Democratic Statehood In International Law

This book analyses the emerging practice in the post-Cold War era of the creation of a democratic political system along with the creation of new states. The existing literature either tends to conflate self-determination and democracy or dismisses the legal relevance of the emerging practice on the basis that democracy is not a statehood criterion. Such arguments are simplistic. The statehood criteria in contemporary international law are largely irrelevant and do not automatically or self-evidently determine whether or not an entity has emerged as a new state. The question to be asked, therefore, is not whether democracy has become a statehood criterion. The emergence of new states is rather a law-governed political process in which certain requirements regarding the type of a government may be imposed internationally. And in this process the introduction of a democratic political system is equally as relevant or irrelevant as the statehood criteria. The book demonstrates that via the right of self-determination the law of statehood requires state creation to be a democratic process, but that this requirement should not be interpreted too broadly. The democratic process in this context governs independence referenda and does not interfere with the choice of a political system. This book has been awarded Joint Second Prize for the 2014 Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship.

Our world is in urgent need of global answers on subjects such as Big Data, climate change, and the interconnected global economy. This volume tackles those issues and more, with the goal of advancing more democratic modes of decision-making.

This edition brings the treatment of statehood in the field of international law up to date. It retains a wealth of historical material and introduces new problems such as the disposition of territory in Kosovo and East Timor, claims for secession in Chechnya and Quebec and devolution in Scotland.

Professor Crawford's inaugural lecture as Whewell Professor of International Law at Cambridge addresses a number of facets of the relationship between international law and democratic principles. In particular he examines the ways in which international law may or may not underwrite those principles, a subject which has increased greatly in significance as governments and international organisations search for a 'New World Order' in the post Cold War world.

PART V CRITICAL APPROACHES.

This book explores the right to democracy in international law and contemporary democratic theory, asking whether international law encompasses a substantive or procedural understanding of the notion. The book considers whether there can be considered to be a basis for the right to democracy in international customary law through identification of the relevant State practice and opinio juris, as well as through an evaluation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and whether the relevant provisions might be interpreted as forming customary law. The book then goes on to explore the relevant provisions in international treaties including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights before looking at the role of regional organizations and human rights regimes including the European Court of Human Rights and the Arab human rights regime. Khalifa A. Alfadhel draws on the work of John Rawls in order to put forward a theoretical basis for the right to democracy.

The objective of this work is to restate the requirements of democratic legitimacy in terms of the deliberative ideal developed by Jürgen Habermas, and apply the understanding to the systems of global governance. The idea of democracy requires that the people decide, through democratic procedures, all policy issues that are politically decidable. But the state is not a voluntary association of free and equal citizens; it is a construct of international law, and subject to international law norms. Political self-determination takes places within a framework established by domestic and international public law. A compensatory form of democratic legitimacy for inter-state norms can be established through deliberative forms of diplomacy and a requirement of consent to international law norms, but the decline of the Westphalian political settlement means that the two-track model of democratic self-determination is no longer sufficient to explain the legitimacy and authority of law. The emergence of non-state sites for the production of global norms that regulate social, economic and political life within the state requires an evaluation of the concept of (international) law and the (legitimate) authority of non-state actors. Given that states retain a monopoly on the coercive enforcement of law and the primary responsibility for the guarantee of the public and private autonomy of citizens, the legitimacy and authority of the laws that regulate the conditions of social life should be evaluated by each democratic state. The construction of a multiverse of democratic visions of global governance by democratic states will have the practical consequence of democratising the international law order, providing democratic legitimacy for international law.

Contrasts democratic and authoritarian approaches to international law, explaining how their interaction will affect the world in the future.