This chapter explores the relationship between international law and the Chinese Constitution, which reflects the country’s self-positioning in the international legal order and its reception of international law in the local context. It first covers (i) the adaptation of international law in the domestic context and (ii) China’s engagement and increasing influence in the international arena. The Constitution provides a normative context to understand how international law is interpreted and applied in China. It concerns the perception of the PRC’s party regime on the content and the effect of international law and how they may be selectively adapted and interpreted in the local context to serve theprimary goals. From a normative perspective, this chapter analyzes the evolution of the Chinese Constitution from that of a revolutionary state to that of an emerging global power, with a focus on the current 1982 Constitution and its amendments in the post-Mao era in light of the notion of selective adaptation. A global power’s constitution, as featured in the 2018 amendment, suggests an effort of the PRC to pursue normative consensus with the international community.

How can force be used to pursue human security? Treatments of this issue are surprisingly rare.  This chapter addresses the potentially positive uses of force to address basic human needs under the new doctrine of human security in international law.   International laws, cases, and regimes addressing the constituent elements of human security are addressed in turn: personal and political security, economic, food, health, community and environmental security. The evolving structure and function of UN Peacekeeping Operations is demonstrated through cases of specific missions. Finally, the possibilities of 2001’s "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine are debated.

As a species, we spend a great deal of time, energy, and money on security. The world’s military budgets alone totalled more than $1.9 trillion U.S. dollars in 2020, an average of 6.0 percent of government spending and 2.0 percent of Gross Domestic Product.1 The United States accounts for more than a third of the total all by itself and spends upward of $70 billion on foreign and military intelligence (a figure that excludes black budget expenditures).2 Add in spending on border controls, coast guards, and funding for national security–related research and development across a variety of fields, and it is clear that many countries invest very heavily indeed in protecting against foreign threats.

Our final stop on this particular tour of security referents is the individual human being. In saying this, I do not mean to prejudge debate about exactly what the term ‘human being’ denotes; which attributes of human beings (if any) are essential and which accidental; whether it makes sense to speak of human beings in the abstract, as opposed to (only) in concrete social or cultural contexts; or whether speaking of the individual human being as ‘the’ human security referent is the best – or only – way to make sense of the concept of human security as it has been articulated, operationalized, explored, or criticized by scholars, policy makers, activists, or anyone else who has engaged with it. As we shall see, these are all live issues. I simply mean to say that I will land on positions on all of them. I will, of course, do my best to give satisfactory reasons for those positions as I go along.

The international community is too often focused on responding to the latest cyber attack instead of addressing the reality of pervasive and persistent cyber conflict. From ransomware against the city government of Baltimore to state-sponsored campaigns targeting electrical grids in Ukraine and the United States, we seem to have relatively little bandwidth left over to ask what we can hope for in terms of “peace” on the Internet, and how to get there. It’s also important to identify the long-term implications for such pervasive cyber insecurity across the public and private sectors, and how they can be curtailed. This edited volume analyzes the history and evolution of cyber peace and reviews recent international efforts aimed at promoting it, providing recommendations for students, practitioners, and policymakers seeking an understanding of the complexity of international law and international relations involved in cyber peace. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This chapter provides a foundation for the case made for ecological security by exploring the contours and limitations of existing discourses of climate security. After first examining the evolution of debates linking environmental change – and more directly climate change – to security, the chapter goes on to outline the contours and limitations of three key discourses of climate security: national security, international security and human security. These discourses emphasize the preservation of the nation state from external threat (national security), the preservation of the norms and rules of an international society (international security) and the protection of vulnerable human communities (human security). In the case of outlining the contours of each discourse, the chapter notes how the referent object is defined, who constitutes an agent of security, what means are envisaged to advance or protect security and the nature of the threat posed by climate change itself. In noting their respective limitations, the book provides a foundation for the elaboration and defence of ecological security.

This chapter builds upon three streams of experience by its author: (a) one related to his six-year term as the first UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism (2005-2011), namely the identification of the absence of a proper international definition of terrorism as an important source of human rights abuses, (b) his observation of actual court practice and media coverage where definitional-conceptual elements of terrorism, in particular as to its aims, appear to be ignored despite being one of the cornerstones on which those legal definitions were built, and (c) his academic work pointing out that the instrumentalization of the human person, in breach of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, comes through as a characteristic both of acts of terrorism and of human rights violations committed by States in the name of countering terrorism.

On the basis of reflecting on these experiences, and departing from his own best practice definition built on Security Council Resolution 1566 (2004) and included in his last report to the UN Human Rights Council, the author now proposes the removal of any subjective aim element from international definitions of terrorism, and its replacement with the objective element of the act amounting to the instrumentalization of human beings, typically victims of terrorism.

In this concluding chapter, we delineate theoretical insights drawn from relevant comparisons among the case studies and suggest policy recommendations. Specifically, we reassess the three hypotheses, identify and map relevant patterns from the different case studies across several regions of the world, offer several policy recommendations based on these patterns, and draw some general conclusions. In addition to the observable patterns as related to type of borders, political and institutional arrangements, and political economy, in the perusal of the eleven case studies we identified two additional elements that further explain the reality of peaceful borders and illicit transnational flows: the geopolitical location of regions and subregions, as hubs for transnational illicit flows; and the legacy of civil and intermestic wars. In the last part of the chapter, we suggest several policy recommendations: (1) be aware of the normative dilemmas of human security; (2) increase cooperation and develop effective mechanisms of governance at all the possible levels; and (3) promote and prefer peace rather than war, but be aware of its potential unintended consequences.

If the pathologies of international relations (described in Chapter 3), especially those that derive from the nature of the international system, are not remedied, effective international cooperation to address climate change much more effectively will be elusive. If the pathologies of national politics (described in Chapters 4–6), especially narrow and short-term conceptions by states of their interests, are not modified to better comprehend the collective interest in mitigating the climate crisis for the benefit of people around the world, other attempts to govern the problem will be insufficient. If pathologies of human nature (described in Chapter 7), particularly overconsumption, continue to manifest themselves in the developed countries and spread metastatically to the developing countries, greenhouse gas pollution will be extraordinarily difficult, and probably impossible, to bring down to the degree, and with the speed, that is needed to avoid or at least mitigate dangerous climate change. This chapter conducts some diagnoses of the pathologies and explores some potential therapies for climate governance.

This chapter identifies a number of prescriptions for climate governance that could, alongside other actions being taken worldwide, mitigate the climate crisis. Success in this regard would entail dramatic and quite rapid declines in greenhouse gas pollution globally and successful adaptation to the impacts arising from past pollution. These outcomes would engender greater protection of human interests and substantial reductions in the many injustices arising from climate change, all while enhancing environmental sustainability in the long term. The prescriptions outlined here are intended to address corresponding governance pathologies described in Chapters 3–7. Before these prescriptions can be applied in practice, much more explication would be required. Thus, they are intended to illustrate the kinds of steps that will be required to make climate governance much more effective. All of these prescriptions for climate governance are aspirations: they are proposals for action that will have practical significance for the climate crisis only if they are taken seriously.