As the climate crisis intensifies, advocates worldwide have stood up to defend their communities, territories, and environment. In response, they have faced violent retaliation. This repression persists despite evolving international, regional, and national-level legal frameworks around the “right to defend rights” and the “right to protection.” This article begins by providing a comprehensive overview of this evolving legal landscape. Against this backdrop, the article examines the tactics and architectures of violence used to repress land and environmental defenders through the lens of counterinsurgency theory. The article proposes a typology of counterinsurgent violence including: surveillance; stigmatization; criminalization; arbitrary detention; infiltration; cooptation; destruction of social fabric; psychological violence; and physical violence. It applies that typology to forty case studies of violence against land and environmental defenders in Latin America over the past decade. Using these case studies, I analyze where and how governments and corporate actors use strategies pulled from counterinsurgency theory and psychological operations to repress land and environmental defenders. Two or more forms of counterinsurgency violence were identified in all forty cases, with four or more forms identified in thirty-three of the cases. Ultimately, the analysis reveals a complex web of violence undertaken by a combination of state security forces and private actors.
Interim measures may offer a solution to obstructive tactics in international commercial disputes. While arbitral tribunals’ authority to grant provisional relief is now widely recognized, enforcement remains legally uncertain and fragmented, undermining the promise of this solution. Acknowledging that proposals for a supranational treaty on enforcement of interim measures or an amendment to existing treaties are unrealistic, this article offers a critical analysis of existing enforcement models– court assistance, exequatur, and mixed approaches–and evaluates them through the lens of legal certainty and efficiency. The article argues that the exequatur model, supported by a dynamic interpretation of the New York Convention, provides the most effective path toward an efficient resolution of international disputes, promoting international commerce in the long run. In lieu of treaty reform, the article advocates for a best practices approach, facilitating the adoption of the exequatur model across jurisdictions.
While scholars have extensively explored the evolution of labor provisions in trade agreements, less attention has been paid to the institutional mechanisms that operationalize these provisions. This article addresses this gap by offering a comparative analysis of labor compliance models that are emerging across jurisdictions. Recognizing that no institutional design is without trade-offs, this article applies the theory of comparative institutional analysis to evaluate existing models—not by asking whether they are (in)effective in the abstract, but: (in)effective compared to what? Specifically, it examines the strengths and limitations of various institutional mechanisms using benchmarks that matter to policymakers, including procedural efficiency, cost-effectiveness, legal certainty, enforceability, preservation of diplomatic and trade relations, and regulatory autonomy in labor governance. This article advances two key arguments. First, there is no one-size-fits-all institutional model; the choice of compliance design must be context-specific. A state’s labor regulatory framework, political will to advance workers’ rights, enforcement capacity, and trade and diplomatic dynamics all influence how it values core institutional benchmarks. These priorities, in turn, shape the tradeoffs a state is willing to accept when designing or adopting a labor compliance mechanism. Second, labor compliance mechanisms in trade agreements cannot function in isolation. Their effectiveness can be significantly strengthened through integration with broader legal and institutional frameworks—including the International Labour Organization, evolving norms on corporate accountability, and domestic capacity-building initiatives.
Today, it seems self-evident that human rights are enshrined at the international level because they protect universal human dignity—a cosmopolitan entitlement that cannot be left to the contingencies of domestic law. The prevalence of this received wisdom, however, masks a fundamental transformation in the idea of human rights over the last century. When human rights were first enshrined in international law—during and following the Second World War— their international status was not seen to be justified primarily by the inherent dignity of persons, but by the instrumental role human rights were understood to play in securing interstate peace. This article uncovers the history of these dual justifications for the international status of human rights and the interactions between them. And it shows that as one justification and then the other dominated prevailing thinking over the last century, this had a significant effect on both human rights law and the structure of the contemporary international legal order as a whole. As it concludes by observing, by better understanding the arc of the relationship between human rights and interstate peace over the past century, we can better understand challenges that have emerged for this relationship today.
Notwithstanding the recognition of select gender-based crimes as international crimes and the International Criminal Court’s prosecutors’ professed commitment to seeking justice for gender-based crimes, core doctrines of international criminal law (ICL) obstruct accountability for gendered violence. This article identifies the overlooked gendered implications of a few substantive pillars of ICL: a de facto insistence on a connection to war (“war fetish”), a preoccupation with powerful men, and a focus on the “mastermind” of the crime to the exclusion of other culpable perpetrators. These substantive pillars, some long-standing and some more recently erected, obscure the vast landscape of gender-based crimes and narrow accountability to a thin slice of gendered violence. The article examines ICL’s current architecture, revealing the ways it systematically shields perpetrators and proposes steps to remodel it to better accommodate the important goal of combatting gender-based harms.
