Chapter 5 examines the rebuilding of the global environmental movement after the Second World War. Environmental protection did not become one of the core objectives of the newly created United Nations. It was not until the ‘environmental revolution’ of the 1960s, which transformed environmentalism from an elite concern into a mass movement with wider electoral consequences for governments, that international society began to accept environmental stewardship as a new primary institution. Within a short space of time, from the mid-1960s until the early 1970s, leading industrialised economies established environmental protection first as a comprehensive domestic duty of the state and then as a general responsibility for international society. The 1972 Stockholm conference, the first UN conference on the environment, became the equivalent of a ‘constitutional moment’ in the greening of the international normative order. This chapter traces the process through which world society actors successfully transmitted environmentalism into international society, with leading powers such as the United States providing critical leadership along the way.

The legal regulation of terrorism has posed significant challenges to the integrity and legitimacy of global legal order for many decades. While acknowledging that the Security Council had been reasonably active on counterterrorism issues for decades prior to 9/11, this chapter starts from the assessment that there were distinct limitations to the scope and breadth of its action. The events of 9/11 marked a distinct shift in this regulatory status quo. While treaty making was dominant in the regulation of terrorism pre-9/11, it has been overtaken by the assertive role taken by the Security Council in regulating state responses to terrorism through Security Council Resolutions. This chapter will argue that these combined shifts have had a distinctly negative effect on the overall advancement of meaningful protection for human rights in the counterterrorism sphere. In parallel, the analysis asserts that such profound legislative shifts at the global level have displaced and negatively affected well-entrenched constitutional and domestic protections for human rights embedded in the national legal systems of many countries. In this supremacy model of Security Council action in the counter-terrorism arena, domestic human rights and constitutional protections are being rendered irrelevant or powerless in the new regulatory landscape.

The first part of Chapter 3 introduces the diverse roots of environmental thinking and identifies the normative core around which modern environmentalism is built. It traces the evolution of different strands of environmentalism and outlines the main debates that have shaped the evolution of environmental thinking and activism since the nineteenth century. The second part of this chapter identifies the different ways in which environmental ideas can be applied to the international realm. Employing the English School’s conceptual dyads of pluralism/solidarism and international/world society, it identifies four ideal types of how a green global order can be created: ‘Green Westphalia’ and ‘global environmental governance’, representing the pluralist and solidarist variants of a green international society; and ‘eco-localism’ and ‘eco-globalism’ as the pluralist and solidarist versions of a green world society.

In exceptional circumstances, defined as “emergencies”, states can limit human rights and personal freedoms, as long as restrictions are proportionate and necessary. From a comparative constitutional law perspective, several “emergency models” can be envisaged. At the same time, several international law tools provide for the possibility to derogate guarantees embodied therein in order to tackle exceptional circumstances. Since September 11, 2001, international terrorism has represented one of the biggest challenges for democratic countries and such a “global” threat still afflicts our democracies. Nevertheless, few countries have triggered their emergency provisions, as contained either in national constitution or legislation. Rather, limitations of human rights are often embodied in “ordinary” measures, so posing a high risk of “normalizing” restrictions of rights outside of a legally regulated and temporary state of emergency. How far has the “normalization” of exceptional circumstances come in times of international terrorism in democratic systems? Which is the relationship between international law provisions allowing derogation from human rights embodied in treaties and national emergency provisions? How can the international level impact on the other levels in determining exceptional measures? Are several de facto emergency provisions challenging the above-described models, which classify emergency regimes from a constitutional law perspective?

The use of artificial intelligence to remove so-called terrorist content from online platforms, is the object of this chapter. As a first step, the analysis identifies the complex and tangled relationship between different levels in regulating the issue. In doing so, the author notes that the United Nations’ role seem to be particularly unclear and major international initiatives – as the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism – aimed at managing the challenge of terrorist content online are characterized by a lack of democratic architecture and even of transparency as regards its governance and activities. As a consequence, the removal of “dangerous” content is often left to voluntary, informal and unregulated partnerships between the public and the private sector. As a second point, the analysis remarks that regional organizations – first of all, the European Union – are taking steps to try to regulate these partnerships, but the outcome is characterized by several drawbacks, both in terms of human rights protection and institutional issues. Ultimately, the chapter assesses these challenges through the lenses of constitutional law and argues in favor of a more pronounced role of international and regional bodies, which avert excessive informality and privatization in such a sensitive field.

Chapter 6 discusses how environmental stewardship established itself as a fundamental norm of international society. The first section reviews the creation of secondary institutions, or environmental regimes, and how dynamics of international environmental rule-setting reinforced but also reinterpreted the underlying environmental norm. The second part focuses on indicators of changing state behaviour and identity, particularly with regard to how environmentalism affected diplomatic practices and multilateralism as a mode of international cooperation. The third part completes the story by examining the spatial dimension of environmental stewardship’s social consolidation, with a focus on how environmental ideas and practices spread worldwide and how the Global South came to not only adopt but also redefine global environmental responsibilities.

In Chapter 9, I focus on the pluralist elements of international society and isolate the pluralist logic of international action in relation to environmental issues and values, what I have referred to as Green Westphalia. In a first step, I explore the pluralist logic of coexistence and the extent to which it can give rise of sustained international environmental cooperation. I then move on to consider whether the emergence of the environment as a security threat (e.g. climate change) could translate into a distinctly pluralist response to global environmental problems. In the final section of this chapter, I take this argument one step further and explore whether environmental securitisation could engage great power management, a classic pluralist institution in international society, as the source for international environmental action and leadership.

Especially in the aftermath of 9/11, states’ counterterrorism efforts have increasingly sought to use criminal law preventively, by criminalizing conduct before a terrorist crime is committed, including preparatory acts, and acts that contribute or support terrorism such as financing or providing material support. While a preventive use of criminal law is not in itself problematic, basic principles of human rights law pose limits to its use. In this context, the current Chapter analyses recent legislative-type counterterrorist resolutions by the Security Council in the areas of criminalising "foreign terrorist fighters" and the financing of terrorism. It argues that in both Resolution 2178 (2014) and Resolution 2462 (2019) the Security Council has also increasingly moved towards the criminalization of conduct before a terrorist crime is committed. Such a move poses dangers not only for a number of international legal standards, but also for humanitarian workers operating in certain contexts, while a number of questions remain with regard to the application of these legal regimes and how they interact with the existent counter-terrorism architecture, in particular the proscription of terrorist organizations at the national level and the Security Council ISIL (Da'esh) & Al-Qaida Sanctions regime, as well as the work of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

This introductory chapter sets the theoretical background and explains the research questions of the book; afterwards, the structure of the book is presented.

Chapter 11 summarises the main argument developed in the book, with regard to the rise of global environmental stewardship as a primary institution of global international society, the norm transfer from world society to international society, the globalisation of the environmental norm, ongoing norm contestation and consolidation. It discusses the interplay between the environmental norm and other primary institutions of international society: diplomacy, international law, sovereignty, territoriality, great power management, market and developmentalism. Further, it discusses the use of English School theory to derive predictions about the future development of the international normative structure in response to major ecological threats.

Chapter 2 provides the main theoretical and conceptual framework for the analysis in this book. The first section introduces the conceptual landscape of the English School, especially the concepts of primary institutions, the solidarism versus pluralism debate, and the link between international society and world society.The second section reviews how various English School authors have interpreted the rise of global environmental politics, moving from an initial neglect of environmental issues among the founders of the English School to a more comprehensive engagement with global environmentalism in recent years. Building on this, the third section outlines the analytical framework that will inform the empirical analysis in the remainder of the book.