Since the twentieth century, the proliferation of new States has not declined in the twenty first century. Several small territories have declared themselves as sovereign States by claiming statehood in international law. These developments have a significant measure in many respects of international law notions of self-determination, secession, recognition and de-colonisation. A State remains a primary subject of international law. Despite the fundamental legal framework on the creation of States enshrined in the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States 1933 (Montevideo Convention), the creation of States and unilateral secession remain part of the controversial and unsettled issues of international law. This is because of the legal and factual situation that evolves around the concept of State creation and unilateral secession. While the legal framework on State creation is in place, other new criteria continue to develop, alongside are the concepts of unilateral secession and self-determination. It therefore follows that in any given situation of contemporary international law, the concepts of State creation, secession and self-determination cannot be discussed in isolation. In this thesis, I will analyse the notions of statehood, secession and recognition. I will argue that in contemporary international law or post-colonial era, unilateral secession and satisfying the traditional criteria of statehood does not qualify the clamant entity to become a new State. Secondly, I will argue that although recognition is not a rule of customary international law, State practice on recognition and other suggested criteria play a significant role with regards to creation of States in international law. Thirdly, the Republic of Somaliland as a case study will be analysed against the criteria of statehood and the application thereof. The study will also provide a general analysis of a few specific cases of successful and unsuccessful attempts at secession.

The lawful use of nuclear weapons in self-defence sits in a precarious and fraught position amongst lawyers, states and scholars, primarily due to their indiscriminate destructive nature. The use of nuclear weapons is the biggest threat to peace and security yet they exist under obscurity in International Law. The purpose of this paper is to examine at what point, and under what circumstances, a State is lawfully permitted to use nuclear weapons in self-defence. The right to self-defence is a basic normative right codified in the United Nations Charter (UN Charter). The inherent right to self-defence is the primary justification for the use of nuclear weapons according to the International Court of Justice in the Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons (Advisory Opinion). Even so, nuclear weapons would still have to meet the threshold of self-defence and the cardinal principals of ‘imminence’, ‘necessity’ and ‘proportionality’ which regulate the lawfulness of a state’s actions in self-defence. Since there has only been two situations where nuclear weapons have been used- in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945- it is necessary to examine three hypothetical situations in which nuclear weapons are used in self-defence to determine if, under any, exceptional circumstances such action could be lawful.

Dissertation (LLM)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / Public Law / unrestricted

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In the United States, the past twenty years has witnessed a growing academic interest in understanding ‘globalization,’ i.e., a series of interconnected social, cultural, and political processes occurring under integrated economies. Management scholars have tried to understand globalization in terms of its potential consequences for companies conducting business in various countries and regions. However, globalization involves more than this, for as new relationships between people and places occur, new ideas about who they/us are in those relationships also emerge. How can international management scholars thus understand these complex relationships occurring under globalization? How can they theorize and study such relationships? Although there are multiple ways to address these questions, the approach to globalization within U.S.-based international business and management research has been insufficient. First, meta-theoretical assumptions supporting U.S.-based management theories and practices have seldom been questioned in regards to their deployment in non-Western contexts. Second, the emphasis of this research on “cultural differences” implies “separation” and may conceal social and cultural formations established through global relationships. Thus, alternative approaches to understanding business practices in the context of globalization are needed. To this effect, I first develop the notion of identity formation , based on poststructuralist and postcolonial theories, as a conceptual framework, in contrast with the modernist views of identity informing the extant international management literature. I suggest this notion as an appropriate focus of analysis for understanding contemporary relationships between people in the world. To demonstrate these arguments, I conduct fieldwork focused on the international entrepreneur, specifically the Turkish entrepreneur. Relying on an extended case study design and a multi-method approach, I examine how Turkish entrepreneurs in high-technology sectors in the U.S. and in Turkey engage in identity formation processes. The identity formation framework allows me to demonstrate how globalization processes occur relationally through embedded discourses of hybridity, gender, subalternity, and nation articulated by international entrepreneurs. I further address how postcolonial lenses allow for conceptualizing encounters between West and non-West occurring under globalization as a series of interdependent events at the locus of identity formation. As such, my dissertation offers a theoretically distinct conceptualization for globalization research in international management.

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This dissertation examines the relationship between citizenship and the growth of standing national armies in early modern Europe. The works of Niccolo Machiavelli, Frederick the Great, and Carl von Clausewitz are examined in detail to account for the evolution of realist political-military strategy in the balance-of-power state system. My thesis is that the state's recurring efforts to mobilize citizenship--construed as armed virtue--and its development of ever-more violent technologies and strategies of war rendered the balance-of-power unstable. The opening chapter surveys the legacy of realism in the history of international relations theory. Chapter two surveys how the modern state system developed out of the declining Christian Commonwealth of medieval Europe. Each of the three following chapters locates a realist theorist within the historical context in which he wrote and was active as a political-military reformer: Machiavelli and the crisis of the Florentine Republic; Frederick the Great's struggle to form a Prussian Army; and Clausewitz's effort during the Reform Era to respond on a revolutionary scale to the challenge of total Napoleonic warfare. By studying the political context in which secular realism in early modern Europe developed a balance-of-power state system, I show the genesis of political-military strategies that even today prepare for war in order to achieve international peace. My study of mobilized citizenship, military strategy, and the state's preparation for war shows that the balance-of-power is inherently unstable. A state system that arose on the basis of limited and pre-emptive wars can scarcely serve as a worthy model for international relations in the era of total war, indeed, of nuclear war.

The Southern African Development Community sees high levels of migration. Many children within these groups are undocumented and have no means to prove their identities. This greatly increases their risks of statelessness, which opens the way to abuse, exploitation, trafficking, and the inability to claim their human rights. Birth registration represents one of the main protections undocumented children have in avoiding statelessness, as this reduces their chances of abuse, as well as provides them with a better chance of accessing nationality. Providing nationality is also important in reducing statelessness, as birth registration is not enough on its own. Therefore, whether birth registration and nationality are available for undocumented migrants in SADC member states is examined within both the international and regional legal contexts. International human rights treaties go a long way in providing rights to birth registration and nationality, but the scope of these rights is not infinite. International law takes a strong stance on birth registration, as it is provided in many of the main treaties, as well as the fact that it is linked to the best interests of the child principle. The right to nationality on the other hand is generally understood to have restrictive application in that migrants do not have the right to the nationality of the host state, a state must just ensure that a child has the right to “a” nationality. This reduces the ambit of protection. In turning to the SADC, the region in general was found to have a number of barriers to birth registration and nationality. For birth registration, gender discriminatory laws, centralised organisational structures, the COVID-19 lockdown, and penalties for late registration were counted as among the leading barriers to registration. This was similarly the case for South Africa and Zambia which were two key country profiles analysed. For nationality, there were many gaps in protection, such as uneven protection for foundlings and children who would otherwise be stateless, as well as onerous barriers to naturalisation. Given these findings, this dissertation concluded that SADC members are not adequately giving effect to their international obligations