Reflections

[Prefatory Note: The essay below is a modified version of the 2018 Annual Lecture of the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) of Queen Mary’s University London, given on March 22 of that year.

[Prefatory Note: The following review was also published today by Mondoweiss, an outstanding online news and opinion service addressing important international and domestic issues, with special attention to the following: the Palestinian national struggle; Israeli denial of basic Palestinian rights; U.S.

Remembering the World Court Advisory Opinion on Israel’s Separation Wall After 15 Years
 

Is there an ‘After’ After the Kushner show in Bahrain?
 
 

Toward the Brink of War: Provoking Iran for What? For Whom?
 
 [Prefatory Note: The following interview with the Iranian journalist Javad Hieran-Nia was published in Iran together with Middle Scholar’s Statement on Trump’s Iran Policy. The links below on the Iranian publication in Mehr News and Tehran Times.
 
 

[Prefatory Note: The following review of Ayça Çubukçu’s For the Love of Humanityis scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of the London Review of International Law.]
 
ACTING BEYOND THE STATE: TOWARD A COSMOPOLITAN AWAKENING?
 
Ayça Çubukçu,For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
 
 

 
[Prefatory Note: I have had several second thoughts since posting ‘Are the Democrats in a Race to the Bottom’? I continue to worry about the disunity of anti-Trump America, and its danger of giving Americans, and indeed the world, four more years of cruel and dangerous governance almost certain to erode the quality of democracy for decades, but there are several major caveats that qualify this anti-Trump priority.
 

Are the Democrats in a Race to the Bottom?
 
I have had several recent conversations with friends about the 2020 election who preface their assessment with this liberal sentiment—‘I am in favor of whoever has the best chance of beating Trump.’ I respond meekly with a question, guessing in advance their likely response. My words: ‘Where does that lead you?’ and my guess is depressingly accurate. His or her words: ‘I think that Joe Biden is the only one who can beat Trump.’  Or in more pessimistic versions of the same response: ‘Biden has the best chance of winning.’
 

Jurisprudential Notes Toward Empowering and Liberating International Law and the United Nations
 

[Prefatory Note: The posted text below will be one of the contributions in the forthcoming virtual roundtable The Responsibility to Protect and Palestine, orchestrated and editedby Coralie Pison Hindawi (AUB), that will appear soon on the Beirut Forum website,