nuclear weapons, which expands the evolution of the concept of sovereignty, the potential cataclysmic impact of nuclear war on climate change, the multiplication of nuclear-weapon-free zones as evidence of a widespread rejection, mounting evidence regarding the physical and psychological harm, and unwillingness of the nuclear weapons states to fulfill their obligations under the NPT. This article challenges the notion that a few sovereign states should be the sole arbiters of international law and affirms the legitimate claim of the global community of protection from the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons. The use or threat of use undermines foundational values of the international legal system and the specific rules of self-defense and humanitarian law. The contribution seeks to give an accentuated role for the explicit use of the fundamental values of international legal order, in crafting an innovative methodology for the formulation of the judgment. The very existence of these weapons undermines the rights of all of humanity. The ICJ should be moved to categorically declare the use and possession of nuclear weapons a crime against humanity.

1. Summary of Findings of 1996 Rulings
The principal findings of the Court in its 1996 advisory opinion are as follows:
1. By a vote of 14-0 the Court found that “There is in neither customary nor conventional international law any specific authorization of the threat or use of nuclear weapons”;
2. By a vote of 11-3 the Court found that “There is in neither customary nor conventional international law any comprehensive and universal prohibition of the threat or use of nuclear weapons as such”;
3. By a vote of 14-0 the Court found that “A threat or use of force by means of nuclear weapons that is contrary to Article 2, paragraph 4, of the United Nations Charter and that fails to meet all the requirements of Article 51, is unlawful”;
4. By a vote of 14-0 the Court found that “A threat or use of nuclear weapons should also be compatible with the requirements of the international law applicable in armed conflict, particularly those of the principles and rules of humanitarian law, as well as with specific obligations under treaties and other undertakings which expressly deal with nuclear weapons”;
5. By a vote of 7-7 the Court found that “The threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law; However, in view of the current state of international law, and of the elements of fact at its disposal, the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake”;
6. By a vote of 14-0 the Court found that “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control”.

2. Rationale for Review of the 1996 Judgment
The Court is subject to a request to review its own findings of its earlier advisory opinion issued in 1996.^* The Court has determined that it has the jurisdiction to proceed with this question. The court also determines, as it did in 1996, that this question raises matters of a distinctively legal character and therefore it is appropriate for the Court to discharge its obligation to provide advisory opinion on a legal question. Finally, the Court has discretion whether to provide an advisory opinion or not.
In a fundamental sense, law should reflect the basic values and sense of public conscience which emerge from evolving expectations responding to changes in perceptions, attitudes and shared subjectivities of society at large. Law in our time emerges during a very turbulent period. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the prevailing perceptions and attitudes were inevitably colored by the five-decade-long arms race in which the salience of nuclear weapons in national defense strategy was unassailable and a perspective encompassing the security needs of humanity as a whole had yet to emerge. Furthermore, facts and circumstances impacting on an assessment of this issue have changed substantially since our earlier judgment.
1. The vitality and relevance of law are tied to its sensitivity and the responsibility it generates for its impacts on humanity and its social consequences. In our earlier judgment, the Court did not adequately consider that its own response may serve as a justification or stimulus for the further proliferation of nuclear weapons. Since then at least three other countries – India, Pakistan and North Korea – have acquired possession of nuclear weapons, substantially escalating the dangers of an intentional detonation of nuclear weapons. According to testimony of the IAEA, a fourth nation, Iran, may be close to doing so. Studies by respected institutions indicate the likelihood that a continuation of the legal status quo could encourage or provide compelling justification for other nations to acquire nuclear weapons.
2. Recent disclosures regarding accidents relating to nuclear weapons and materials in the USA and the former USSR – both during and since the end of the Cold War – make clearer the magnitude of the danger of a nuclear accident. Evidence has come to light which suggests that the Court may not have sufficiently considered the possible unintended dangers arising from its judgment, since it considered only the question of intended usage. Recent studies tracking fallout from the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 indicate that thousands of citizens in other countries around the world may have lost their lives or incurred serious illness as a result of the fallout from the accident. If there is a probability that any action, whether it be erection of a nuclear power plant or possession of nuclear weapons, may lead to unintended consequences that impact on other claimants, then those claimants have a right to seek reasonable protection under law from such actions and the Court has an obligation to examine the issue from this perspective as well.
3. Both of these factors acquire even greater significance in the light of the rising levels of international terrorism over the past two decades, which have plagued and continue to plague the international community since the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001. While the 1996 judgment directly concerned only the usage of nuclear weapons, sanctioning possible usage necessarily implies a sanction for the possession of nuclear weapons. In doing so, therefore, the Court may have inadvertently undermined the rights of other nation-states and the world community to protection from victimization, as a result of weapons stolen from nuclear weapon states.
4. With the end of the Cold War, it appeared in 1996 that the world may well be nearing the end of its long history of war. Yet, since then, two major destabilizing wars have flared up in Afghanistan and Iraq and spread waves of violence to a neighboring nuclear weapons state, Pakistan. The recent change of leadership in North Korea, also a nuclear weapons state, has heightened tensions and threat levels.
5. While the presumption of earlier testimony before the Court was that the use of nuclear weapons might possibly be required as a last resort for self-defense, since then several nuclear weapon states including the USA and USSR have actually enhanced the status of nuclear weapons as part of their overall defense strategies, including the possibility of first use. This suggests that the Court’s earlier judgment was not sufficiently clear in its pronouncement on the inherent illegality of these weapons.
6. Perhaps, most significant of all, our earlier judgment was made before there was widespread understanding regarding the threat posed by climate change to the security of the entire human race and the potentially devastating impact of nuclear war on global warming, a threat to humanity that could well overshadow all other considerations.
7. Our earlier judgment was predicated around the issue of whether sovereign states had the right to possess and possibly to use nuclear weapons. It did not sufficiently take into account the rights of other non-belligerent states to protection from the possible intended or unintended consequences of possession or use of these weapons.
8. Earlier, the Court acted under the assumption that sovereign states were the sole legitimate participants in the creation and interpretation of law related to nuclear weapons. It now becomes evident that the security and welfare of the entire world community may be directly and very powerfully influenced by the question whether use of nuclear weapons is considered legal under any circumstances. From this perspective, it is necessary to reconsider whether an act by one party in self-defense may be justified when there is a possibility that it may have consequences for the entire world community. Can self-defense of the part be justified if it endangers the security of the whole?
9. The concept of national sovereignty has evolved from the notion of state absolutism to a concern that sovereignty derives its authority from the people, whose interests are reflected in the emergence of norms of good governance which require transparency, accountability, responsibility and a fundamental regard for the human rights and dignity of the people, protected by the rule of law. Sovereign authority does not come from the barrel of a gun but from the individual components of the body politic. There are grounds to question whether the Court’s earlier judgment was founded upon an interpretation of the rights of nation-states which may be at variance with recent developments in international rule of law, which significantly change assumptions of state sovereign absolutism.
10. This issue raises fundamental questions regarding the rightful claimants in this case. Resolutions in the UN General Assembly, efforts to establish regional nuclear-free zones, studies and opinion polls measuring global public opinion in both nuclear and non-nuclear weapon states all indicate a growing abhorrence and rejection of the legitimacy of these weapons. The 2011 resolution of the UN General Assembly calling for a convention to prohibit the use of nuclear weapons was approved by 117 nations. While it is true that the ICJ was originally established by an international treaty signed by nation-states, the ultimate sovereignty and authority of these states must necessarily arise from and rest with their citizens. In recent years, the UN Security Council has recognized the right of the international community to intervene in countries such as Libya when it became evident that national governments were acting in contravention of the will of the majority of their own people. If it be found that the vast majority of the world’s citizens reject the legality of nuclear weapons, then it may be that the legality of prevailing national laws and international treaties is subject to question. Therefore, this issue compels the Court to consider whether in fact claimants other than nation-states may under certain circumstances have legitimate interests that should be accounted for in the expression of international rights and obligations on this important issue.
11. Finally, the Court’s earlier judgment was predicated on the explicit premise that the nuclear weapons powers would pursue and conclude good-faith negotiations leading to complete nuclear disarmament as they are legally bound to do under article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Events subsequent to the Court’s earlier judgment have not borne out this premise. On the contrary, not only have at least three additional states acquired nuclear weapons, but in addition several of the largest nuclear weapons powers have actually upgraded the salience of nuclear weapons in their military strategies, a move directly counter to their obligations under the Treaty.
In view of the salience of these issues for the future of international law and the future of global society, the Court holds that it lies within its sound discretion to revisit its earlier ruling and to provide a clear and precise legal appraisal of the issue.

3. Evolution of the Concept of Sovereignty
In 1996 we provided an important clarification concerning the unique characteristics of nuclear weapons and the scope of the applicable International Law. This approach rejected the arguments of nuclear-enabled states which argued that there was no specific rule of customary international law or treaty law that specifically held the threat or use of nuclear weapons to be illegal or that there was no international prohibition on its face that the threat or use of nuclear weapons was incompatible with international law. This proposition was based on the Lotus Case decided by the PCIJ in 1926.^**
The case involved a collision on the high seas between a French and a Turkish ship in peace time. Turkey had sought to prosecute the Officer of the Watch on the French ship for criminal negligence. The Court ruled in favor of France. Essentially, Turkey could point to no international treaty or customary rule that gave it jurisdiction over French personnel with regard to an accident occurring on the high seas. In short, the Court ruled that since there was no specific rule of international law to which the parties had consented, there could be no restraint based on International Law imposed on a sovereign State. The context of this case did not emerge under the shadow of the laws of war or contemporary human rights obligations. As a consequence, the precedent provides no guidance for the current problem. Additionally implicit in the Lotus Case is a strong version of sovereignty, a version significantly modified by the expanded scope of international obligation under the UN Charter.
The concept of sovereignty and the implication of state absolutism have been considerably modified by the UN Charter and state practice since WWII. For example, the Preamble of the UN Charter begins with the phrase “We the peoples of the United Nations determine…” While it is true that membership in the UNO is confined to Sovereign states, those states condition UN membership on agreeing to subordinate sovereignty to the major purposes of the UN Charter. These include the values of peace and security, friendship between nations, the value of humanitarian and human rights law, which implicate universal dignity, and a commitment to the rule of law. Additionally, the post-war period has emerged with a principle of universal jurisdiction for certain crimes against humanity, grave violations of human rights and genocide. Additionally, the international system has developed a class of obligations known as obligations erga omnes, obligations which trump sovereignty. In addition, international law has developed the principle of peremptory norms of international law, jus cogens, which is also a principle which trumps sovereign absolutism. Finally, there is emerging, in international law, a further limitation on the notion of sovereign absolutism.
This is the emergence of the abuse of the idea of sovereignty which is specifically designed to diminish sovereign absolutism when significant or serious violations of human rights happen.
The doctrinal basis of sovereignty gives preference to the legal personality of the state but has historically had the consequence of viewing the individual as not a subject of international law, but an object of it. This extinguishes individual identity and correspondingly the individual as an articulator of individuated interests in the international legal system. This is an outgrowth of objective positivism, which seeks to base law solely on external fact and explicit agreement ignoring the subjective reality of human aspirations, inalienable rights and universal human values. The state is viewed as an entity apart, something separate from the individuals who constitute its members, an objective reality in its own right, even its right to impose itself on its own people. It bases itself on faith in a mechanical process of ordering and organization which may fail to perceive or honor the subjective aspirations and values of those it seeks to govern. The subjective reality is based on the developing self-consciousness of humanity and its quest for self-realization.
As indicated, a condition of membership in the UN is that a State is able and willing to honor the obligations codified in the UN Charter itself. Moreover, judicial method has itself evolved in the exposition of law. The idea of law as a set of narrowly formulated rules to be mechanistically followed is incompatible with the fundamental principle embedded in the UN Charter that law should be construed in the light of the major object, purposes and values of that instrument. In short, in the absence of specific rules it is completely unnecessary, and possibly irresponsible, to consign vitally important aspects of human conduct to a legal vacuum in our global social and legal process. To this end, modern law brings to legal discourse more than simply “rules”; it brings to the discourse higher level principles, standards, doctrines and fundamental legal values for the complete and careful discharge of the judicial function. More than that, adjudication, be it advisory or contentious, must understand the problem before the Court in its appropriate context. It must be alert to the possible value of a multidisciplinary perspective, it must keep in mind the basic values which are ultimately the foundation of the law itself and must see law as an important expression of authoritative and controlling responses in the common interest of all mankind.
As national law is ultimately founded on the fundamental rights of individual human beings, the true basis of international law cannot be relegated solely to the rights of national entities represented by their governments, but must be ultimately founded on the rights of all human beings. So too, it must not only recognize the existence and rights of sovereign nation-states to protect their territory and freedom to determine their way of life, but also and equally the existence and rights of the global human community to protect the global commons and freedom from compulsions dictated by smaller collectives. Prevailing international law is based on the need to control the egoism of individual nation-states, but this is an insufficient basis for the evolution of global governance. Sovereignty is not a matter of supremacy of the nation-state over its own people or freedom from binding obligation to humanity. The individual, the nation-state and the global community all have a legitimate claim for protection and freedom, and justice necessitates evolution of a rule of law that recognizes, harmonizes and reconciles rather than merely balances and compromises the claims of all three.

* Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, ICJ Advisory Opinion (8 July 1996).
** S.S. Lotus (Fr. v. Turk.), 1927 P.C.I.J. (ser. A) No. 10 (Sept. 7)

Flaws in the Concept of Nuclear Deterrence

John Scales Avery — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:24:09 +0000

Abstract
The concept of nuclear deterrence is seriously flawed, and it violates the fundamental ethical principles of all major religions. Besides being morally unacceptable, nuclear weapons are also illegal according to a historic 1996 decision of the International Court of Justice, a ruling that reflects the opinion of the vast majority of the worldʼs peoples. Even a small nuclear war would be an ecological catastrophe, not only killing civilian populations indiscriminately in both belligerent and neutral countries, but also severely damaging global agriculture and making large areas of the earth permanently uninhabitable through radioactive contamination. The danger of accidental nuclear war continues to be very great today, and the danger of nuclear terrorism is increasing. In this perilous situation, it is necessary for the nuclear nations to acknowledge that the concept of deterrence has been a mistake, which is threatening the lives of all human beings as well as threatening devastation of the biosphere. Acknowledging that the policy of nuclear deterrence has been a grave error can reduce risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.
Before discussing other defects in the concept of deterrence, it must be said very clearly that the idea of “massive nuclear retaliation” is completely unacceptable from an ethical point of view. The doctrine of retaliation, performed on a massive scale, violates not only the principles of common human decency and common sense, but also the ethical principles of every major religion. Retaliation is especially contrary to the central commandment of Christianity which tells us to love our neighbor, even if he or she is far away from us, belonging to a different ethnic or political group, and even if our distant neighbor has seriously injured us. This principle has a fundamental place not only in Christianity but also in all other major religions. “Massive retaliation” completely violates these very central ethical principles, which are not only clearly stated and fundamental but are also very practical, since they prevent escalatory cycles of revenge and counter-revenge.
Contrast Christian ethics with estimates of the number of deaths that would follow a US nuclear strike against Russia: Several hundred million deaths. These horrifying estimates shock us not only because of the enormous magnitude of the expected mortality, but also because the victims would include people of every kind: women, men, old people, children and infants, completely irrespective of any degree of guilt that they might have. As a result of such an attack, many millions of people in neutral countries would also die. This type of killing has to be classified as genocide.
When a suspected criminal is tried for a wrongdoing, great efforts are devoted to clarifying the question of guilt or innocence. Punishment only follows if guilt can be proved beyond any reasonable doubt. Contrast this with the totally indiscriminate mass slaughter that results from a nuclear attack!
It might be objected that disregard for the guilt or innocence of victims is a universal characteristic of modern war, since statistics show that, with time, a larger and larger percentage of the victims have been civilians, especially children. For example, the air attacks on Coventry during World War II, or the fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, produced massive casualties which involved all segments of the population with complete disregard for the question of guilt or innocence. The answer, I think, is that modern war has become generally unacceptable from an ethical point of view, and this unacceptability is epitomized in nuclear weapons.
The enormous and indiscriminate destruction produced by nuclear weapons formed the background for a historic 1996 decision by the International Court of Justice in The Hague. In response to questions put to it by WHO and the UN General Assembly, the Court ruled that “the threat and use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and particularly the principles and rules of humanitarian law”. The only possible exception to this general rule might be “an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a state would be at stake”. But the Court refused to say that even in this extreme circumstance the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be legal. It left the exceptional case undecided. In addition, the World Court added unanimously that “there exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion, negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict international control”.
This landmark decision has been criticized by the nuclear weapon states as being decided “by a narrow margin”, but the structuring of the vote made the margin seem more narrow than it actually was. Seven judges voted against Paragraph 2E of the decision (the paragraph which states that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be generally illegal, but mentions as a possible exception the case where a nation might be defending itself from an attack that threatened its very existence). Seven judges voted for the paragraph, with the President of the Court, Mohammad Bedjaoui of Algeria casting the deciding vote. Thus the Court adopted it, seemingly by a narrow margin. But three of the judges who voted against 2E did so because they believed that no possible exception should be mentioned! Thus, if the vote had been slightly differently structured, the result would have been ten to four.
Of the remaining four judges who cast dissenting votes, three represented nuclear weapons states, while the fourth thought that the Court ought not to have accepted the questions from WHO and the UN. However, Judge Schwebel from the United States, who voted against Paragraph 2E, added in a separate opinion, “It cannot be accepted that the use of nuclear weapons on a scale which would − or could − result in the deaths of many millions in indiscriminate inferno and by far-reaching fallout, have pernicious effects in space and time, and render uninhabitable much of the earth, could be lawful”. Judge Higgins from the UK, the first woman judge in the history of the Court, had problems with the word “generally” in Paragraph 2E and therefore voted against it, but she thought that a more profound analysis might have led the Court to conclude in favor of illegality in all circumstances. Judge Fleischhauer of Germany said in his separate opinion, “The nuclear weapon is, in many ways, the negation of the humanitarian considerations underlying the law applicable in armed conflict and the principle of neutrality. The nuclear weapon cannot distinguish between civilian and military targets. It causes immeasurable suffering. The radiation released by it is unable to respect the territorial integrity of neutral States”.
President Bedjaoui, summarizing the majority opinion, called nuclear weapons “the ultimate evil”, and said “By its nature, the nuclear weapon, this blind weapon, destabilizes humanitarian law, the law of discrimination in the use of weapons… The ultimate aim of every action in the field of nuclear arms will always be nuclear disarmament, an aim which is no longer utopian and which all have a duty to pursue more actively than ever”.
Thus the concept of nuclear deterrence is not only unacceptable from the standpoint of ethics, it is also contrary to international law. The World Court’s 1996 advisory opinion unquestionably also represents the opinion of the majority of the world’s peoples. Although no formal plebiscite has been taken, the votes in numerous resolutions of the UN General Assembly speak very clearly on this question. For example, the New Agenda Resolution (53/77Y) was adopted by the General Assembly on 4 December 1998 by a massively affirmative vote, in which only 18 out of the 170 member states voted against the resolution.^* The New Agenda Resolution proposes numerous practical steps towards complete nuclear disarmament, and it calls on the Nuclear-Weapon States “to demonstrate an unequivocal commitment to the speedy and total elimination of their nuclear weapons and without delay to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to the elimination of these weapons, thereby fulfilling their obligations under Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)”. Thus, in addition to being ethically unacceptable and contrary to international law, nuclear weapons are also contrary to the principles of democracy.
Having said these important things, we can now turn to some of the other defects in the concept of nuclear deterrence. One important defect is that nuclear war may occur through accident or miscalculation − through technical defects or human failings. This possibility is made greater by the fact that despite the end of the Cold War, thousands of missiles carrying nuclear warheads are still kept on a “hair-trigger” state of alert with a quasi-automatic reaction time measured in minutes. There is a constant danger that a nuclear war will be triggered by an error in evaluating the signal on a radar screen. For example, the BBC reported recently that a group of scientists and military leaders are worried that a small asteroid entering the earth’s atmosphere and exploding could trigger a nuclear war if mistaken for a missile strike.
A number of prominent political and military figures (many of whom have ample knowledge of the system of deterrence, having been part of it) have expressed concern about the danger of accidental nuclear war. Colin S. Gray, Chairman, National Institute for Public Policy, expressed this concern as follows: “The problem, indeed the enduring problem, is that we are resting our future upon a nuclear deterrence system concerning which we cannot tolerate even a single malfunction”. General Curtis E. LeMay, Founder and former Commander in Chief of the United States Strategic Air Command, has written, “In my opinion a general war will grow through a series of political miscalculations and accidents rather than through any deliberate attack by either side”. Bruce G. Blair (Brookings Institute) has remarked that “It is obvious that the rushed nature of the process, from warning to decision to action, risks causing a catastrophic mistake”… “This system is an accident waiting to happen.”
“But nobody can predict that the fatal accident or unauthorized act will never happen,” Fred Iklé of the Rand Corporation has written, “Given the huge and far-flung missile forces, ready to be launched from land and sea on both sides, the scope for disaster by accident is immense… In a matter of seconds − through technical accident or human failure − mutual deterrence might thus collapse.”
Another serious failure of the concept of nuclear deterrence is that it does not take into account the possibility that atomic bombs may be used by terrorists. Indeed, the threat of nuclear terrorism has today become one of the most pressing dangers that the world faces, a danger that is particularly acute in the United States.
Since 1945, more than 3,000 metric tons (3,000,000 kilograms) of highly enriched uranium and plutonium have been produced − enough for several hundred thousand nuclear weapons. Of this, roughly a million kilograms are in Russia, inadequately guarded, in establishments where the technicians are poorly paid and vulnerable to the temptations of bribery. There is a continuing danger that these fissile materials will fall into the hands of terrorists, or organized criminals, or irresponsible governments. Also, an extensive black market for fissile materials, nuclear weapons components etc. has recently been revealed in connection with the confessions of Pakistan’s bomb-maker, Dr. A.Q. Khan. Furthermore, if Pakistan’s less-than-stable government should be overthrown, complete nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists.
On November 3, 2003, Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, made a speech to the United Nations in which he called for “limiting the processing of weapons-usable material (separated plutonium and high enriched uranium) in civilian nuclear programmes − as well as the production of new material through reprocessing and enrichment − by agreeing to restrict these operations to facilities exclusively under international control.” It is almost incredible, considering the dangers of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism, that such restrictions were not imposed long ago. Nuclear reactors used for “peaceful” purposes unfortunately also generate fissionable isotopes of plutonium, neptunium and americium. Thus, all nuclear reactors must be regarded as ambiguous in function, and all must be put under strict international control. One might ask, in fact, whether globally widespread use of nuclear energy is worth the danger that it entails.

Figure 1: Recent studies by atmospheric scientists have shown that the smoke from burning cities produced by even a limited nuclear war would have a devastating effect on global agriculture. The studies show that the smoke would rise to the stratosphere, where it would spread globally and remain for a decade, blocking sunlight and destroying the ozone layer. Because of the devastating effect on global agriculture, darkness from even a small nuclear war (e.g. between India and Pakistan) would result in an estimated billion deaths from famine. Nuclear darkness resulting from a large-scale war involving all of the nuclear weapons that are now on high alert status would destroy all agriculture on earth for a period of ten years, and almost all humans would die of starvation. (See O. Toon, A. Robock, and R. Turco, “The Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War”, Physics Today, vol. 61, No. 12, 2008, p. 37-42).

The Italian nuclear physicist Francesco Calogero, who has studied the matter closely, believes that terrorists could easily construct a simple gun-type nuclear bomb if they were in possession of a critical mass of highly enriched uranium. In such a simple atomic bomb, two grapefruit-sized sub-critical portions of HEU are placed at opposite ends of the barrel of an artillery piece and are driven together by means of a conventional explosive. Prof. Calogero estimates that the fatalities produced by the explosion of such a device in the center of a large city could exceed 100,000.

We must remember the remark of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan after the 9/11/2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. He said, “This time it was not a nuclear explosion”. The meaning of his remark is clear: If the world does not take strong steps to eliminate fissionable materials and nuclear weapons, it will only be a matter of time before they will be used in terrorist attacks on major cities. Neither terrorists nor organized criminals can be deterred by the threat of nuclear retaliation, since they have no territory against which such retaliation could be directed. They blend invisibly into the general population. Nor can a “missile defense system” prevent terrorists from using nuclear weapons, since the weapons can be brought into a port in any one of the hundreds of thousands of containers that enter on ships each year, a number far too large to be checked exhaustively.
In this dangerous situation, the only logical thing for the world to do is to get rid of both fissile materials and nuclear weapons as rapidly as possible. We must acknowledge that the idea of nuclear deterrence is a dangerous fallacy, and that the development of military systems based on nuclear weapons has been a terrible mistake, a false step that needs to be reversed. If the most prestigious of the nuclear weapons states can sincerely acknowledge their mistakes and begin to reverse them, nuclear weapons will seem less glamorous to countries like India, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran, where they now are symbols of national pride and modernism.
Civilians have for too long played the role of passive targets, hostages in the power struggles of politicians. It is time for civil society to make its will felt. If our leaders continue to enthusiastically support the institution of war, if they will not abolish nuclear weapons, then let us have new leaders.

* Of the 18 countries that voted against the New Agenda resolution, 10 were Eastern European countries hoping for acceptance into NATO, whose votes seem to have been traded for increased probability of acceptance.
Author Contact Information: avery.john.s@gmail.com