Sub-Constitutional Engineering: Negotiation, Content, and Legal Value of Interinstitutional Agreements in the EU

Abstract:  This article analyses the roles and impact of Interinstitutional Agreements (IIAs) in the EU, taking into account their relationship to primary law. Concretely speaking, these roles range from (a) explicitly authorised specifications of Treaty provisions via (b) not explicitly authorised specifications of vague Treaty law to (c) pure political undertaking. Based on the distinction between the constitutional and the operational level of the political game, we challenge the assumption that IIAs usually strengthen the European Parliament. As our case study, the 1993 interrelated package of IIAs on democracy, transparency and subsidiarity, illustrates, the European Parliament is not the only institution that benefits from IIAs, especially if they lack a sufficiently precise Treaty basis. Furthermore, if Treaty provisions underlying IIAs are precise, they also tend to produce precise and thus legally relevant content. Conversely, if IIAs deal primarily with elusive concepts they are likely to be legally ambiguous or even irrelevant at all.     

"We Live in a Country of UNHCR"—Refugee Protests and Global Political Society

Between September and December 2005 over 3,000 Sudanese refugees held a sit-in demonstration at the Mustapha Mahmoud Square in Cairo, Egypt, which is located directly across from the offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). We analyze the events of the refugee sit-in as an act of global political society, one that saw people outside the realm of the political making demands for recognition and a say in the solutions being developed to relieve their plight. We argue that the sit-in at Cairo was fundamentally a disagreement between the refugees and the UNHCR over the politics of protection, care, and mobility. The article analyzes the strategies through which the refugees named their "population of care" in ways that countered the UNHCR's governmental strategies to classify the Sudanese refugee population in Cairo. We propose the concept of "global political society" as a way of thinking about global political life from the perspective of those who are usually denied the status of political beings. Global political society is a highly ambiguous site where power relations are enacted, taken and retaken by various actors, but in ways that do not foreclose opportunities for refugees to actively reformulate the governmentalities of care and protection.     

Men and women's attributions of blame for domestic violence

Attributions of blame for the first and latest episodes of violence were assessed in a sample of 139 couples who were referred to a mandatory domestic violence treatment program in the military. Use of a methodology which allows for reports of nonmutually exclusive categories of attribution from both members of the dyad revealed more complex patterns of attributions than reflected in the existing literature. In addition, there were low rates of agreement within couples as to who was to blame for the violence. Although both men and women exhibited a high frequency of blaming their partner for both episodes of violence, men were significantly more likely to blame themselves for the latest than for the first episode. Attributions of blame were related to contextual variables in both men and women. Sex specific relationships emerged. These results were discussed with specific reference to predictions derived from attribution theory and their clinical implications.     

Parents' Reactions to Child Day Care Organizations: The Influence of Perceptions of Procedures and the Role of Organizations' Trustworthiness

On the basis of the uncertainty management model, we argue here that when people are uncertain about an organization's trustworthiness, they may resolve the question how they should react toward the organization by relying on their perceptions of the organization's procedures. As a consequence, we predicted that the reactions of parents whose child was in a day care center would be strongly influenced by their perceptions of the procedures used by the organization that was responsible for their children's day care when the parents would be uncertain about the organization's trustworthiness. However, when parents would be certain that the organization could be trusted they would be less in need of procedural information, yielding less strong effects of perceived procedure on parents' reactions. The findings of a survey study corroborate this line of reasoning. In the discussion it is argued that these findings suggest that people especially rely on their perceptions of procedures when they are uncertain about important aspects of their lives, such as the trustworthiness of organizations that are responsible for their children's day care.     

Reforming the United Nations: New Proposals in a Long-Lasting Endeavor

Netherlands International Law Review -     

The Dutch Engagement with the Project of International Criminal Justice

Netherlands International Law Review -     

When Negotiations Become Routine: Not Reinventing the Wheel While Thinking Outside the Box

In this article, we seek to apply the insights of recent research on routine to the context of repeated negotiations. To demonstrate the link between both concepts, we introduce an analytical framework in which we identify different negotiation situations in which routine can develop. We distinguish two dimensions of the negotiation process: a problem-solving dimension and a communication dimension. Our framework for analyzing the role of routine in negotiation is built around these two dimensions. We define those skills that we argue in repeated negotiations can help negotiators manage particular kinds of negotiations depending on the level and type of routinization that type of negotiation involves. Moreover, we demonstrate that our framework is inherently dynamic, which we illustrate with simplified business examples.