The Urgent Imperative of Peace

This article disputes academic accounts of Afro-pessimism, which see it as a product of ideological or discursive bias in the viewer, or as a crude generalisation across very different countries and cultures by examining the context for and major themes of Afro-pessimism after 1994. In particular, it shows that modern Afro-pessimism is largely a product of liberal concerns and liberal media. It demonstrates the salience of these themes by showing how they permeate and influence former US President Barack Obama’s African outlook by a close reference to his speech to the Ghanaian parliament in 2009 and suggests that they may provide the context for the views of current US President Donald Trump.

Roadblocks to Remedies: Recently-Developed Barriers to Relief for Aliens Who Suffer Harm by U.S. Officials' Illegal Acts, Contrary to the Founders’ Desires and International Law Obligations

Self-referential processing is defined as the process by which a person becomes aware that specific contents are related to his or her own self. Cortical midline structures (CMS), such as dorsal and medial prefrontal cortex, and regions such as inferior frontal cortex, insula, and temporal pole have been implicated in self-referential processing. However, the specific contribution of each of these areas is still largely unknown. More particularly, not many studies have examined the influence of valence and decision making difficulty on regions involved in self-referential processing. In this study, participants evaluated how well personality traits, differing in valence and decision difficulty, described themselves or the current US President. In line with predictions, ventral, rostral, and dorsal parts of medial prefrontal cortex showed greater activity when participants judged traits about themselves relative to judging traits about the current US President. However, none of these regions showed significant modulation by trait valence. Increasing trait decision difficulty was associated with increased activity within dorsal medial prefrontal cortex and bilateral anterior insula. However, there was very minimal overlap (6/119 voxels, i.e., 5%) of the regions of dorsal medial prefrontal cortex implicated in self-referential processing and those implicated in trait decision difficulty. The results are interpreted within current accounts of self-referential processing.

State of the Union Addresses (SOUA) by two recent US Presidents, President Obama (2016) and President Trump (2018), and a series of recent of tweets by President Trump, are analysed by means of the data mining technique, sentiment analysis. The intention is to explore the contents and sentiments of the messages contained, the degree to which they differ, and their potential implications for the national mood and state of the economy. President Trump's 2018 SOUA and his sample tweets are identified as being more positive in sentiment than President Obama's 2016 SOUA. This is confirmed by bootstrapped t tests and non-parametric sign tests on components of the respective sentiment scores. The issue of whether overly positive pronouncements amount to self-promotion, rather than intrinsic merit or sentiment, is a topic for future research.

<p><em>This research aims to analyze the sanctions that can be applied to the United States for violations of international law arising as a result of the unilateral proclamation announced by President Donald Trump on December 6, 2017 as its foreign policy that recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moves its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This type of research is prescriptive normative in order to identify sanctions to the United States that has violated international law.</em></p><em>The result of this research showed that violations of international law on the United States unilateral proclamation regarding the status of the City of Jerusalem may be subject to various sanctions by the UN Security Council including economic sanctions, diplomatic sanctions, sports sanctions, individual sanctions, and sanctions to suspend privileges as a member of the United Nations. Of the various sanctions that can be applied by the UN Security Council, there are obstacles that can be found, namely the veto rights of permanent members of the Security Council. Therefore it is recommended to countries that have economic stability and geopolitical conditions more or less the same as the United States such as China in order to impose political sanctions in the form of unilateral economic and diplomatic sanctions.</em>

Human life and technological developments are closely related to the legal awareness of the international community. The discovery of nuclear weapons for the first time was by the United States (US). It was used in World War II to attack and bomb the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The incident resulted in the death of 160,000 (one hundred and sixty thousand) people, and damage to almost all the ecosystem. The devastating negative effects resulting from the use of nuclear weapons were then regulated and contradicted the norms outlined in Additional Protocol I of 1977, to the 1949 Geneva Conventions which regulates the methods and methods of war. Although it has been regulated in the 1949 Geneva Conventions (international humanitarian law), however, it turns out that there are still many countries that continue to develop nuclear weapons for reasons of national security. The research method used is a type of normative juridical research and uses a statutory approach and conceptual thinking. The results of the study indicate that the governing norms regarding; research and possession of nuclear weapons are still discriminatory. In practice, there is a distinction between a nuclear state and a non-nuclear state. Furthermore, in the current reality, there are still countries that are classified as not having good intentions to carry out the agenda of disarming and stopping the development of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, according to the results of this study, to overcome these problems, it is necessary to have new legal principles that can be universally binding.

The rapid development of the use of digital technologies has facilitated access to digital information and evidence. This information and digital evidence are obtained via the Internet, social media or satellite. And may be used to investigate violations of human rights and international criminal law. Therefore, there is a problem of rebalancing between the right to privacy and the use of information and digital evidence in the investigation of violations of human rights and international criminal law. This study has objective of unified universal principles that set out the origins and rules for the use of information and digital evidence in the investigation of violations of human rights and international criminal law. In order to ensure international and national justice and criminal accountability and to document all violations of human rights and international criminal law. The analytical approach will be used through analysis of previous studies on the use of digital information and evidence in the investigation of violations of human rights and international criminal law. And analysis of the Berkeley Protocol on Open-Source Digital Investigations. Several findings and recommendations were reached in this paper, the most important of which is the need for the international community to recognize the information and digital evidence obtained to demonstrate violations of human rights and international criminal law.

How American Rejectionism Undermines International Economic Law

119State immunity — Jurisdictional immunity — Head of State — Whether acts performed outside scope of official duties attract immunity as acts of instrumentality of State — Acts in violation of international law — Claim by alien for wrongful death resulting from torture by security forces in foreign State — Whether international law forms part of substantive domestic law providing basis for jurisdiction of United States courts — United States Alien Tort Act — Whether providing cause of action for violation of international law or purely jurisdictional — United States Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act — The law of the United States

Dedication: gearing up for war

Obligations of member states under the UN Charter prevail in cases of a conflict with obligations under any other international agreement. Such conflict did not play a significant role in UN practice and international cooperation for more than 40 years. A new test case for international and regional courts may become military operation Cast Lead against Gaza that Israel launched on 27 December 2008 under the pretext of self-defence against terrorism. The alleged violations of international law and human rights law during the armed conflict in Gaza between 27th of December 2008 and 19th of January 2009 induced League of Arab States (LAS) to commission for first time in its history an independent fact finding committee (IFFC) to give a factual and legal assessment of situation in Gaza resulting from military operation and to recommend legal ways and means to hold any violators of international law and humanitarian law accountable. Keywords: countering terrorism; human rights law; independent fact finding committee (IFFC); international law; Israel; judicial supervision; League of Arab States (LAS); Palestine; UN charter

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the issue of racism became a hot topic discussed by the world community, especially in the United States. The bustle of the #STOPASIANHATE hashtag illustrates that the issue of racism is attracting the attention of the world community massively. The emergence of this hashtag was triggered by one of the political propagandas of the Former President of the United States, Donald Trump, through his tweet stating that the Covid-19 virus was the "Chinese Virus". Therefore, this paper aims to find out how the influence of Donald Trump's political propaganda on the level of racism among Asian-Americans. In this paper, the authors use qualitative research methods through case studies. The results show that Donald Trump's political propaganda affects the level of racism in the United States with an increase in hate-speech cases against Asian-Americans by 15% during the pandemic compared to 2019.

President Donald Trump’s decision on December 6, 2017 to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and his directives to transfer the U.S embassy to there, have signaled a sudden shift in the American adopted and declared policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict. This decision is considered as one of the most dangerous regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This study examines the attitude of the American administrations towards the city of Jerusalem by monitoring the historical roots and studying their developments, through using the documents issued by American presidents from 1948 to 2017. It also analyses President Trump’s motives to move forward in the announcement of this decision. The study has concluded that the US administrations dealt with the issue of Jerusalem from the point of view of management rather than resolution and that the United States of America has deviated from its course and position on the issue of Jerusalem, in accordance with maintaining the strategic interests related to Israel.

This paper examines the arguments of the Joint Resolution presented by the President of the United States, Barack Obama, to the United States Congress to employ the use of force against the so-called Islamic State. Overall, the UN Charter prohibits the use and threat of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, except the two exceptions: the collective security system of the United Nations and the right of self-defense. However, the United States invoked, either expressed or implied, other exceptions, namely the determination of a threat to international peace and security, self-defense to protect their civilians and nationals, the intervention by invitation or with the consent of the State concerned and, finally, the Responsibility to Protect. This paper seeks to prove the hypothesis that these arguments have no basis in international law, keeping only those exceptions provided by the UN Charter.

ABSTRACTThe current US nuclear modernization program departs in several major ways from longstanding US nuclear policy: It elevates the role of nuclear weapons in US national security strategy, includes plans for developing several new nuclear weapon capabilities, and resurrects former nuclear capabilities that past US presidents had wisely eliminated. Of all the Trump administration’s nuclear modernization plans, however, the most destabilizing are probably the new, low-yield nuclear options and dual-capable systems that may be ambiguously nuclear or conventional. But the United States can still return to a smarter path – one that eliminates these specific nuclear weapons plans, and adopts a more measured nuclear rhetoric to match.