America,capitalism, and the interstate system

Peter Gowan responds to published criticisms of his article “Triumphing toward International Disaster: The Impasse in American Grand Strategy” (Critical Asian Studies 36, no. 1 [March 2004]: 3-36) by Kristen Nordhaug, Ravi Arvind Palat, Vijay Prashad, Marika Vicziany, Mark T. Berger, and Heloise Weber (see Critical Asian Studies 37, no. 1 [March 2005]: 75-140).     

Unjust Enrichment and Contract

Benedetti v Sawiris was concerned with the measure of a quantum meruit, and in particular whether a ‘subjective’ or ‘objective’ measure should be preferred. The Supreme Court addressed the issue broadly in line with the approach in the mainstream academic literature on unjust enrichment, according to which this is a problem of how to measure benefit. The article argues that this unjust enrichment approach is misguided because it obscures the role of agreement and conflates transfer and exchange, and that a contractual analysis of the case would make the issues clearer and easier to resolve.     

The politics of self-defence: beyond a legal understanding of international norms

This contribution considers an alternative approach to the research on the use of force, a field that has been largely dominated by international legal scholars. I argue for application of an evolutionary approach to international (legal) norms, one that complements current legal approaches and moves the discussion of norms beyond their dichotomous legal/illegal understanding. This kind of research highlights the role of politics in international law and allows us to determine factors influencing dissemination of international norms. Through a study of seven post-Second World War cases, I trace the development of both narrow and expanded notion of preemptive self-defence and conclude that while ascertaining legality of specific actions is vital for understanding established international law, one cannot talk about radical breaks in development of the law on the use of force. The expanded concept is in fact a product of the evolution of (societal) norms on self-defence and an accumulation of previous successful challenges in metanorms on the use of force.     

How African States keep their people poor: The legal issues

Many of the problems of inequity and poverty in Africa are the result of the state's own policies and legal requirements that serve to marginalise the poor and hamper the access of communities to environmental and other assets. The article looks at case studies of the regulation of forest access in Cameroon and the allocation of public revenues in Uganda.