When countries find themselves with disagreements over their legal obligations to other states, the International Court of Justice can provide a decisive and binding judgment. The Court is an international juridical body that hears cases involving legal complaints between governments. Its jurisdiction is carefully defined to preserve the sovereignty of the states involved, and much controversy comes out of the complicated relationship between state sovereignty and the binding nature of international law. State sovereignty and the international rule of law make an odd pairing, and the design of the ICJ straddles the two. For instance, the ICJ is forbidden from using past decisions as precedents in future cases, and it can only hear a case if both parties agree to it.

This chapter engages with humanitarian disarmament as a concept, rather than examining its practice in any particular context. It explains and distils general critiques of humanitarianism and explores whether, and if so, to what extent, those critiques might apply in the context of humanitarian disarmament. Drawing on literature from philosophy, media studies, critical security studies and human rights, four critiques of humanitarianism are examined: the apolitical posturing of humanitarianism; humanitarianism’s complicity with militarism; humanitarianism’s imperative of action; and the way in which a humanitarian discourse sets up a ‘hierarchy of humanity’. In each instance, the chapter shows that the general critiques do have traction in the specific context of humanitarian disarmament. Nevertheless, a humanitarian discourse is not rejected outright as being a viable means by which to advance disarmament discourse. Rather, the conclusion is that humanitarianism is one possible discourse that can, and does, illuminate disarmament but that it brings its own complexities, blind spots and complexities.

Chapter 1 reviews past scholarly ideals and political realities of a world constitution, focusing on the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Charter of the United Nations. It sketches out the core claims of the book according to which constitutional trends in world politics must be viewed with realistic skepticism and, in that light, can be understood in terms of a process called constitutionalization. This process does not generate the unified constitutional framework typically associated with national constitutions but manifests itself as an inadvertent by–product of piecemeal international treaty making driven by proximate objectives within issue–specific domains. The chapter then presents the major themes and limitations of the contemporary “constitutionalism beyond the state” debate and establishes how a social scientific perspective can add to this legal debate. It concludes with a preview of the book, emphasizing the main theoretical insights and empirical findings.

Introduction

This poem was written by one of the women who contributed to this research. It outlines a conflict that many women in Kyrgyzstan face every day: the risk of encountering sexual violence. Throughout the whole country, such incidents, and other gender-based crimes like domestic violence and bride abductions, are widespread (Kleinbach et al, 2005: 198; Moldosheva, 2008: 7–11). However, despite this reality, some statistical surveys have tended to produce quite low numbers of registered crimes like rape or related assaults (National Statistical Committee of the Kyrgyz Republic, 2012: 126), as well as very low prevalence rates of physical sexual harassment (Civil Union ‘For Reforms and Results’, 2015: 14–15). The gathering of realistic data sets related to these topics is complicated by a widely shared assumption that sexual violence is a normal feature of daily life in Kyrgyzstan's highly patriarchal society (Moldosheva, 2008: 7–9).

Introduction

Books on security and danger in Central Asia could doubtlessly fill a small library. Many of them assume an outside gaze that presents the region as a foreign, hostile, and very unpleasant place. They emphasize threats such as geopolitical rivalries, Islamic terrorism, political instability, drug trafficking and organized crime, or political instability. Looking at Central Asia from the outside, for example, most people will probably think of the war-ravaged landscape of Afghanistan first. Associations that come to mind include heavily fortified military bases, suicidal car bombings, poppy fields, religious fanatics and corrupt government officials. Furthermore, even when widening the gaze beyond this single– unfortunate– country, many of the dangers that have become manifest there seem at least latently simmering in the region as a whole. Take the case of religiously motivated violence: for many observers, Central Asia can be considered a worrisome breeding ground for militant Islamist groups. The networks of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU)– different parts of which are connected to either the so-called Islamic State/Daesh or al-Qaeda and the Taliban– allegedly also stretch across Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Furthermore, the threat of Islamist terrorism continues to dominate debates on security and insecurity in the region, both in international policy circles and academic conferences. Yet, it should be noted that fears of Islamist violence are by no means reserved for the outside perspective alone. Central Asian governments themselves frequently evoke this danger: sometimes in order to justify repressive political action, such as the banning of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan in 2015; and sometimes to excuse outright violence, such as the 2005 massacre committed by Uzbek security forces in the Fergana Valley, killing up to 600 demonstrators on the grounds of what was then labelled an ‘anti-terror’ operation.

In their critical interrogation of such ‘discourses of danger’, Nick Megoran and John Heathershaw (2011) urged scholars some years ago to broaden our understanding of what security and insecurity may mean in the region (see also Thompson and Heathershaw, 2005). How is it experienced by local communities or even individual people? Do they share these (inter)national and elitist discourses?

The logic of democratic power is put to an empirical test in Chapter 6. Having identified treaties as the best observable source of international rules, this chapter tests the democratic power argument for international rule–based cooperation systematically in the context of international treaty making, which involves three stages – negotiations, commitment, and compliance. This statistical analysis is based on a dataset of seventy–five international treaties adopted between 1945 and 2008 and is complemented with insights from the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The results reveal consistent and robust empirical patterns regarding states’ willingness and ability to cooperate over international treaties, which are generalizable across treaties, issues, and the stages of treaty making. The analysis confirms the centrality of the democratic powers as the chief promoters and adherents of international rules that gradually but inadvertently contribute to the constitutionalization of world politics.

Introduction

This book has followed an explorative approach to detect securityscapes, which we understand as imaginary concepts that reveal themselves in everyday practices and highlight the spatial as well as conflictive dimensions of security. This explorative character is underscored by the high number and wide variety of case studies discussed in this volume. Our aim has been to study security from ‘below’ by putting the practices of the individuals concerned at the centre of our research approach. We have described and analysed different types of securityscapes of people who perceive themselves– for different reasons– as marginalized in their own society. Our intention here is to understand how individuals manoeuvre their everyday life through situations perceived by them as risky and insecure. We have explored a wide variety of insecure situations, ranging from vague and amorphous feelings of uncertainty, to concrete and explicit exposure to physical harm. Confronted with such security threats, our interest has been to understand security practices that find their expression in common routines of avoiding, separating, mimicking, hiding and so on.

Through a collection of individual case studies, we present and discuss the security practices of diverging social groups. We included minority ethnic groups such as Uzbeks and Lyulis in the city of Osh, and socially marginalized groups such as the LGBT community, but also young females and interethnic mixed couples. As a general finding, our research detected diverging sets of repertoires of security practices and securityscapes for different social groups and communities. A key conclusion is that everyday security practices are framed, above all, by the positionality of the actors and very much depend on the very specific context of (in)security.

The conceptual pathway of our research was pre-structured by two distinct decisions: first, we chose the state of Kyrgyzstan as the common point of reference for our research; and, second, we focused on the everyday security practices of marginalized groups. Both decisions were necessary to make our different case studies comparable. However, we are aware that such decisions meant that our research excluded certain other aspects of security practices that might be of interest for future research.

Chapter 2 offers a novel conceptualization of administrative styles. Depending on dominant strategic orientations shaping administrative routines, we identify four ideal types to systematically assess IPAs’ policy influence: a servant style, an advocacy style, a consolidator style, and an entrepreneurial style. In addition to this conceptual innovation, we offer a theoretical framework accounting for the variation in administrative styles across different international bureaucracies. We argue that the variation in administrative styles across different organizations can be explained by two factors, namely the perceptions of internal and external challenges.