The European Union's (EU) proposed Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) underscores that the introduction of climate-motivated trade measures is no longer just a matter of academic debate. With countries ramping up domestic climate action at different speeds and levels of ambition, the likelihood of other countries following the EU's lead and adopting a border carbon adjustment (BCA)1 of their own will only increase. International cooperation can help avoid a fragmented landscape of varying BCA designs, mitigate concerns about trade protectionism, and ensure that the further development of BCAs leads to stronger global action on climate change. Some countries have begun to show an interest in pursuing international cooperation involving joint trade measures through “climate clubs.” Yet such international cooperation also raises new questions concerning the legal form, the forum through which cooperation should be pursued, and the (normative) substance of any international agreement on BCAs. The answers to these questions matter not only for the development and implementation of BCAs, but may also affect the future trajectory of the international legal regime for climate change and trade.

The climate is changing, and so is climate diplomacy. Global treaties may be failing, while unilateral actions are proving to be contentious both within the climate and the trade regime. At the same time, countries need to be given the right incentives to participate in the fight against climate change and to start curbing their emissions substantially. The European Union's (EU) decision to introduce a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and the momentum around carbon pricing may be the perfect opportunity to revisit these ideas in the form of clubs. What if small groups of countries got together and set the pace for a new era in climate diplomacy? What if they relied on trade measures to do so? Clubs are not new in international law, let alone in international climate law. Compared to global approaches, they may avoid freeriding; compared to unilateral ones, they may reduce the risk of trade frictions. And not all major emitters need to participate right away. As few as two parties could start a climate club, a sort of club within the club, gradually catalyzing or influencing action on climate change. In this essay, we argue that climate clubs enable like-minded countries to assume more ambitious commitments and gradually pull in other countries with them.

In “Making Sense of Security,” J. Benton Heath convincingly argues that the concept of security should be understood as a struggle for epistemic authority. Heath develops a comprehensive typology that helps to understand the processes through which people make sense of the term security, while it also helps identifying the legal and political practices involved. However, as he rightly observes, these approaches to security are “not stable equilibria but rather more like quantum states, in which each type contains the potential for the others.”1 Global counterterrorism law powerfully illustrates this evolution. In particular, the growing field of preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) reveals a flow of security conceptions, including realist, widened, and discursive security. Applying Heath's typology to this field shows that evolving rationales have set in motion normative practices, which are difficult to trace from within a traditional international security law framework. In their relational modes, such practices aim at turning risks into opportunities, thus denoting that one's security is the other's perpetuation of insecurities. The recourse to resilience as a technique of counterterrorism governance that instrumentalizes shared and emerging social identities and practices in order to prevent extremism, contributes to the entrenchment of an ever-expanding security apparatus. But it is precisely by resorting to social life—unpredictable as it is—that resilience becomes a quantum state itself, which bears potential for disruption.

Claims to security are everywhere. They are used by states to justify invading other nations1 and to derogate from international law obligations.2 They are invoked by governments as reasons to exclude foreign nationals from their territory;3 surveil their citizens;4 and kill citizens and foreigners alike by remote control.5 Some experts use security claims to underscore the seriousness of global threats, like COVID-19.6 Security claims are also used by communities to defend their rights and well-being from those threatening them, including the state itself.7 Still others criticize the use of security discourse—in at least some circumstances—describing it as undermining the rule of law.8 Embedded within these claims is a view about whose security matters most—something that is also implicitly reflected in J. Benton Heath's four-part typology of security claims described in his recent article, “Making Sense of Security.”9 This essay explores the importance of whose security matters to Heath's framework. It does so by examining one political movement currently challenging the U.S. national security state. This movement is led by members of groups targeted and disadvantaged by U.S. national security policies—namely, Muslim, African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian communities. In that movement's recently released policy agenda, Abolishing the War on Terror & Building Communities of Care: A Grassroots Policy Agenda for the Biden-Harris Administration and 117th Congress (Abolishing the War on Terror), 10 its leaders call for abolishing the national security state and the War on Terror that it birthed.11

In “Making Sense of Security,” J. Benton Heath pushes the reader to tangle with two unresolved foundational questions about the use of security in international law: who decides questions of security, and on what grounds.1 This essay examines the role of race in both of those questions, identifying structures and mechanisms of racial subordination that must be surfaced to fully make sense of security.2 In particular, it foregrounds the tension between reformist reforms and abolitionist reforms to which Heath makes reference. By rendering visible the historical and contemporary work performed by white supremacy in security, this essay seeks to elucidate and problematize that dilemma. Rather than retaining the exclusionary security frame, a turn to solidarity offers the possibility of a more inclusive approach to international law that creates connection based on our shared humanity.

Should the climate change crisis be framed in security terms? Many argue that it is dangerous to treat non-military threats as security issues. Such “securitization” is associated with the expansion of executive power and the exercise of exceptional measures involving the suspension of individual rights, secrecy, state violence, and a weakening of the rule of law. Nonetheless, climate change has already been identified as a security issue by many government agencies and international institutions.1 But, as J. Benton Heath explores in “Making Sense of Security,” the very concept of security is both ambiguous and contested.2 There are different and competing ideas about what it means, when, and by whom it should be invoked, the kinds of law and policy responses it should trigger, and, crucially, who gets to decide these questions. Heath argues that differing approaches to security reflect deeper struggles over whose knowledge matters in identifying and responding to security threats. He develops a typology for assessing these different approaches, and the implications they have for international law and institutions. But, while he notes that climate change is precisely one of those issues around which there are competing security claims, he leaves to others the question of whether, or how, to frame climate change in security terms. This essay takes up that question, continuing the inquiry into how best to understand the concept of security, and how Heath's typology helps think about the question. It argues that it may indeed be important to frame climate change in security terms, but as a matter of global security rather than national security.

In this essay, I analyze how feminist work on security is read and understood, where it is located, and the relationship between feminist scholarship and conceptions of security pluralism. I pick up J. Benton Heath's argument that “pluralist security” is a good tool to address widened security agendas and to decolonize international law.1 I also develop Heath's account of “widened security”—which he associates with feminist security studies and with the women, peace, and security agenda—to argue that making feminist sense of widened security requires distinguishing between which feminist knowledge is incorporated into international law and the larger corpus of feminist work.2 I use feminist analysis as a tool for examining, and responding to, the structural inequalities within law, starting with gender, but expanding to intersectional3 and postcolonial feminist insight.4 This approach facilitates the deployment of gender as co-constituted through adjunct vectors of inequality, including, but not limited to, race, sexuality, ableism, or class, as well as the legacies of empire.5

The end of the Cold War wrought a shift in international legal priorities and preoccupations, including among feminists. When feminist approaches to international law, particularly to human rights and humanitarian law, began to make headway in the early 1990s, they had already left behind some of the anti-imperial and anti-military emphases of much of the internationally informed feminism of the 1970s and 80s. Here, I revisit some of those Cold War feminist approaches, with the hope of informing today's much-needed international legal attention to peace, disarmament—including nuclear disarmament—and global inequality.

Rescuing the “other woman” has been an intractable feature of international and human rights legal interventions. This rescue narrative configures the “other woman,” invariably third world or from the Global South, as left behind in the movement toward progress and modernity. Part of the solution envisages the rescue and incorporation of the “other woman” into liberal rights discourse—the teleological endpoint of emancipation. Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and postcolonial feminist critiques have exposed the racial and civilizational discourses that shape these rescue missions and the epistemic violence they engender. Using the example of the military invasion and occupation of Afghanistan from 2001–2021, I demonstrate how these discourses persist in contemporary women's human rights agendas and the carceral and securitized logics that they serve. I discuss the need to delink rights from rescue missions and the epistemic shifts required to move the critique in a meaningful and productive direction.

Advancing the goals of feminist international law in the twenty-first century requires renewed commitment to universality, and a deft multi-directionality. The iconic 1989 demonstration organized by British Asian women in support of the writer Salman Rushdie, condemned to death by a fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeini, provides a helpful metaphor. Campaigners from Southall Black Sisters and Women Against Fundamentalism led the protest carrying signs proclaiming: “A Women's Place Is in the World,” and “Our Tradition Is Struggle, Not Submission.”1 The women stood between two groups of men: a phalanx of British Muslim fundamentalist demonstrators denouncing Rushdie and calling for blasphemy laws, and white far right National Front protestors who opposed those fundamentalists with racist rhetoric. The women human rights defenders (WHRDs) challenged both groups of men, were threatened by both. Though encircled, they were determined to create their own space for multi-directional resistance.

In The Boundaries of International Law: A Feminist Critique (Boundaries),1 amidst observations about masculine bias in treaty law, co-authors Christine Chinkin and Hilary Charlesworth queried the masculine configuration, i.e., the gender of jus cogens or peremptory norms. A peremptory norm is “accepted and recognized by the international community . . . as a norm from which no derogation is permitted and which can be modified only by a subsequent norm of international law having the same character.”2 Interrogating whether jus cogens privileged the experiences of males over that of females, they challenged jus cogens’ presumed universality and its intended utility. Accepted peremptory norms, they averred, exerted a silencing, deleterious impact on core feminine values such as sexual equality or freedom from gender discrimination.3 Decades after the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties’ (VCLT) codification of jus cogens, the International Law Commission (ILC) reified a non-exhaustive list of peremptory norms that explicitly excluded gender-based discrimination.4 This essay proposes a “jus cogens redux” to revive Chinkin and Charlesworth's question by peering at several threads in the thwarted conversations about whether freedom from gender discrimination rises to peremptory norm status. The conversational threads lay tattered by positive law's reliance on enumerated treaty provisions and accepted precepts of customary international law. They are frayed by normative law's philosophical, moralists’ approach. Neither the positivist law nor the normative law's concepts of how to determine jus cogens values grapples with gender or gender minorities. By default, each retains a masculine approach that configures the gender of jus cogens as “non-female.”

América Latina siempre ha sido central para la configuración, interpretación y operación del campo de la justicia transicional. Empezando a fines de la década de 1980 con las contribuciones de juristas interesados en las transiciones democráticas luego de las dictaduras en el Cono Sur, la firma del Acuerdo de Paz en Guatemala en 1996, y la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación en Perú, hasta el caso más reciente de Colombia, la academia y el activismo en América Latina han contribuido de manera significativa a la teoría y práctica de la justicia transicional. Este ensayo explora una cuestión central para los procesos recientes de justicia transicional: la interacción y posibles contradicciones entre el objetivo de poner fin a un conflicto interno violento y las demandas que impone el Derecho internacional. Colombia sirve como ejemplo, en tanto el caso colombiano está informado por todas las experiencias anteriores, pero también porque es el primer proceso de justicia transicional que se desarrolla en la región desde la entrada en vigor de la Corte Penal Internacional. Si bien el proceso colombiano aún está siendo implementado, y es demasiado pronto para definir su éxito o fracaso, ofrece un punto de vista importante acerca de las interacciones difíciles, complejas y profundas entre el Derecho internacional, la paz interna y la justicia transicional. Este ensayo explora así la manera como los actores locales y externos involucrados en la negociación e implementación del Acuerdo presentaron el Derecho internacional como si fuera unívoco y universal, como si no hubiese interpretaciones en competencia dentro de la disciplina, y como si fuera neutral en relación con las discusiones políticas internas. Sobre la base de este análisis, el ensayo busca arrojar luz acerca de los usos ideológicos del Derecho internacional.

Latin America has always been central to the configuration, interpretation, and operation of the field of transitional justice. Starting in the late 1980s with contributions from scholars interested in democratic transitions after dictatorships in the Southern Cone, the 1996 signing of the Peace Agreement in Guatemala, and the Truth Commission in Peru, to the more recent case of Colombia, Latin American academics and activists have contributed significantly to the theory and practice of transitional justice. This essay explores a question central to recent transitional justice processes: the interaction and possible contradictions between the aim of ending a violent internal conflict and the demands imposed by international law. Colombia serves as an example. The Colombian case is informed by all previous experiences, but it is also novel because it is the first transitional justice process established in the region since the establishment of the International Criminal Court. Although the Colombian process is still being implemented and it is too early to claim its success or failure, the case offers important insights into the tense, complex, and overarching interactions between international law, internal peace, and transitional justice. This essay explores how local and external actors involved in negotiating and implementing the agreement presented international law as if it were univocal and universal, as if there were no competing interpretations within the discipline, and as if it were neutral in relation to local political discussions. Building upon this analysis, the goal is to shed light upon the ideological uses of international law.

A comienzos del siglo veinte, al celebrarse la primera reunión del entonces recién creado Instituto Americano de Derecho Internacional, juristas de distintos países adoptaron una declaración que estipulaba que “el derecho internacional es a la vez nacional e internacional”1. Casi cien años después, si hay un aspecto del Derecho internacional que tiene un rasgo distintivamente latinoamericano, y que da cuenta de la idea acuñada en esa Declaración, es el Derecho internacional de los derechos humanos. Desde la adopción de la Declaración Americana de de los Derechos y Deberes del Hombre, en 1948, y especialmente a partir de la década de los cincuenta, con la creación de la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, y luego con la adopción de la Convención Americana sobre Derechos Humanos, en 1969, los derechos fundamentales han sido, son y todo indica que seguirán siendo un proceso y fenómeno radicalmente regional del Derecho internacional. Este ensayo analiza, a través del desarrollo de la jurisprudencia de la Corte Interamericana, la manera como se ha construido el Derecho transnacional de los derechos humanos en América Latina, con la formación del sistema interamericano, hasta las formas peculiares de interacción e influencia entre el Derecho internacional y el Derecho constitucional. Revisando la jurisprudencia reciente sobre justiciabilidad de derechos sociales, el ensayo muestra cómo la idea de un derecho común de los derechos humanos presenta dificultades que deben atenderse si se quiere tomar en serio el carácter transnacional de los derechos humanos en la región.

In 1916, at the first meeting of the then newly created American Institute of International Law, jurists from different countries adopted a declaration stipulating that “[i]nternational law is at one and the same time both national and international.”1 A century later, Latin American international human rights law clearly reflects that idea. Since the adoption of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man in 1948, and especially since the 1950s, with the creation of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and later with the adoption of the American Convention on Human Rights in 1969, human rights in Latin America have been, are, and will continue to be an essentially regional phenomenon of international law. By examining the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ case law, this essay analyzes the way in which Latin America has articulated transnational human rights law, from the establishment of the inter-American system, to the distinctive forms of interaction and influence between international law and constitutional law. Drawing from recent jurisprudence on social rights, this essay shows that the idea of a Latin American common law of human rights—an idea that has become highly influential in the past decade—is an example of the outer limits of the potential integration. As such, the idea presents challenges that must be addressed in order for regional human rights to realize their full potential as transnational norms.

En marzo de 2021, la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos (en adelante, “Corte IDH”) resolvió el caso Vicky Hernández y otras vs. Honduras, en el que se condenó al Estado hondureño por el asesinato de Vicky Hernández, una mujer trans defensora de derechos humanos1. Esta sentencia es muy relevante para el sistema interamericano por ser la primera que a nivel internacional aplica un tratado específico de protección de derechos humanos de las mujeres para proteger a una mujer trans. De allí que permite analizar la interpelación que el debate feminista viene haciendo al sistema binario de protección de derechos en la región y en el mundo. En este ensayo, defenderé la decisión mayoritaria de la Corte frente a sus votos disidentes, sosteniendo que el sujeto político de los derechos humanos (incluido el feminista) es dinámico y emergente y, en consecuencia, el derecho y los derechos positivizados están a la retaguardia de las luchas por el reconocimiento y, por tanto, sometidos a constante interpelación y necesidad de cambio. Por esta razón, se requieren interpretaciones evolutivas e incluyentes de los derechos, que empujen a la desestabilización del sistema jurídico binario y, con ello, a su transformación en clave igualitaria e interseccional.