To the Rescue --- Rupture and Resilience of the UN Charter Order CGLG Talk with Special Guest - Antje Wiener

Abstract: The rule-based international legal order is under duress. Recent breaches of international law on behalf of members of the United Nations (UN) Security Council's permanent members represent deep contestations with potentially destructive consequences for the UN Charter Order. These ruptures raise issues about adequate political strategies of reaction (or retaliation) which are related with conceptual questions of the UNCO's resilience in the mid- and long-term. While a rule-based order faces predictable non-compliance with and violations of norms which are handled as a matter of routine, thereby documenting the liberal international order's resilience, the qualitative shift from ‘normal' to ‘deep' contestation cuts to the core in a potentially order- changing way. This raises novel questions about the resilience of the UNCO, and global order, more generally. Defined as the capability to maintain pathways to participation that warrant affected stakeholders' access to normal contestation, resilience is enhanced by pathways that enable normal contestation (i.e. proactive engagement with norms) towards deep decarbonisation, or to counter human rights violation, genocide, torture or the illegal use of force. While such pathways are shaped by organising principles and fundamental norms that have long guided global politics, they are now challenged by the very member states that established them with the UN Charter in 1945. Given the novelty, no prediction of constructive or destructive effects of deep contestation can be made. Yet, it is possible to examine the effects beyond observation and description. This talk invites a discussion of a multi-method integrated theoretical framework to evaluate the effects against the background of five contestation scenarios developed from norms research in International Relations and International Law. It takes an innovative mid-range focus on institutional change and identifies sources (norm agents) and dynamics (social and legal) as drivers towards plausible future scenarios. This objective is addressed by recursive theorising in conjunction with empirical research (mapping, modelling, evaluating) that zooms in on contestations over justice and security.

Author details:
Univ.-Professor Antje Wiener AcSS, MAE holds the Chair of Political Science especially Global Governance at the University of Hamburg where she is also a Professor of Law; and she is a By-Fellow at Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge