China has emerged in the 21st century as a sophisticated, and sometimes contentious, actor in the United Nations Security Council. This is evident in a range of issues, from negotiations on Iran's nuclear program to efforts to bring peace to Darfur. Yet China's role as a veto-holding member of the Council has been left unexamined. How does it formulate its positions? What interests does it seek to protect? How can the international community encourage China to be a contributor, and not a spoiler? This book is the first to address China's role and influence in the Security Council. It develops a picture of a state struggling to find a way between the need to protect its stakes in a number of 'rogue regimes', on one hand, and its image as a responsible rising power on the world stage, on the other. Negotiating this careful balancing act has mixed implications, and means that whilst China can be a useful ally in collective security, it also faces serious constraints. Providing a window not only into China's behaviour, but into the complex world of decision-making at the UNSC in general, the book covers a number of important cases, including North Korea, Iran, Darfur, Burma, Zimbabwe, Libya and Syria. Drawing on extensive interviews with participants from China, the US and elsewhere, this book considers not only how the world affects China, but how China impacts the world through its behaviour in a key international institution. As such, it will be of great interest to students and scholars working in the fields of Chinese politics and Chinese international relations, as well as politics, international relations, international institutions and diplomacy more broadly.

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is intended to provide an effective framework for responding to crimes of genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. It is a response to the many conscious-shocking cases where atrocities - on the worst scale - have occurred even during the post 1945 period when the United Nations was built to save us all from the scourge of genocide. The R2P concept accords to sovereign states and international institutions a responsibility to assist peoples who are at risk - or experiencing - the worst atrocities. R2P maintains that collective action should be taken by members of the United Nations to prevent or halt such gross violations of basic human rights. This Handbook, containing contributions from leading theorists, and practitioners (including former foreign ministers and special advisors), examines the progress that has been made in the last 10 years; it also looks forward to likely developments in the next decade.

This book explores the extent to which Responsibility to Protect shifts our understanding of both the potential and practice of international law.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. In a democracy, a constitutional separation of powers between the executive and the assembly may be desirable, but the constitutional concentration of executive power in a single human being is not. Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism defends this thesis and explores 'semi-parliamentary government' as an alternative to presidential government. Semi-parliamentarism avoids power concentration in one person by shifting the separation of powers into the democratic assembly. The executive becomes fused with only one part of the assembly, even though the other part has at least equal democratic legitimacy and robust veto power on ordinary legislation. The book identifies the Australian Commonwealth and Japan as well as the Australian states of New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia as semi-parliamentary systems. Using data from 23 countries and six Australian states, it maps how parliamentary and semi-parliamentary systems balance competing visions of democracy; it analyzes patterns of electoral and party systems, cabinet formation, legislative coalition-building, and constitutional reforms; systematically compares the semi-parliamentary and presidential separation of powers; and develops new and innovative semi-parliamentary designs, some of which do not require two separate chambers.

Analyse af FN's sikkerhedsråd og en reform af dette.

This book examines the use of presidential powers in Central and East Europe between 1990 and 2010. Focussing on presidential vetoes and the formation of governments, it maps patterns of presidential activism and its determinants across nine democracies. Thereby, it combines the analysis of original quantitative data on the use of presidential powers with in-depth case studies in an innovative mixed-methods framework. Based on regression analyses and unique insights from numerous elite interviews, the study shows strong support for the hitherto insufficiently tested assumption that popularly elected presidents are more active than their indirectly elected counterparts. As one of the first comprehensive comparative studies of presidential activism and veto power in Europe, this book will be a key resource not only for area specialists but also for scholars of presidential studies, comparative government, and executives.