Presidents possess vast authority over policies and outcomes. Recent studies suggest the public checks this unilateralism through expressive opinions and political participation. We reevaluate this accountability link with a preregistered panel survey that incorporates a number of design and conceptual improvements over existing experimental studies. Our findings reveal a more complex relationship between presidential actions and public opinion. We find no evidence that the public reacts negatively to unilateralism – and some evidence they react positively. Respondents, however, may punish an incumbent for failing to implement the proposed policy change. While such a result suggests that the public can hold presidents accountable, we close by discussing how a lack of information likely renders this check moot.

The paper looks at contracts and contract law as a place of both commodification and resistance to commodification. Commodification and contract are connected through the lens of flexibilisation, seen in particular as one party’s unilateral prerogative to adapt the content of the contract’s performance. Flexibilisation in this sense works to entrench the market mechanism (qua responsiveness to price and demand dynamics) in situations where marketisation makes the realisation of long-term human needs rely on the short-term horizon of market operations. Two such contexts of marketisation in the context of European Private Law are considered as examples, namely transfer of enterprise and acquisition of a (household) customer portfolio in energy markets. The paper argues that ‘taking contractual equality seriously’ can contribute to decommodification – or at least throw some sand in the wheels of commodification.

Since its accession to the WTO twenty years ago, China's image has shifted from a good student aspiring to assimilate itself into the multilateral trading system to one that is increasingly alienated from key WTO principles. How has China's perspective on WTO been evolving? What are the reasons behind China's changing perspective? This paper answers these questions from the Chinese perspective with a comprehensive analysis of the key moments in China's first two decades in the WTO, followed by practical suggestions on how to engage China more constructively in the WTO and beyond.

Global regulatory competition is a recent phenomenon that confronts us in various different fields, ranging from food and chemical safety to climate change, and animal welfare to environmental law. The digital economy is not immune to this trend, and it seems highly unlikely that this will soon come to an end when we consider the radical differences between the European Union and the United States with respect to the importance they assign to the right to privacy and the right to freedom of speech. Nevertheless, despite their differences in content, it can be contended that they both tend to disregard the interest of others even though they have enough resources at their disposal to take them seriously. This becomes visible when the recent case law of the CJEU and the recent regulations such as the GDPR and the US CLOUD Act are taken into account. Their similar attitude to regulating for the globe raises the question of whether we are confronted with a new type of Eurocentrism, which is more contracted and introverted than the previous expansionist version. The article argues that unilateralism should be a selfless one and that it should necessarily consider outsiders if it is to acquire legitimacy.

Global common concerns – including combating illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing – necessitate effective global action to avoid displacing illegal practices to under-regulated jurisdictions. The response in international law has therefore included the obligation upon all states to exercise jurisdiction, albeit with varying clarity regarding the existence and scope of duties for each jurisdictional basis. This article argues that, through its non-cooperating third country identification procedure, the European Union (EU) has sought unilaterally to crystalize and promote the implementation of an obligation upon states to exercise extraterritorial active personality-based jurisdiction over their own nationals engaged in IUU fishing. This is demonstrated through an analysis of EU practice relating to Asian states and remains true despite the EU's non-cooperating third country identification procedure only formally targeting flag, port, coastal, and market states. The EU and Asian states have improved their laws governing nationals engaged in IUU fishing, but concerns over legal certainty arise.

If the main merit of The Internationalists is to shed light, in a powerful and convincing way, on the transformative power of rules, the role of institutions – and in particular of the United Nations and its collective security system centred around the activity of the Security Council – does not come out of the book as clearly as it might. It is submitted that the decision to concentrate upon the rule – the prohibition to use force – while limiting the attention paid to the institution – the United Nations and its collective security system – is not without consequence, particularly given the strict link existing, in the common perception, between the rule and the institution. This brief comment will focus on certain ambivalences emerging from the book about the contribution of the United Nations, as a peace-enforcing organisation, to fostering the emergence of a New World Order, as well as its continuing relevance for preserving the effectiveness of the principle on non-use of force.

The unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovar authorities in Pristina in 2008 has been the source of various controversies in international affairs. From a legal perspective, Kosovo’s secessionist drive is contrary to the well-established position of international law regarding the territorial integrity of states. From a political perspective, Kosovo’s case exemplifies the political drive to alter the law – a drive that applies to other entities in Kosovo’s position. Both these phenomena are accompanied by the divergent interests held by Kosovars as the ‘local agency’ and by the interests of Serbia and third states (including great powers) that support or oppose Kosovo’s independence. The interdisciplinary nature of this matter is enhanced by the intersection of applicable legal frameworks with competing political interests. The motivating factors – and implications of – great power conduct in this context should be examined through the prism of political realism, which provides an enhanced perspective on the relationship between legal and political factors in all their complexity.

Individual relationships between Mainland China and Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan are considered confusing for some because China’s rising international power is not resulting in stronger calls for a shared identity based on ‘Chinese pride’ or historical links. Instead, China’s economic growth appears to be provoking increasingly stronger calls for autonomy or independence. In this article I discuss why Beijing’s self-described peace and development policy is failing to procure positive responses in those four regions, with a primary focus on the failed use of narrowly-defined Westphalian thinking to understand relevant issues. I argue that the reason for this failure is the tension between the individualist ontology underlying modern international politics (as expressed in terms of Westphalian sovereignty) and the relational ontology underpinning a traditional Chinese politics built upon a tianxia (‘all-under-heaven’) world view. This tension has become conspicuous in the context of China’s recent rise and Beijing’s growing confidence in contesting Western power. The Chinese leadership’s reliance on arguments involving historical connections with Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and calls for autonomy or independence from citizens living in those four areas, are examples of this contestation.

Even scholars who support multilateralism in principle frequently question the value of securing approval from existing multilateral bodies for humanitarian intervention. The United Nations (UN) and regional organisations such as NATO, the argument goes, are far from democratic; furthermore, multilateralism is often a recipe for doing nothing; therefore, unauthorised intervention should be permissible in circumstances of ‘humanitarian necessity’. This article maintains that although today’s multilateral organisations and related procedures for authorising armed intervention may be suboptimal, they have significant output legitimacy. First, existing authorisation procedures reduce the risk of destabilising conflict spirals among powerful states. Second, they diminish the likelihood that humanitarianism will be used as a pretext. Third, they reduce epistemic problems concerning the identification of a just cause for intervention and thus the risk of accidental abuse. Fourth, they minimise the ‘moral hazard’ of humanitarian intervention. Finally, compliance with multilateral procedures is increasingly required for successful peacebuilding. This leads me to conclude that humanitarian warfare should always be authorised by the UN or regional multilateral organisations.

A crucial question for international law is how to allocate regulatory jurisdiction over transboundary problems between sovereign states. Insufficient clarity can trigger disputes such as that regarding the legality of the EU Directive that extends its ETS to all flights taking off from or landing at an EU airport, including those by non-EU carriers. This article uses this dispute as the vehicle to examine sovereignty in an increasingly interdependent world. It argues that a state’s decisional inviolability is central to sovereignty. Decisional sovereignty allows a state to regulate actors or activities with a link to its territory when these affect the state’s domestic affairs, rather than leaving the state at the mercy of an actor’s home state or of other states from the territory of which the problem emerges. Moreover, allocation of regulatory jurisdiction in conformity with decisional sovereignty reduces the incentives to free-ride on other states’ regulatory efforts and incentivizes international cooperation.