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The paper analyses the Russia-South Africa bilateral relations, using the constructivist framework of states’ identities. This approach posits that states may have multiple identities, and thus, cannot be strictly categorized in international politics. In other words, the same state can be perceived as a friendly and coercive power, simultaneously. This article explores the important nuances of the Russia-South Africa bilateral ties, since 1990s, when two countries re-established their diplomatic relations. Their strong bilateral ties have successfully navigated through the past and present complexities of the international system. In recent years, they conducted several joint military exercises, and, on many occasions, their leaders expressed similar worldviews and shared stances towards the increasing global tensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On several occasions, Finn Collin has engaged in discussions surrounding social constructivism, a relatively recent theoretical orientation emerging through the development of naturalized science studies from the 1970s. Inspired by Finn's work, this paper explores the distinction between 'social constructivism' and 'social constructionism' and their origins in various strands of the sociology of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper looks at resolutions and operational activities of the un as parts of processes of institutionalisation of nascent norms of cil. It argues that institutionalisation clarifies the scope of the norm and of its application; and improves mechanisms of persuasion and compliance with the norm, thereby increasing social pressure on resilient States. Hence, institutionalised norms have a higher potential to affect both the behaviour and attitude of States than non-institutionalised norms. Crucially, the paper argues that un resolutions and activities foster processes of institutionalisation of new norms. Although the work acknowledges that is not possible to foresee whether a norm will crystallise as cil, it suggests that its potential increases if it matches and draws on the normative framework provided by the un Charter; if it does not excessively challenge the predominant expectations of States, and if un organs work together in promoting it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence of differing historical interpretations of the same happenings and the consequences of this phenomenon have attracted scholarly attention and deserve to be studied in the future by philosophers of history. Plurality repeatedly surfaces in historical discussions and relativism seems to be one of the obvious conclusions drawn from the existence of competing historical accounts. In my paper, I begin with plurality in history to examine further the issue of relativism. I focus on the dualism of scheme and content as being at the root of relativity and subsequently argue that abandoning this type of dualism is one way how to avoid relativism even within a broadly constructivist view of history. The discussion is, moreover, linked to the issue of how historians present their accounts: Do they offer representations of the past or should we think about their outcomes in a different way? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nadezhda Lamanova was the only well-established Russian pre-revolutionary fashion designer who declared her loyalty to the new regime following the 1917 Bolshevik insurrection. The juxtaposition of the extraordinary glamour of her pre-1917 designs with her dedicated post-revolutionary service to the Bolsheviks has contributed to Lamanova's mythical status in Russia. This paper contextualizes Lamanova's designs within the prerevolutionary and post-revolutionary modernist arts and applied arts movements, and shows that Lamanova's work and her personal life were embedded in the social, cultural, and artistic avant-garde of her times. In turn, the paper forges a link between Lamanova's pre-and-post-1917 careers, periods that, previously, had been strictly delineated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The Law of Peoples, John Rawls develops a theory of global justice whose scope and ambitions are quite modest. Far from justifying a global resource distribution principle modeled on the difference principle, Rawls's theory does not argue for significant redistribution among peoples. This paper focuses on Rawls's claim that the character and scope of his account of global justice are determined by the constructivist method that he employs to extend political liberalism's project from the domestic to the global sphere. The principles of an acceptable law of peoples, he argues, are simply those principles that would be selected by rational representatives of peoples from the standpoint of a suitably characterized fair choice position. This paper argues that Rawls's constructivist method in fact provides support for an account of global justice of greater scope and ambition than Rawls's Law of Peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional human rights bodies, such as the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, have constituent instruments which contain clauses allowing states to leave the institution. Given that regional human rights tribunals have the power to issue rulings against states, these clauses have been relatively underused. This paper argues that this is due to the socialisation of states within regional human rights regimes. Exit clauses are a reflection of underlying political forces behind a regional human rights bodies' formation. They also play an important and under-examined role in state socialisation once a state is a member of a regional human rights body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As is known, the racist worldview rising in Europe, particularly in Germany of the 1930s, affected also the socio-political realities in Turkey, and became in effect a part of the official policy of the country. Many theories of obvious Turkist nature, such as Güneş Dil Teorisi (Sun Language Theory), were even shaped by the government and introduced into the university programmes. In this framework, the ancient Near Eastern states were declared Turkish, and the idea about the primordial presence of the Turks in Anatolia and Mesopotamia became a sort of axiom or absolute truth. From anthropological perspective, thousands of Armenian and Greek graves were opened and examined for the purpose of determining the real Turkish type; the skulls taken from these graves were compared with those of the contemporary Turks. The racist ideology defeated in Europe as a result of World War II, was correspondingly overthrown in Turkey too; even some sanctions were imposed to its defenders. However, since the 1980s, the similar ideas have been brought to the agenda again via the project of 'the re-discovery of the proto-Turks in Anatolia'. Moreover, some Turkish academics have argued that the non-Muslim and non-Turk peoples, such as the Pontus Greeks, the Armenians, and the Assyrians are, indeed, of Turkic origin. This paper examines the recent publications by several Turkish authors who vehemently advocate the above summarised views, which, at the same time, are shared and embraced by a clear majority of the academics studying identity and ethnicity issues in Turkey. The introductory part of the paper discusses the theoretical aspects of ethnicity-again with a focus on the relevant literature published in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although we have some first-hand accounts of visits by American drama critics and theater directors to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, with one or two exceptions we do not know much about how American visual artists gained first-hand knowledge of the works of the Russian avant-garde at this time. Tracing the surprisingly rich history of American exhibitions of Russian art in the first half of the twentieth century, this paper examines the influence of Berlin and Vienna in shaping American exhibitions and also shows how curatorial decisions often determined which artists were associated with which movements, even when these associations would later be contradicted by historical facts. Indeed, style may be said to have played a subservient role as curators strove to associate the avant-garde with spirituality or to gain public support for starving Russian artists. Nevertheless, these exhibitions did bring significant works to the attention of American artists and the American public, revealing the significance of certain artists as well as collectors and curators in shaping the American understanding of the Russian avant-garde. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legitimacy-building process in the wake of the crisis in Ukraine and Russia's annexation of Crimea is investigated in this paper. A comprehensive dataset of President Putin's speeches was analyzed using qualitative text analysis in order to reveal the basic legitimizing arguments within the narrative. Four basic subject areas were identified in the dataset – history, identity, Ukrainian context, and the international context. These subjects are further analyzed in order to present the logic and development of the legitimacy building process presented by the Russian President to domestic and international audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imagination is crucial to Joseph Margolis' philosophy: he addresses its significance for the experience of works of art and, more importantly, he portrays it as constitutive of human reality itself. I explicate these claims and define Margolis' notion of imagination vis-à-vis Jean-Paul Sartre's, whose own conception of imagination Margolis rejects. Studying Margolis and Sartre in relation to each other illuminates crucial differences between their positions and highlights the different commitments that underlie their philosophical anthropology as a whole. In the conclusion of this paper, I argue that there are in fact certain affinities between their positions and suggest that we think of the problem of imagination meta-philosophically, as a problem that guides philosophical thought in its various attempts to define the human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radiophonic art could not have emerged at the end of the 1920s without an intense period of experimentation across the creative fields of radio, new music, phonography, film, literature and theatre. The engagement with sound recording and broadcast technologies by artists radically expanded the scope of creative possibility within their respective practices, and more particularly, pointed to new forms of (inter-)artistic practice based in sound technologies including those of radio. This paper examines the convergence of industry, the development of technology, and creative practice that gave sound, previously understood as immaterial, a concrete objectification capable of responding to creative praxis, and so brought about the conditions that enabled a radiophonic art to materialize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper offers a historical outline of the main positions and protagonists of feminist epistemology as a specific field in philosophy at the end of the twentieth century, in the context of a feminist critique of knowledge in academia in general as part of international feminist movements. The main question discussed is whether there is a specific feminist concept of philosophical and scientific knowledge. If so, what is its innovative aspect? What are the philosophical problems in arguing for feminist knowledge? Is there a specific insight or methodological approach? A further question is what role, if any, feminist epistemology plays in the interdisciplinary field of Gender Studies. The discussion will centre on how feminist epistemology relates to non-scientific practices. In particular, the role of the concept of objectivity in feminist epistemology will be elaborated. This will illuminate the connection between the feminist knowledge project with other emancipatory projects and outline how feminist constructivism might play a prominent role in this context in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like other normative systems, the international nuclear export control norms are incomplete and at times contradictory. Thus, contestations to the international nuclear export control norms inevitably emerge, as they did in the wake of the 1974 Indian nuclear test and the 1991 discovery of Iraq's nuclear weapons program. These two nuclear crises prompted intense debates regarding the adequacy of the existing norms. The outcome of the debates generated overwhelming agreement and action among nuclear suppliers that they required strengthening. Drawing on Wayne Sandholtz's theory of normative change, which argues that events trigger disputes whose outcomes modify norms, this article illustrates how the nuclear export control norms have evolved in a cyclical fashion. The article aims to contribute to the constructivist literature on normative change and discusses policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International investment law and domestic law governing foreign investment strongly influence one another and indeed operate in a relationship of co-dependency or interoperability. Yet the flows between the two bodies of law, and their respective modalities of influence, remain generally unexplored in international legal theory. To shed light on this important phenomenon, this article traces the ways in which international investment law can affect the content of domestic investment law, using theories of international law compliance as a lens for such an understanding. It then proposes a set of pathways by which domestic law can influence the content of international investment rules. International law thus depends upon national law not only for its implementation but for its very content. Indeed, the regime of investment law will not tolerate significant discrepancies between the two. An appreciation of this dynamic is critical to evaluating the prospects of improvements to international investment law and can inform the ongoing discussions among stakeholders to this end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kalle Pihlainen's book reworks seven essays published over the last dozen years. Pihlainen's Preface and Hayden White's Foreword articulate a cri de cœur. Both fear that something important has been missed. White's Foreword somewhat cryptically characterizes Pihlainen's book as "metacritical," and locates Pihlainen in the role of being a "serious reader" for the community of theorists of history. What does it mean to be a "serious" reader? White never says. But following White's hint, Pihlainen can be read as updating Marx's conception of the task of unmasking sources of alienation by focusing on the reasons for the estrangement of histories from a wider audience. For him, "the core case is that the 'historical' (situated) nature of history itself needs to be acknowledged" (p. xiv). It remains unacknowledged so long as the source of meaning in history continues to be displaced. For even those who emphasize narrative form tend to talk as if meanings were imposed by some factor other than human intervention, as if form magically imbues content with significance. But this is one more symptom, if such is needed, of collective bad faith, a denial that only people make meaning. By taking disembodied literary forms as repositories of significance, responsibility for meaning is once again deflected or deferred. In this key regard, Pihlainen's claim to place "decided emphasis on its [historical theory's] ethical-political momentum" (p. xv) signals that the issues he intends to foreground are not epistemological or discursive. Pihlainen rightly suspects that all the talk of "narrativism" and "discourse" serves only to evade confronting the truly difficult moral and political challenges that writing represents. His various chapters identify these evasions and the challenges that remain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has long been hailed as a major event in the realisation of children's human rights, combining the need for protection with a desire to grant agency through recognition of the evolving capacities of the child. Yet the idea of children's agency as articulated in the CRC excluded sexual identity and expression, and ushered in an incomplete emancipation for LGBTIQ children; children who are gender non-conforming; and children whose sexual expression otherwise conflicts with heterosexuality – hereafter queer children. I argue that while the CRC granted children agency in terms of rights to expression, thought and conscience, it denied children sexual agency. Queer children's political agency is intimately connected to sexual identity and agency, because unlike their heterosexual counterparts, queer children's identity and expression is sexualised while, at the same time, they are excluded from adult, identity-based movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to shed light on the question of how 'meanings' of an international norm adapt to norm contestation and asks whether and how R2P is being adapted to contestation. We contend that the reframing of an existing international norm by norm proponents in order to adapt it to dynamics of norm contestation have not been discussed adequately in the literature to date. Constructivist research on norm contestation could benefit from taking into account concepts in the new institutionalist literature. By combining the institutionalist concepts of 'borrowing' and 'sharing' with the literature on norm entrepreneurs and their framing-attempts in norm diffusion processes, we conjecture that an expansion in contestation increases the likeliness of the adaptation of the norm in question along the line of the contested issues. We aim to trace this adaptation by analysing the dynamics of R2P's change in meaning and focus in its process of implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Arab-Muslim world is often described negatively as undemocratic, intolerant and economically backward. Rare positive commentary about the region is usually reserved for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states based on the belief that their status as rentier states coupled with immense energy resources has enabled them to escape the failures of the larger region. However, this research posits a United Arab Emirates (UAE) exceptionalism attributed to its internalization of key political, economic and social norms, and the promotion of such norms as a norm entrepreneur. The attractiveness of the UAE’s accomplishments in the region has made it worthy of emulation and, thus, a soft power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Erste Russische Kunstausstellung [First Russian Art Exhibition] of 1922 was a remarkable event not only for Berlin's art lovers at that time, but also for the history of twentieth century art. Held at Galerie van Diemen, the show gave a comprehensive overview of Russia's artistic achievements from late Tsardom to the Russian Civil War. Of all styles in the exhibition, the non-objective art movements of suprematism and constructivism provoked the greatest sensation among the visitors, many of whom were Western artists. Relating Russia's variations of non-objectivity with their--assumed--political notions, Western modernists reacted in various ways. This article aims at tracking the long-lasting vestiges of the Erste Russische Kunstausstellung in the personal and artistic developments of two key-figures of Germany's modern art scene: Kurt Schwitters and Hans Richter. While the role of El Lissitzky, who designed the catalogue's cover, has already been canonized, this article wants to highlight lesserregarded aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work addresses the role of UN in the formation of customary international law from a constructivist perspective. It dialogues with the International Law Commission and, in contrast with the latter, it argues that the importance of the UN is a matter to be defined empirically. Its organs are capable of acting as norm entrepreneurs, articulating and promoting new norms. They are capable of affecting social processes in order to create pressure on the states that resist emergent norms. Thus, instead of a mere agent of states the UN is capable of deeply influencing them both in behavioural and attitudinal terms. Furthermore, the UN promote the formalization and institutionalization of new norms, elucidating their scope, application, and embedding them in consistently coherent amalgamation of norms and practices. Hence, it is capable of fostering the processes that lead to the crystallization of norms as customary international law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negotiators expect the World Trade Organization (WTO) to be an arena for states to pursue their material gain. However, the WTO also reflects symbolic aspects of international politics, in particular the notion of multilateralism. Although such a principle, in part, expresses Western dominance, Global South states have also benefited from multilateral regimes, and thus have incentives to legitimize them and behave according to their rules. Will the pattern of multilateralism change as other trade arrangements potentially gain more prominence? This article analyzes actions taken by Brazil and India in WTO's Doha Development Agenda (DDA) and concludes that the multilateral system of trade will survive as Global South states participate in the organization to seek not just material gains but also to commit themselves to the international normative dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines institutional patterns of leadership and followership in the UN Security Council with respect to the Responsibility to Protect principle. In a departure from existing literature on leadership and followership in international relations, which has hitherto been framed within a realist analysis, the article presents a constructivist account of leadership that sheds light on the strategies and scope of conditions for mobilizing international action to protect populations from mass atrocities. The article applies a theoretical innovation to case studies that examine strategies that India and China adopted in the Security Council to respond to the crises in Libya and Syria from 2011 to 2013. This integration of theory and empirics reveals a complex and layered account of factors that shape the Security Council's ability to exercise its Responsibility to Protect. In doing so, the article demonstrates that followership and leadership are relational practices that create or limit the possibilities for institutional action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The norm set known as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) remains contested. This contestation is, from a normative perspective, not only driven by intentions to challenge a western-dominated international order. Recent constructivist scholarship on norm contestation points to pre-existent norms and normative beliefs as determining actors' perception of the legitimacy of new international norms. The English School and empirical justice research point in a similar vein to collectively held ideas of justice as motives for norm contestation. Drawing on process tracing, qualitative content analysis, and expert interviews, this article analyses the negotiations on R2P in 2005 and compares the results with the further development of R2P within the un General Assembly. The article thereby illustrates that conflicts over individual vis-à-vis statist entitlements and over procedural justice remained unresolved during the emergence of R2P in 2005 and are now hampering the further evolution and implementation of the norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on arguments advanced in a new book on the idea of 'special responsibilities' in world politics, this article brings to the foreground what is often in the background of R2P debates. Specifically, it explores how far a special responsibilities frame can bridge the gap between the 'permissive' character of the R2P regime and the cosmopolitan desire to see decisive humanitarian rescue as an obligation. Special responsibilities also provides an opening to consider the other side of the register, namely, how the burdens and costs of intervention should be distributed. To date, it is realists who have raised such questions; I argue that, constructivists need to address them too. With better burden-sharing arrangements related to special responsibilities, great powers will be more inclined to accept the further movement of R2P in the direction of an obligatory regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ease of R2P calls for greater attention to agency and feedback in norm dynamics. New international norms are more likely to spread if the responsibility for their creation and diffusion is seen to have been more broadly shared than being credited to any particular group. Many new norms have multiple sources and contexts, yet there is a tendency to credit them to their final point of articulation. Moreover, once created, norms do not remain uncontested and static. The application of new norms in different locations and contexts can lead to their subsequent modifications, which in turn can reshape its initial features and support mechanisms. This feedback constitutes a form of agency, which might broaden the legitimacy and appeal of the norm and the possibility of its greater diffusion. The case of R2P shows that although it is generally attributed to the work of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, the norm had multiple prior sources, including the idea of 'responsible sovereignty'. Furthermore, its development has had a strong African context. Lastly, subsequent controversies over the norm's application, especially in Libya, attests to the possibility of critical feedback, such as calls for stricter enforcement of the norm's criteria of last resort and proportionality, and greater accountability in operations conducted in defence of the norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States and Iran have been estranged for over thirty years. Conventional wisdom in the US holds that Iran is chiefly responsible given its threatening actions and harsh rhetoric. Yet, between 1990 and 2003, Iran presented successive American presidents with opportunities for rapprochement. Each declined to fully seize the opportunity. Why? This article posits the causal significance of ideas and discourse in the United States. What the author calls the Iran Narrative is comprised of the vast collection of frames, myths, caricatures, news reports, "expert" analyses, and ideas that cohere and portray Iran as a uniquely evil, hostile, and irrational enemy of the United States. Domestic actors leverage the Narrative to increase the political costs and reduce the normative desirability of rapprochement with Iran. Perceptions of high political cost and low normative desirability dissuade American presidents from more actively pursuing engagement with Iran. In this article, the author tests the evidence for the existence of an Iran Narrative through a media content analysis and suggests that the Narrative has causal significance for policy decisions. Further explication of the Narrative is an interdisciplinary task that ought to leverage the tools of political science, psychology, anthropology, and other fields. The policy implications of the Iran Narrative are critical. If the Narrative does, indeed, constrain American presidents from taking bold risks for peace with Iran, then a fuller explication and deconstruction of the Iran Narrative is a necessary condition of rapprochement between Washington and Tehran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Public diplomacy's scholarship and practice are evolving and seeking to adapt to the expanding interests, expectations, connectivity and mobility of the publics that have come to define the field in an organic fashion. The characteristic distinction between international and domestic publics as the key to defining the practice of public diplomacy is increasingly challenged by public audiences that are no longer constrained by such traditional delineations. The attention on the involvement of domestic publics in public diplomacy, or its domestic dimension, has to be understood within this context. This article aims to cast further light on public diplomacy's domestic dimension, with Canada and Australia - two countries that have much in common - as the launch pads for discussion. The article's first section investigates the approach and development of public diplomacy's domestic dimension in both countries and draws out the similarities and differences. The second section identifies the opportunities, challenges and tendencies in its practice as well as the conceptual implications. The article finds that while differences in approach remain, Canada and Australia have more in common than not when it comes to involving domestic audiences in international policy, especially in recent years. Their practice of public diplomacy's domestic dimension appears to be resilient and adaptive in nature, although it has been subject to fluctuations resulting from changes in the political climate, leadership styles and governmental preferences, and resource availability. Additionally, reconceptualizing public diplomacy with a domestic dimension and constructivist underpinnings opens the window on norms that are taken for granted in diplomacy and offers the potential for a more inclusive view and practice - a better fit for its time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the "Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings '0.10'" (1915) as a key moment when Russian painters began to work seriously in three dimensions, exploring the nature of materials, questioning the relationship between art and reality, and ultimately laying the foundation for the subsequent emergence of the Constructivist movement. The exhibition revealed an important strand in Russian creative thinking and practice concerning sculpture and the nature of artistic materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a startling and meteoric rise to fame, Arab Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid is one of the most sought after and in-demand architects of the twenty-first century. Hadid's work, which often defies description, draws on a diverse palette of influences including Soviet Constructivism, Suprematism, and what her colleague Patrick Shumacher has termed 'Parametricism'. At the same time, Hadid's work ? she studied under Rem Koolhaas ? is infused on multiple levels with her Arab culture and identity. Originally more famous for her designs and un-built works, those which have been constructed or are on the verge of completion span the globe from China to Azerbaijan to Europe, the US and ? more recently ? the Arab world. She is the recipient of some of architecture?s most prestigious awards including the Pritzker Prize. Simultaneously, Hadid has met with controversy and obstacles to her single-minded approach to design and utilization of space in both Europe and the Arab world. This article contains previously unpublished interviews ? which examine her approach to form and space, her relation to computer-assisted design, as well as her Iraqi identity ? undertaken with Zaha Hadid by the author over a decade, as well as photographs and illustrations of her paradigmatic work that pose serious challenges and hurdles for structural engineers and builders, while engaging all those who view or encounter them to assess their own relation to space and concepts of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas the entrance of the monochrome into modern art has typically been understood in light of movements in contemporary art and aesthetic theory following in its wake, this essay seeks to understand the motivations for, and the effect of, the monochrome in the work of Aleksandr Rodchenko in 1921 in reference to Plato's analysis of pure pleasure and absolute beauty in the Philebus. I argue that Rodchenko and Plato were motivated by a shared project to contend with the aesthetic and psychological effects of figurative semblance, or what Socrates calls the phantasm, in order to harmonize human perception with the world of sensuous material objects. It is in this shared project, I contend, that Rodchenko's strategy is to be understood as a kind of materialist Platonism that, when viewed phenomenologically, reveals Plato's objects of absolute beauty to be, in the context of industrial capitalism and the crisis of perception that Benjamin, among others, saw as its consequence, sites of loss and meaninglessness for modern consciousness, yet sites which nonetheless contain emancipatory potential for a social order that has been systematically alienated from itself and its environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article concentrates on experimental dance movements of the outside of the Ballets Russes, especially the danse plastique, in St. Petersburg, Munich, and Moscow. Particular attention is paid to the innovative interpretations of Salomé and analogous subjects by Ida Rubinstein, Alexander Sacharoff, Lev Lukin, and Kasian Goleizovsky. Reference is made to the persistence of the Symbolist esthetic in dance of the 1910s and to pictorial renderings of the various performances by artists such as Léon Bakst, Marianne Werefkin, and Boris Erdman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid rise of the responsibility to protect provides us with a unique opportunity to consider the impact of a decade or so of determined norm entrepreneurship. The responsibility to protect has not yet become a binding norm of international law, and in this article we examine what factors are holding back or promoting this development. We draw on an 'interactional' account of international law, which focuses on three inter-locking elements. First, legal norms are social norms and as such they are connected to social practice – they must be grounded in shared understandings. Second, what distinguishes law from other types of social ordering is not so much form or pedigree, as adherence to specific criteria of legality. When norm creation meets these criteria and, third, is matched with norm application that also satisfies the legality requirements, international law will have legitimacy and generate a sense of commitment among those to whom it is addressed. After highlighting key steps in the norm building process so far, from the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty to the General Assembly debate in 2009, we offer a brief sketch of our theoretical framework, and employ it to examine the trajectory of the responsibility to protect norm, concluding with an assessment of its current and potential status as binding law. Although the responsibility to protect, including its potential for the collectively authorized use of force, is increasingly supported by globally shared understandings, the norm falls short on several of the legality criteria. Furthermore, given the inconsistent practice on protective use of force, no practice of legality can be said to have evolved. Proponents of the norm face a lot of hard work ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hume and contemporary Humeans contend that moral sentiments form the sole and sufficient basis of moral judgments. This thesis is criticized by appeal to Hume's theory of justice, which shows that basic principles of justice are required to form and to maintain society, which is indispensable to human life, and that acting according to, or violating, these principles is right, or wrong, regardless of anyone's sentiments, motives or character. Furthermore, Hume's theory of justice shows how the principles of justice are artificial without being arbitrary. In this regard, Hume's theory belongs to the unjustly neglected modern natural law tradition. Some key merits of this strand in Hume's theory are explicated by linking it to Kant's constructivist method of identifying and justifying practical principles (à la O'Neill), and by showing how and why Hegel adopted and further developed Kant's constructivism by re-integrating it with Hume's central natural law concern with our actual social practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the concept of pace in social interaction in order to gain traction for explaining the conditions and consequences of diplomatic activity. Two recent analyses related to diplomacy and pace are reconsidered. In the First World War case, the different environments in which Maurice Paléologue and Wilhelm von Schoen were socialized regarding the pace of diplomatic activity explain the selection of particular activities and objectives. In the 2001 EP-3 case, the mediation of tension between the United States and China is explained through the interpretive process of understanding diplomatic action, which includes particular notions of pace. Because this article specifies the continuities that make identification of accommodation and resistance possible, it is part of a growing body of literature that urges researchers to consider normal practice and what meanings are constituted by them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international community has responded to the crisis in Darfur in a seemingly haphazard manner. Yet, a closer examination reveals a complex normative environment where states must respond to three related, but sometimes conflicting, sets of human rights norms – the responsibility to protect, international criminal justice, and humanitarianism. Using competing theoretical explanations of state behaviour – those based on self-interest and those based on norms – allows us to examine the relationship between these norms and map the international response to Darfur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]