International Law Abstract

International Law
Abstract
When one thinks about international law, various images and ideas
may pop in your mind: you may think at issues of war and peace between nations, ongoing humanitarian crisis, or other global issues, like global warming or the protection of the environment. You may also think at the protection of basic human rights, from freedom of speech and demonstration to the right to food or the promotion of social rights for workers. Or more dramatically, you may think at despicable international crimes, in the context of violent uprisings or acts of terrorism. You may think at more personal dramatic events that affected your family in recent years, or at more distant events that made history and allowed for your parents or grand-parents to meet, or that forced your family to migrate. On a more peaceful note, you may think at your latest long-distance flight, getting a visa at the embassy of the country you visited, or the fruits from exotic places you bought yesterday at the supermarket. Maybe you're employed or someone in your family is employed by a large transnational corporation and you've been living abroad because that company made investments there. Or you have sailors in your family, commercial pilots or engineers working on off-shore oil platforms. Or just look at your smartphone and imagine, besides of course the incredible engineering and technology that made it, the amount of law that has gone into it: not only the fact that you bought it and that you have also contracted with a phone company, which are largely issue of domestic law, but also the oceans it travelled after having been manufactured, the minerals that had to be extracted to make the components and that were exported, the patents that protect the software in all jurisdictions, the agreements that have been contracted in order for the data that you download to travel around the planet at the speed of light, etc. As much as our daily lives are constantly influenced and shaped by rules of domestic law that go most of the time unnoticed, they are also increasingly influenced and shaped by rules of international law.At a time of globalization, this does not come as a surprise: the more we interact with each other, the more we need common rules to sustain that interaction and make it predictable. Law mediates between us and offers us a common ground for action -- and the complexity resulting from interaction calls for more law.
But what is that law that transcends national settings, How does it come to existence, How can it be upheld, What can be done when it is not respected?
And also: when you look around and see how much international law is at the same time hypocritically invoked and constantly disregarded by governments, is it really law? Is it possible to have international law as law, or are international relations actually governed by nothing else but power and might? Would international law offer the best illustration of the well-known thought of Blaise Pascal, who famously wrote that "Unable to make what is just strong,
we made what is strong just"?
And where is justice in this world?
Is not justice the purpose of any law?
Those are the kind of questions we are going to try to answer in this in a scientific article.
Or, at least, the scientific article will help you to have a more informed and articulate
view on those fundamental questions that I just raised
and that will be looming large throughout the article despite the fact
that, as I started by recalling, we are actually surrounded
by international law all the time.