PROVINCE OF INTERNATIONAL LAWS DETERMINED

[A]. State Sovereignty

[B.] Changes And Continuity In The International System

[C.] The International Court of Justice (ICJ)

[A.] The global order

[B.] On Peace-keeping attempts of the UN

[C.] THE RULE OF LAW

04. PURSUIT OF JUSTICE

[A.] Institutional Authority

[B.] Political Agency

We can see that the United Nations is an organization that is fully set up for some ideal purposes such as setting up of international peace and security atmosphere among the states who are the member of the UN system. In the international standards and among the various peace-keeping organizations, we can see that the efforts of the UN are highly appreciable and on various counts they could be said to be aiming towards the development of the international laws and the peace at the international level. In the various sectors of the study, we have found that the UN system is primarily concerned of the growing needs of the international society and is also aimed at the incorporation of the policy of equal participation among the various states of the international community. We the peoples of the United Nations can say that there is one organization which is primarily aimed at the establishment of the international standards at the international level. In the various researches for the analysis of the works and the attempts of the UN, it has been shown that the UN is the most concerned organization regarding the peace and higher development of the world in some prospect which could be highly useful for the world.

The international laws in the current aspects as viewed by most of the jurists round the globe are the laws that govern the relations of the nations with each other and the control over the individualism and freedom of these democratic as well as otherwise nations. the international laws are thought to be the governing machineries of the contemporary scenario in which the accountability of the nations for the most inhumane crimes being done by them are brought to the court. in the various books that talk of "taking the state to court" and the "mobilization" standards of the present F1 generations are being expressly interviewed. These scholar works tend to connote that the international laws are the tools that can limit the future dangers of the international insecurity and other problems of colonization etc.  faced by most of the nations of the world. These nations are threatened by the superpowers for being forced to remove their ruling strategy. The United Nations has done several peacekeeping operations and has set various organizations that intend to store the peace and spirit of coordination and cooperation in the world. The theories of the international laws that are found to be dealing with the origin and the gradual development of the international laws have been asked a lot of questions as the race for hegemony is on the peak. Growing problems of racism and international terrorism are the new challenges being faced by the international laws today. This article presents various such aspects and put the suggestions for their solutions under one umbrella. The first question before everyone is this that "what are the international laws and what purpose do they serve for humanity and international peace?" This is the most critical question that corresponds to the enforcement of international and the limits of the international courts of justice being determined. We know that the function of the national laws is to regulate the behavior of the individuals but when we intend to talk of the international laws, the shoes of individuals are wore by the states. What if the international laws are the vanishing point of the world? It is well known to the students of the international laws that the primary function of the international law is to regulate the conduct of the states while on the other hand the national laws intend to regulate the conduct of the individuals. If we examine the contours on which the body of international law is explained we could easily derive the conclusion that most of the allegations that are imposed upon the rule of international laws are concerning their applicability or jurisdiction in one way or the other. Thus the international laws are to be made more binding and the forces that provide sanctioning power to such laws are to be extending to ensure the desired obedience. The identity of the international laws another such aspect that is necessary to limit the province of international laws. The state and non-sate actors are also the key aspects that correspond to the applicability of the international laws. We here mean the kinds of acts performed by the international superpowers and other small newly independent states. In various cases of hegemonic expansion and colonialism, it could be traced that the war-crimes and crimes against humanity are recorded.

In the contemporary growth of the international law, the growing awareness among the people of the various countries has led to the introduction of the concept of public interest litigation which has increased and widened the opportunities that even the states could be brought under the jurisdiction of the courts. In a study by the German philosopher "Hans Dembowski", it has been concluded that the growing political unfairness and other political reasoning have led to the introduction of Judicial Activism which has led to the growth of the power and abilities accompanied with the authoritativeness of the judiciary. International laws deal with the sociology of governance and in this respect connote to the division of power between the administrative and judicial branches of the government and their interaction with society as a whole in the particular cases that have been studied. The ongoing, excited media debate about the public interest litigation and judicial activism makes this evident. This function has typical stand point in certain countries of the world. The international arena on which various countries are brought on the same standard in the international court are is seemingly an attempt to ensure fairness and security in the international contour. Let us have a look over the two important aspects that have been the focus of study in the international society.

Sovereignty, for the past several centuries, has been the foundation of interstate relations and the world order. The concept- defined as the independent and unfettered power of a state in its jurisdiction-lies at the heart of the customary international law and the UN charter. It remains both an essential component of the maintenance of international peace and security and a defense for weak states against the strong. At the same time, the concept has never been as inviolable, either in law or in practice, as a formal legal definition might imply. In his 1992 An agenda for peace, UN secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali pronounced that the theory of sovereignty never matched the reality. In exploring why the westphalian sovereignty is continuously ignored or violated, Stephen Kraser has noted straightforwardly that "organized hypocrisy is the normal state of affairs. Sovereignty has routinely been violated by the powerful. In today’s globalizing world, it is generally recognized that cultural, economic influences neither respect borders nor require entry visas in both powerful and the powerless countries. The concept of state sovereignty is well envisaged in the legal and the political discourse, but territorial boundaries have come under the stress. Not only technology but also communications have made the boundaries permeable, but the political dimensions of the internal disorder and suffering often can result in wider international disorder. The initial purpose of this discussion is to set out the scope and significance of state sovereignty as a foundation on which to explore the contemporary debates about intervention. The literature on this subject is vast and contentious. As one legal analyst accurately summarizes:

Few subjects in the international law and international relations are as sensitive as the notion of sovereignty. Steinberger refers to it in the Encyclopedia of Public International Law as "the most glittering and controversial notion in the history, doctrine and the practice of the international law." On the other hand, Henkin seeks to banish it from our vocabulary and others call it " a word that has emotive quality lacking meaningful specific content". There is little neutral ground when it comes to sovereignty. State sovereignty denotes the competence, independence and legal equality of the states. The concept is normally used to encompass all matters in which each state is permitted by international law to decide and act without intrusions from the other sovereign states. The scope of freedom of choice in these matters is not unlimited; it depends upon developments in international law and in international relations. The current foundations of the international law with regard to sovereignty were shaped by the agreements concluded by the European states as part of the treaties of Westphalia in 1648. the 1993 Montevideo Convention On Rights and Duties of States spells out the following main essentials: a permanent population, a defined territory, a functioning government, and the ability to enter into relations with the other states. The Montevideo definition includes both empirical (population and effective government) and juridical (borders and independence) components. There is a controversy regarding the accurate sovereignty of the states in Africa which has been the problem in the enforcement of the principles of the convention. These states are sovereign de jure but not de facto. As a hallmark of statehood, the territorial sovereignty is a must in the international system. An act of aggression is unlawful for two reasons: it undermines the international order, and states have exercised their sovereignty to outlaw war in the UN charter. The failure or the weakening of the state capacity brings tragedies and international insecurity. In sum, sovereignty is the key constitutional safeguard of the contemporary international order. Despite the pluralisation of the international relations resulting from the proliferation of the non-state actors which is evidenced by globalization, democratizationand privatization worldwide- the sate remains the fundamental guarantor of human rights locally as well as building block of international society.

Instead of the heavy recommendations on the maintenance and enforcement of sovereignty among the states, this constitutional aspect of every nation is subject to limitation in the statements of the United Nations which have dealt heavily upon the matters concerning the world peace and a definite civil order in the international community. These limitations are as described under:-

Firstly, the charter of the United Nations contains collective international obligations for the maintenance of international peace and security. According to Chapter VII, sovereignty is not a barrier to Security Council action in response to " a threat to peace, a breach of the peace or an act of aggression."

Secondly, sovereignty may be limited by customary international law and treaties. States are responsible for their international obligations, and therefore sovereignty cannot be an excuse for not performing the duties to which they have agreed sovereignty thus carries with it responsibilities to protect the persons and property, as well as to regulate political and economic affairs. Sovereignty cannot shield internal violations of Human rights that contradict the international obligations. It has been evident in the pages of history that in a no of cases, the Security Council endorsed the use of military force for the protection of the populations in the states which were caught in the throes of war.

Limits to the sovereignty are widely accepted-its erosion by economic, cultural and environmental factors, for example, or by customary law and voluntarily agreed treaty obligations. But Annan’s assertion of popular sovereignty was a far more radical challenge. It joined three other threats to traditional notions of state sovereignty that arose in the 1990s and are relevant for our consideration of humanitarian intervention: the right of self-determination, a broadband conception of international peace and security; and the collapse of state authority. In spite of significant change, the international system reflects substantial continuities: in centrality of state decision making and the lack of any changes overriding central authority. But situating the nature of changes and continuities is the task of political analysis and judgment. However, after the end of the cold war, these situations changed to a great extent. Firstly, the soviet union became a superpower in which Russia led the legal status of USSR, including a permanent seat on the Security Council, but 14 other states were created by the implosion of the former soviet union. Shortly, thereafter, Yugoslavia broke up into six independent states, with Serbia and Montenegro later forming the republic of Yugoslavia. Contemporary politics in developing countries is conditioned by the legacy of colonialism. The second challenge is that the broadening interpretation of threats to international peace and security, the charter’s only enshrined license to override the principle of noninterference. The third challenge was to the traditional interpretations of the sovereignty has arisen because of the incapacity of some states to exercise effective authority over their authorities and populations, a topic that is dealt extensively by the international community. For these states sovereignty is a legal fiction which never matches to reality. The political vacuum leads to the nonstate actors taking matters into their own hands and is usually accompanied by the forced displacement of the people. The United Nations confronts the same constraints today as the diplomats and politicians have since time immemorial, and certainly since the beginning of the modern efforts at the multilateral cooperation in the 19^{th century.}

The international court of justice even though working for the enforcement of the principles behind the objective of maintenance of peace among the states of the world have been posed by various questions that are the critical areas of thought that concern the epistemology behind the working of the international courts. The states which are prosecuted in the court suffer from various discriminations and differentiations. The trials that are governed or were carried out at Nuremberg etc. follow the traditional principles i.e. TRC Act, 1995. This method has been given the name "Victor’s Justice". The victor prosecuting the accused in his own sort of understanding and reasoning is clearly presenting the breaking of the basic norm of the law that "nobody could be a judge in his cause". This method of trial was applied in the Saddam’s trial when USA attacked it after it had the security threats from Iraq that it possessed nuclear weapons of mass destruction. The differentiation and the discrimination which has been done against Saddam have been, clearly witnessed by the world that dreams of making a new world order that involves the concept of Justice. The influence of Gandhian thought is clearly visible in the TRC Act. The basic problem is that most of the overwhelming systems of justice of the contemporary world are penal, and having very less imports of the impressions of peace. There the troublesome atmosphere prevails in the international level. It imposes stress upon the mind that what does the phrase "Taking the state to court" means. The solution is thus provided:

Democracy as a norm and the promotion of democracy as an activity has become far more deeply embedded within international society in various ways. In the first place, there has been an enormous expansion in the involvement of the UN and regional organization in elections. Electoral assistance has become an established part of UN activities and has also led to development of a broad transnational and trans-governmental network of electoral assistance, party support, and monitoring.second, external actors have routinely become involved in democracy promotion as a result of the expansion in the number and scope of peacekeeping operations, whose multi dimensional character came in many places to include human rights and democracy as well as demilitarization, refugee protection and state-building. In the cases of direct international administration of territory, the assumption of the sovereign power involved both transitional administration and also democratic regime-building. Third, democratic membership criteria have been established in two regions, and, in the case of Europe, democracy, human rights, and minority rights have all played a central part of the process of EU enlargement, the conditionality policies of the EU, and its extensive programme of member-state building. Finally, an increasing body of academic writing has opened up the idea of a legal right to democratic governance. The normative expansion of the international society to include democracy was also driven by political factors. Although there were references to ‘democratic’ rights in UN Declaration, the conditions of the cold war meant that formal incorporation of political democracy into the human rights system was politically impossible. This changed as a result of the wave of transitions from authoritarian rule in Southern Europe and the developing world in the late 1970s and 1980s; and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; by the liberal self-confidence that followed the ending of cold war and the belief that liberal democracy and free markets were sweeping the world; and the consolidation of the place of democracy in US foreign policy. Two broader shifts need to be highlighted, both of which link academic analysis and political perceptions. The first concerns the progress of democratic change and the possibilities of democratization. During the cold war, Western governments were suspicious that the political change would be destabilizing, bringing to power either those who would ally themselves with the Soviet Union or who would challenge western economic interests. Democratization then carried with it some counter-hegemonic potential. It is also widely held in Western capitals and amongst the private sector that authoritarian governments were most suited to promoting economic development. Many academicians argued that, in any case, democracy required a wide range of ‘prerequisites’ that were lacking in many postcolonial societies. The wave of transition that began in Southern Europe and Latin America in the late 1970s ushered in a striking reassessment: democratization becomes the norm rather than the exception; the exception is of generally forward movement; and the democratization appears to be easier and less problematic than had been previously believed. A post-cold war world meant that unstable and potentially oppositional regimes could no longer look to the Soviet Union. And a globalized world meant that economic nationalism was no longer and option. The trade-offs between uncertain democratization, security interests, and economic preferences were apparently easing and a strong sense of difficulties of democracy gave way to an increased sense of ‘possiblism’. The conversion by the mid 1980s of US foreign policy was retold through a different lens that stressed the country’s historic mission to extend and promote democracy. The other important shift in thinking reflected the allegedly proven link between democracy and peace. Democratic peace theory builds on long tradition writing on international relations, often associated with Kant. However, it only formed one part of Kant’s political thought and had already become a liberal commonplace by the end of the 18th century. Other precursors of modern DPT include Karl Deutsch’s writing in the 1950s on security communities- groups of states in which there is real assurance that the members of that community will not fight each other physically but will settle their disputes in some other way. Overlooked or neglected by many studies of war causation, it became a major theme both of academic writing on international relations and of political and public debate on the nature of the post-cold war international order. Theorists argue that two sets of casual factors are important in explaining the democratic peace. In the first place, the structural constraints of democratic institutions and of democratic politics make it difficult or even impossible for war-prone leaders to drag their states into wars. They also stress the joint effect of these democratic constraints, together with the greater openness and transparency of liberal democracies. If both sides are governed by cautious, cost-sensitive politicians that only use force defensively, then conflict is far less likely to occur. Second, democratic peace theorists highlight the importance of normative mechanisms. Liberal and democratic norms include shared understandings of appropriate behavior, stabilize expectations of the future, and are embedded in both institutions and political culture. Rule-governed change is a basic principle; the use of coercive force outside the structure of rules is prescribed; and trust and reciprocity, rule of law are at the heart of democratic politics. From this view, then, the democratic peace is produced by the way in which democracies externalize their domestic political norms of tolerance and compromise into their foreign relations, thus making war with others like them unlikely. The democratic peace hypothesis rests on two claims: (a) that democracies almost never fight each other and very rarely consider the use of force in their mutual relations and (b) that other types of relations are much more conflictual including democracies’ interactions with non-democracies. The claim is almost always made in probabilistic terms. Few claim that it is a deterministic law. It is not a general theory since it is agnostic or at least much less certain about the relationship between democracies and non-democracies. But it provides some grounds for liberal optimism, even if only within the democratic zone. If true, it holds out the possibility that the homogenization of domestic political systems could transform global political order- in marked contrast both to traditional realist accounts of world politics and pluralistic accounts of international society. The main debates surrounding the democratic peace and the main issues raised by critics and skeptics include: (a) the reliability of the statistical evidence for the democratic peace, especially in the pre 1945 period; (b) the existence of alternative casual logics, especially in explaining regional clusters of peaceful states as in Europe or the Americas; (c) the difficulties of defining key terms in the theory, especially war and democracy; (d) and the problems raised by democratization processes and the evidence that, whilst fully consolidated democracies could be peaceful, democratizing states, specially in unstable areas, may be more conflict-prone than authoritarian regimes. Here are certain important issues noted from the speech (annual report) by the UN secretary general which was delivered in the General Assembly in 2007:--

The rule of law is a fundamental principle on which the United Nations was established. The United Nations goal continues to be a community of nations operating according to rules that promote human rights, human dignity and the settlement of the international disputes through peaceful means. International criminal justice, a concept based on the premise that the achievement of justice provides a firmer foundation for lasting peace, has become a defining aspect of the work of the organization. The international tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda continued to conduct the trials of those accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and other war crimes. The extraordinary courts charged the defendant for the crimes against humanity and placed him in detention. The courts for Sierra Leone commenced the trials of Charles Taylor and rendered two historic judgments that convicted five defendants for war crimes. In March, the Security Council requested UN to negotiate with the government of Lebanon an agreement aimed at establishing a tribunal to bring justice those accused of the attack that killed the former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafiq Hariri. The Security Council took resolution on 30 May, 2007 for establishment of special tribunal in Lebanon.in order to better the coordinate working of these institutions, at the end of 2006, the report entitled ‘Uniting our strengths: enhancing the United Nations support for the rule of law’ announced the establishment of a rule of law coordination and resource group. The group consists of major rule of law assistance providers in the UN system, who met to ensure that programmes are carried out in a coherent manner and are of high quality commensurate with the need of those requesting the support.

One of the attractions of an old fashioned state-based pluralism and of a very thin view of international society was precisely that it appeared to offer a way of dealing with diversity and disagreement. If the diversity and the value are such important features of international life, then we should seek to organize global politics in such a way as to give groups scope of the for the collective self-government and cultural autonomy in their own affairs and to reduce the degree to which they will clash over how the world should be ordered. Equally, if the dangers of predation by the powerful are deep-rooted, even if not structurally determined, then we should continue to place a heavy emphasis on sovereignty and on the balance of power. In addition, the skeptical pluralist is attracted to the idea that it might also be possible to develop a cross-cultural consensus over the minimal rules around which a such a limited international society might be built. Hence the attraction to the international society writers of Hart’s notion of a minimum content of natural law built around Hobbesian assumptions. Hence, too null’s emphasis on the ‘elementary conditions of social life’, his attempt to isolate the elementary primary, and universal goals of the society of states; and his analytical effort to link these goals to the historical institutions of the international society. Negotiating the terms of cooperation is certainly a quintessentially political exercise. But it is also an inherently normative one both because acting in the world requires that we think about morally desirable change and because moral debate forms one part of how that political exercise will unfold. As noted in many places in this book, debates on global justice within the political theory and political philosophy have increased enormously in scope and sophistication. There is an increasingly rich array of potential answers to the problems of global political theory, including those related to just war, to humanitarian intervention, distributive justice, and to global democracy. The fragility of global political order makes it unconvincing to see this challenge as a second-order issue of moral methodology.

There are three major reasons why institutions are so important: as a means of helping to secure the framework for mutually intelligible moral debate; as a way of securing the stable implementation of shared rules; and in terms of the potential for the progressive development of a global moral community. In the first place, if we are looking for cross-cultural universals, a good case can be made for starting with process and with near-universality of ideas about fairness of process: hearing the other side, providing arguments for one’s actions, finding some mechanism for adjudicating between conflicting moral claims. All stable societies have to find some agreed process and procedure by which more moral conflicts can be adjudicated and managed, if not resolved. Within world politics the challenge is more daunting, given the diversity and divisiveness of sentiments, attachments, languages, cultures and ways of living, combined with massive inequalities of power, wealth, and capacity. Stuart Hampshire has suggested that there is an irreducible minimum to notions of just process. Second, institutions are also necessary because rules have to be applied. The cry of the liberal solidarist or the cosmopolitan moralist is that we need new rules to meet new circumstances. Terrorism requires that international society rethink rules relating to self-defence and the use of force. The degree to which international society is affected morally and practically by the humanitarian catastrophe means that we need new rules on humanitarian intervention. There are good arguments in favour of both these propositions. But it is a myth that, for example, a new rule on humanitarian intervention would obviate the need for the institutions and institutional debate. Even if the rule is agreed and even if the background criteria for evaluation are agreed, all rules have to be interpreted and applied. The new rule of humanitarian intervention will not avoid the need for that rule to be applied to the circumstances of a new case. On the one side, this inevitability raises the fundamental political issue: who is the body that has the authority to interpret and to apply the rule? There have been certain proximities that have been put-forth by Dallymayr. On the other side, we are faced by problems intrinsic to the idea of interpretation and application. Thus cultural and historical complexity makes it difficult to read off judgments in particular cases from general or universal moral laws and there is good reason for supposing that a great deal o the debate over values and ethics in the twenty-first century will necessarily have to be context-rich and interpretative. At one level, this might simply mean that universal principles need to show sensitivity to local context. But the challenge is deeper. Thus Tully follows criticizing in those who demonstrate a contemptuous attitude to the particular case. In terms of institutionalizing global order such a position lends support to a form of practical reasoning that is constantly navigating between the general rule, whether legal or moral, and it’s always contestable application to the facts and circumstances of a particular case. Third, institutions matter because of their potential for self-reinforcing dynamic. Once created, institutions act as platforms for the ongoing normative debates, or the mobilization of concern and for debating and revising ideas about how the international society should be organized. However much social scientists insist on analyzing international institutions solely in terms of the provision of international public goods, normative issues cannot be kept out of the picture. In addition, there is an inherent tendency for all normative systems to expand and develop, and to enmesh actors within certain patterns of discourse, reasoning, and argumentation. Finally, as we have seen, there are good reasons for believing that international institutions have acted as powerful agents for the diffusion and socialization of norms. Assessing the very mixed empirical record of actually existing institutions can have important implications for our views of global justice. Thomas Nagel, for example, has developed a political conception of global justice. Drawing on Hobbesian traditions, he argues that justice arises amongst those jointly subject to coercive authority. His assessment of where international institutions and global governance are ‘for the moment’ is that they fail to meet a crucial test, namely, they are not collectively enacted and coercively imposed in the name of all the individuals whose lives they affect. Yet this view of justice places too much weight on the difference between coercive and non-coercive situations; and, more importantly, underplays the extent of the changes that have in fact taken place in the density of international institutions, in the extent to which they do in tact exercise power and can be said to be co-authored, and in the relationship of both states and individuals to those institutions.others who either deny the possibility of international distributive justice or see it only in highly constrained forms also place great emphasis on the absence or weakness of international institutions or other cooperative arrangements. Thus, society’s main political, social and economic institutions and how they fit into one unified system of social co-operation’ determine the basic structure and govern ‘the initial focus’ of how to think about the matters of justice. But the emphasis here should be on ‘initial’ since Rawls also recognizes the possibility of reinforcing change. When writing about the domestic society, there is a strong sense that the institutions play a central role in moving from self-interested cooperation towards full overlapping consensus. They have important socializing influences on the citizens and Rawls presents a psychological account of how people come to accept and internalize principles of justice. Equally- when looking at international life- change, evolution, and learning are self recognized. ‘The idea of a reasonably just society of well-ordered peoples will not have an important place in a theory of international politics until such peoples exist and have learned to coordinate their actions in wider forms of political, economic and social cooperation. A global moral community in which claims about justice can secure both authority and can be genuinely accessible to a broad swathe of humanity will be one that is built around some minimal notion of just process, that prioritizes institutions that embed procedural fairness, and that cultivates the shared political culture and the habits of argumentation and deliberation on which such institutions necessarily depend. As Judith Shklar puts it; ‘procedural justice is not merely a formal ritual, as is often charged. It is a system that in principle gives everyone some access to the agencies of rectification and, more significantly, the possibility of expressing a sense of injustice to some effect, at least occasionally. It is important here to avoid too sharp distinction between a consent-based view of international legal legitimacy and a justice based view. Procedural legitimacy is not simply about state consent. On the one hand, consent itself may be moderated and mediated by the complexities of legal process, even without disappearing entirely from the international legal order. On the other hand, there are other important values located within the processes of international law. This may be understood in terms of the old arguments about the ‘inner morality’ of law and the rule of law. Or it may involve principles of public law that can be employed to guide international and global law-making. Or, most generally, it may simply involve an insistence that the justification of a position or a case follows an articulated, discernible, and coherent pattern of legal argument that draws on analogies, precedents, and the principles that are compatible with already widely accepted values. Finally, law can be viewed as a sociologically embedded transnational cultural practice in which claims and counterclaims can be articulated and debated and from which norms can emerge that can have at least some determination and argumentative purchase. Law, then, can play a communicative and epistemic role, shaping the conditions within which claims, including justice claims can be made and debated. The modern day Grotian will be inclined to stress the ongoing, unstable and subtle interplay between the sources of law and legal process on the one hand and the content of the law and o legal rules on the other.

That we should on the institutions, on negotiation, and on dialogue and deliberation is hardly an original suggestion. Albeit with significant variation, many have been tempted to go down a broadly Habermasian road-stressing the extent to which the terms of a just global order cannot be based on coercion nor on whatever bargain states and societies happen to be able to strike with one another, but require instead critical reflexion, uncoerced agreement of rational agents via a shared process of deliberation and reasoned justification.there have also been important arguments in favour of creating global institutional frameworks which widen the boundaries of the dialogic community. Even after assuming the presence of the multiple voices, the location of a stable and shared moral vocabulary and some degree of institutional stability, one still needs to ask about the conditions of effective political agency. Within domestic society, Habermas is ambiguous as to how far the discourse principle requires changes merely in procedures of bargaining or changes to the underlying balance of bargaining power itself. But however, we might think about power within domestic society, the conditions of global society make it impossible to evade the issue of unequal bargaining power. The massive inequalities of power and condition; the continued occurrence of war and intervention and the continued willingness of major states to use military power as an instrument of state policy; the role of power in skewing the terms of the global capitalist economy and the close links that exist between globalization and inequality; and the deformity of many of the core institutions of international society-all these point towards the pressing need to consider the minimal political preconditions that might underpin a global moral community in which reasoned deliberation and uncoerced consensus could have begin to have been possible. Although political theorists are perhaps naturally tempted to argue from the ceiling down, the wholly different scale of inequalities that exist in the world politics should push us to think hard about the minimum preconditions for an acceptable international political process. At a minimum this might include: some acceptance of equality of status, respect, and consideration; some capacity for autonomous decision making on the basis of a reasonable information; a degree of uncoerced willingness to participate; a situation in which the most disadvantaged perceive themselves having some stake in the system; and some institutional processes by which the weak and disadvantaged are able to make their voice heard and to express claims about unjust treatment. Apart from concern with the suffering of the most disadvantaged, Rawls gives two very good reasons why we should be concerned with inequality: first, that a large gap between rich and poor ‘often leads to some citizens being stigmatized and treated as inferiors, and that is unjust’; and second, because of the ‘important role of fairness in the political processes of the basic structure of the society of peoples’. Yet, despite ample evidence that some peoples stigmatized and treated the inferiors and still more evidence of the massive unfairness of international political processes, Rawls draws only the feeblest of conclusions as to what needs to be changed globally in the interests of justice. We need to give far greater attention to the links between the political and moral cosmopolitan and to the possible principles of global political justice that might inform those links. A revalidation of process legitimacy and procedural justice is crucial for the development of a stable, effective, and legitimate international society and for the nurturing of meaningfully shared foundations for the discussion of global justice. In a very important sense, the ethical claims of international society rest on the contention that such a society continues to be the most stable set of globally institutionalized political processes by which norms and rules can be negotiated on the basis of dialogue and consent, rather than simply being imposed by the most powerful. There is very little reason for supposing that progress in the direction of moral accessibility, institutional stability, or more balanced and equitable forms of political agency is likely to be easy. It may not be possible at all. There are nevertheless good reasons for believing that it is a direction which continues to be of crucial importance. Understanding how the rope bridge may be spun across the canyon is central both to the chances of world order in the 21st century and to the promotion of greater global justice.

The threat of terrorism to international peace, security and development remains a pressing issue for the international community. The expansion of UN efforts on counter-terrorism has produced a unique tool, the UN global counter terrorism strategy adopted by the general assembly. The unanimous endorsement of this document marks an historic step, bringing together 192 member states to demonstrate their resolve and ability to defeat the scourge of terrorism. The strategy outlines a coordinated and comprehensive response to terrorism at national, regional and global levels, while ensuring the respect for human rights and the rule of law. It put forward a concrete plan of action to prevent and combat terrorism and to address grievances and underlying social, economic and political conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism. The strategy will have the greatest success if it is fully achieved. This goal can be achieved by strengthening the capacity of the member states and the UN system, and by seeking the involvement of the civil society and the private sector. The main responsibility for implementing the strategy falls on member states. Nevertheless, various secretariat departments, specialized agencies, and UN programmes and funds contribute to this important endeavor by assisting member states with their implementation efforts.