Timothy William Waters

Indeterminate Claims: New Challenges to Self-Determination Doctrine in Yugoslavia

Serbia has two autonomous provinces, with nearly identical constitutional and political claims: heavily Albanian Kosovo and ethnically diverse but Serb-majority Vojvodina. One is headed towards some form of internationally recognized independence; the other almost certainly is not, even though calls for its autonomy have been mounting. What makes the difference? This article examines what the reasons for these different outcomes show about the changing content of self-determination in an environment of persistent ethnic claims. The defining characteristic of self-determination today is its indeterminacy, which allows policymakers to pursue a broader range of policies than was possible in the era of decolonization. These policies are only limited by the ability of states to define their actions consistently with past practice or to claim new rhetorical ground in the name of self-determination. This in turn will give rise to a new orthodoxy. To achieve a positive outcome in Kosovo, policymakers have adopted rhetorical and legal positions that will shape self-determination as a legal claim and policy option, and will do so in ways that partly revive its original, Wilsonian rationale. Consistent application of the principles that appear to underlie the Wests preferred solution in Kosovo should logically encourage similar outcomes in Vojvodina - yet this is a result few parties desire, so policymakers have to distinguish these claims. Efforts to do so inevitably have to address the different ethnic makeup of the provinces which underlies their different treatment. In disfavoring similar treatment for Vojvodina - and finding it easy to do so - the international community implicitly acknowledges that an ethnic criterion, long disfavored, has definitively reentered the legal and political analysis of self-determination.

Clearing the Path: The Perils of Positing Civil Society in Conflict and Transition

Can there be a general theoretical perspective on civil societys involvement in transitional justice? This article considers this question in its application to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Within the study of transitional justice and conflict resolution, civil society – a notoriously plastic concept – can be understood narrowly as rights-oriented groups working ‘for’ peace, but the term is equally available to describe a broader array of communities that can either promote or prevent peace and justice. It is, in fact, quite difficult to sustain a theoretical distinction between them, because transitional justice does not escape the dictates of politics – of differing human desires expressed through power. Efforts to memorialise imply conflict over the particular memories to be privileged; claims for reparations are not only demands for justice, but for material redistribution that in turn may promote conflict. A narrow view of civil society problematically assumes we even know – let alone agree on – what constitutes positive change. In the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, that is a fraught proposition. Both an accurate definition of civil society and the valence of justice work slip beyond the narrow confines of the received models assumptions: both Jewish and Palestinian groups mobilise a spectrum of resources from political engagement, to overseas support, to violent self-help. On both sides, civil society groups are instrumentalised to advance not an agenda of peace or justice in some abstract sense but a parochial claim that, seen from the other side, is, in fact, an obstacle to resolution. Indeed, there may be no peace or justice initiatives that can be analytically separated from efforts the purpose and effect of which is the very opposite of our conventional understanding of the field. The range from vocal activism to violent action, the spectrum of activation, commitment and radicalism, must be understood as fraught but connected and unbroken – as, at most, a kind of punctuated continuum. The real work performed by civil society in promoting agendas of peace and justice cannot properly be understood without locating it in a defensible theoretical and empirical framework. Imagining a narrow civil society risks skewing our analysis of what civil society can do and actually does in relation to conflict. Civil society can clear the path to peace, or can provide the principal obstacles to it – it can simultaneously do both. In this it very much shares the ambiguous, multivalent profile of its classic counterpart: politics in the public sphere.

For freedom alone: secession after the Scottish referendum

In September 2014, the people of Scotland voted on whether or not to become an independent state. The consequences of independence would have been complex – decisions about accession to the EU, currency union, defense. Seemingly less dramatic, yet no less important, are the consequences of Scotland not seceding – the effects in global law and politics of the very fact that the referendum happened, and that it failed. Many elements of the Scottish case find close parallels in claims for secession elsewhere in the world. Yet those claims more often meet less welcoming receptions. Indeed, it is not the attempt to secede, but the existing states acquiescence that marks this case as different: The UK is the rare country that acknowledges the possibility of its own division. Great Britains acquiescence both made Scottish secession possible and made it an outlier, whose precedential value must be closely interrogated. The key missing element is any evidence that the process was shaped by a sense of international legal obligation – indeed, the pathways of Scottish secession have been an insular affair, a function of particularly British law and politics, in which international law played little role. This article argues that the Scottish referendum provides little precedent for a changing legal norm – yet also offers a compelling model for how such a new norm ought to look. This article is about something that did not happen, and why it does not matter – but also why precisely that is so important.

The spear point and the ground beneath: territorial constraints on the logic of Responsibility to Protect

The doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) faces considerable criticism, of both its inefficacy – its failure to describe an effective pathway around the obstacles to humanitarian intervention in the sclerotic global security system – and its overreach, especially the risk that it enables pretextual agendas of intervention and regime change. Yet neither defenders nor critics have paid much attention to another possibility or risk incumbent in R2P: the likelihood, once intervention is undertaken, that the interveners themselves will be involved in a conflict over territory, whose likely solutions will include, not simply regime change, but partition. The doctrine as we now have it, built thoroughly on a state-centric logic, does not engage with this question, and indeed there are strategic reasons for ignoring the issue: acknowledging such a quality would be too much for R2P’s supporters to admit or its critics to accept. But whatever our normative orientation toward this rising or stumbling doctrine, we ought to be clear about where taking it seriously is really likely to lead us: sooner or later – and more often than we might wish to acknowledge – R2P interventions will force us to confront the logic of partition.