According to the United States Department of Defense (DOD), as of 2013 there were over 12,000 DOD contractors supporting the U.S. mission in Iraq (DASD, 2013). This thesis explores the laws and legal systems that operate to keep contractors, and the companies that employ them, resistant to legal oversight. I ground my analysis in the 2007 Nisour Square massacre, exploring how every attempt to prosecute those responsible was doomed due to Blackwater’s legal position of being American-headquartered, hired by the State Department, privately owned, and operating in Iraq. I conclude that the legal indeterminacy of the US deployed security contractor normalizes violence towards Iraqi civilians while simultaneously downloading the risk and responsibility associated with the US war efforts onto the shoulders of individual contractors. Moreover, I suggest that this legal indeterminacy is of particular interest to geographers as it arises, in part, out of overlapping legal systems, jurisdictions, and authorities.

According to the United States Department of Defense (DOD), as of 2013 there were over 12,000 DOD contractors supporting the U.S. mission in Iraq (DASD, 2013). This thesis explores the laws and legal systems that operate to keep contractors, and the companies that employ them, resistant to legal oversight. I ground my analysis in the 2007 Nisour Square massacre, exploring how every attempt to prosecute those responsible was doomed due to Blackwater’s legal position of being American-headquartered, hired by the State Department, privately owned, and operating in Iraq. I conclude that the legal indeterminacy of the US deployed security contractor normalizes violence towards Iraqi civilians while simultaneously downloading the risk and responsibility associated with the US war efforts onto the shoulders of individual contractors. Moreover, I suggest that this legal indeterminacy is of particular interest to geographers as it arises, in part, out of overlapping legal systems, jurisdictions, and authorities.

Embracing a spatial and historical lens and the insights of critical legal theory, this dissertation maps the patterns of protest and the law in modern British Columbia―the social relations of adjudication—the changing ways in which conflict between private property rights and customary rights invoked by social movement actors has been contested and adjudicated in public spaces and legal arenas. From labour strikes in the Vancouver Island coal mines a century ago, to more recent protests by First Nations, environmentalists, pro- and anti-abortion activists, and urban “poor peoples’” movements, social movement actors have asserted customary rights to property through the control or appropriation of space. Owners and managers of property have responded by enlisting an array of legal remedies and an army of legal actors—lawyers, judges, police, parliaments, and soldiers—to restore control over space and assert private property rights. For most of the past century, conventional private property claims trumped the customary claims of social movements in the legal arena, provoking crises of legal legitimacy where social movement actors questioned the impartiality of judges and the fairness of adjudicative procedures. Remedies and legal technologies asserted by company lawyers, awarded by judges, and enforced by police and soldiers were often severe―from Criminal Code proscriptions against riotous assembly and deployment of military force, to the equitable remedy of the injunction and lengthy prison sentences following criminal contempt proceedings. But this pattern shows signs of change in recent years, driven by three major trends in British Columbia and Canadian law: (1) the effective assertion of indigenous customary rights; (2) growing recognition of the importance of human rights in democratic societies, particularly in the context of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; and (3) changes in the composition of the legal profession and judiciary. This changing legal landscape has created a new and evolving legal space, where property claims are increasingly treated as contingent rather than absolute and where the rights of one party are increasingly balanced by customary rights, interests, and aspirations of others. Consequently, we are seeing a trend toward the dilution of legal remedies traditionally available to the powerful, creating space for the assertion of non-conventional property claims and the emergence of new patterns of power relations. / Graduate

No description available.

The Kyoto Protocol Clean Development Mechanism (‘CDM’) allows developed countries to invest in developing country projects, to effect both greenhouse gas emission reductions and sustainable development, in exchange for carbon credits. This study considers how Brazilian CDM projects currently promote or inhibit sustainable development in Brazil. Brazil originally proposed the CDM-type framework, led the developing countries in the multilateral negotiations, and now ranks third globally for CDM project investment. The critical legal geography literature and corresponding hybrid analytical framework is applied to analyse the overlapping and multi-layered legal space of CDM projects in the context of an uneven physical and human geography. It applies legal and qualitative social research methods including textual analysis of English and Portuguese-language documents, onsite visits, semi-structured and unstructured interviews, focus groups and case studies of twelve Brazilian CDM projects of varying project types to consider: • The environmental policymaking processes underlying Brazil’s position in the international climate negotiations and how that position impacts Brazil’s assessment of proposed CDM projects’ sustainable development benefits; • The role of the Brazilian Proposal from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol negotiations in Brazil’s ongoing assessment of proposed CDM projects; • Brazil’s enunciated sustainable development criteria for CDM projects against the criteria actually applied; • The role of state environmental licensing authorities and nonstate actors in defining appropriate sustainable development benefits for CDM projects; and • The resulting (neo-)regulatory framework for Brazilian CDM projects’ sustainable development benefits in the context of legal pluralism. This dissertation concludes that Brazil’s CDM-specific domestic regulation is driven by the negotiating positions Brazil has taken in the international climate negotiations, most notably the 1997 Brazilian Proposal. As a result, Brazilian government-based CDM-specific regulation only considers the CDM projects’ Greenhouse Gas emission reductions benefits. Brazilian approval of domestic CDM projects also entails confirmation of administrative compliance with certain non-CDM specific regulatory frameworks, but institutional capacity issues within state and local regulatory agencies tend to undermine the effectiveness of assessing administrative compliance rather than legal and regulatory compliance. This government based regulatory framework is augmented by non-state actors, who have a neo-regulatory impact on corporate activity through demands for sustainable development benefits, giving rise to corporate sustainability programmes. There is scope for this neo-regulatory impact to extend to addressing sustainable development issues more broadly through NGO engagement with local and state environmental licensing authorities in the determination of appropriate environmental licensing conditions. In each case, the achievement of substantial sustainable development benefits is impeded by the lack of a mature multi-stakeholder dialogue involving a local government and civil society. As a result, corporate actors dominate consideration of appropriate sustainable development benefits.

The disproportionate incarceration of indigenous peoples in Canada is far more than a socio-economic legacy of colonialism. The Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) espoused incarceration as a strategic instrument of assimilation. Colonial consciousness could not reconcile evolving indigenous identities with projects of state formation founded on the epistemological invention of populating idle land with productive European settlements. The 1876 Indian Act instilled a stubborn, albeit false, categorization deep within the structures of the Canadian state: “Indian,” ward of the state. From “Indian” classification conferred at birth, the legal guardianship of the state was so far-reaching as to make it akin to the control of incarcerated inmates. As early iterations of the DIA sought to enforce the legal dominion of the state, “Indians” were quarantined on reserves until they could be purged of indigenous identities that challenged colonial hegemony. Reserve churches, council houses, and schools were symbolic markers as well as practical conveyors of state programs. Advocates of Christianity professed salvation and taught a particular idealized morality as prerequisites to acceptable membership in Canadian society. Agricultural instructors promoted farming as a transformative act in the individual ownership of land. Alongside racializing religious edicts and principles of stewardship, submission to state law was a critical precondition of enfranchisement into the adult milieu. When indigenous identities persisted, children were removed from their families and placed in residential schools for intensive assimilation. Adults and children deemed noncompliant to state laws were coerced through incarceration. Jails were powerful symbols of the punitive authority of the Dominion of Canada. Today, while the overrepresentation of Aboriginal persons in prisons is a matter of national concern, and critiques of systematic racism dismantle ideologies of impartial justice, the precise origins of indigenous imprisonment have not been identified. The DIA was so intimately invested in assimilation through incarceration that lock-ups were erected with band funds on “Indian lands” across Canada. Archival documents and the landscape of Manitoulin Island make this legal historical geographical analysis of assimilation through incarceration possible. / Thesis (Ph.D, Geography) -- Queen's University, 2012-09-28 14:23:08.969

With discussion of Indigenous laws on the rise in Canada, this thesis explores the question of law’s power: jurisdiction. In this project, I ask whether Indigenous jurisdiction is active in conflicts between Indigenous and state actors over the environment, in the context of the Heiltsuk Nation on the central coast of British Columbia. This project looks to critical legal theory for an understanding of jurisdiction. It identifies three aspects of jurisdiction that are discussed in critical legal theory and related fields: that it is technical, it is authoritative, and it is spatial. Adopting these qualities as provisional indicators of jurisdiction, it applies thefzm to three case studies of Heiltsuk (or “Haíɫzaqv”) conflicts with the state, which engage colonial law in different ways. The three case studies concern (1) herring harvest and management, which was litigated in R v Gladstone; (2) land use and forestry, which is the subject of the Great Bear Rainforest agreements; and (3) trophy hunting for bears, which is the subject of a grassroots campaign based on Indigenous law. Adopting a qualitative approach adapted from institutional ethnography, this project applies a critical jurisdictional lens to each case study, using documentary review and interviews to explore the technical, authoritative, and spatial aspects of each conflict. Ultimately, I find that expressions of Heiltsuk jurisdiction – as understood from a colonial, critical perspective – are already at play in each conflict, although this is not immediately visible from the point of view of colonial law. In the conclusion, I explore the different manifestations and strategies of Heiltsuk jurisdictional expressions, and the ways that colonial jurisdiction interacts with them. / Graduate / 2021-12-19

À partir d’une étude systématique du droit positif des seize Länder de la République Fédérale d’Allemagne, il s’agit de montrer que l’initiative populaire ne relève pas de la démocratie dite directe ou immédiate. Contrairement à la conception communément admise, cette institution démocratique qui permet à un nombre limité de citoyens non élus de participer à l’élaboration de la loi et au contrôle des organes de l’État, s’inscrit bien dans la démocratie médiate. Par l’élaboration d’une typologie des procédures d’initiative populaire en Allemagne, il est alors possible de remettre en question la conception classique tendant à identifier l’initiative populaire au « référendum d’initiative populaire ». Cette approche est en effet réductrice, car elle ne permet pas de rendre compte de la coexistence et de la spécificité des deux types d’initiative populaire mis au jour : l’initiative populaire décisionnelle – qui peut conduire à un référendum, si le Parlement du Land n’adopte pas la demande formulée par les citoyens – et l’initiative populaire propositive – une procédure à vocation non référendaire. Pour démontrer que l’initiative populaire relève de la démocratie médiate, le recours au concept de potentiel populaire permet d’une part de souligner la spécificité théorique de l’initiative populaire par rapport au référendum qui renvoie classiquement à la notion de puissance populaire. D’autre part, cette idée de potentiel populaire permet de redonner à l’initiative populaire une unité conceptuelle, au-delà de la variété des procédures et des types d’initiative populaire, identifiés par l’analyse des droits positifs des seize États fédérés allemands. La proposition de définition du potentiel populaire combine enfin les deux éléments de définition de la démocratie médiate : tout d’abord, le potentiel populaire peut être défini comme l’ensemble des limites juridiques constitutives de l’initiative populaire, ce qui renvoie à l’idée de démocratie représentée, mise en forme et donc nécessairement limitée par le droit qui constitue dès lors le medium de la participation démocratique ; ensuite, ces limites constitutives permettent à la minorité populaire de représenter une possible volonté générale, ce qui permet de justifier la conception de l’initiative populaire, medium d’une volonté générale potentielle, comme institution de la démocratie représentative / Offering a systematic study of positive law in all sixteen Länder of the Federal Republic of Germany, this thesis intends to show that popular initiative does not partake of direct, or immediate, democracy. Contrary to what is commonly thought, this democratic institution, which allows a limited number of non-elected citizens to participate in the elaboration of the law and in the controlling of State organs, does belong squarely in the realm of mediated democracy. By establishing a typology of the different procedures of popular initiative in Germany, one may therefore question the classical conception, which tends to identify the popular initiative with a “referendum by popular initiative.” Such an approach is indeed reductive since it cannot account for the coexistence and the respective singularities of two kinds of popular initiatives: the decision-making popular initiative – which can lead to a referendum if the Parliament of the Land does not grant the citizens’ demand – and the propositive popular initiative – which is not meant to lead to a referendum. In order to demonstrate that popular initiative partakes of a mediated democracy, this thesis resorts to the concept of popular potential, which allows first to underline the theoretical specificity of the popular initiative compared to the referendum, which classically relies on the notion of popular power. Second, with the idea of popular potential, popular initiative can once again be conceived of as a unified concept, beyond the variety of existing procedures and the different kinds of popular initiative in the sixteen federated States of Germany. Finally, the proposed definition of the popular potential combines the two defining elements of mediated democracy: first, popular potential can be defined as the set of legal limits that are constitutive of the popular initiative, which harks back to the idea of a represented and formalized democracy, thus necessarily limited by the law which therefore constitutes the medium for democratic participation; and second, these constitutive limits may allow the popular minority to represent possible the general will, which justifies to conceive of popular initiative, the medium of a potential general will, as one of the institutions of representative democracy

L’application extraterritoriale de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés soulève la question du rôle du principe de territorialité dans la détermination de l’étendue des droits constitutionnels. De façon plus générale, elle soulève la question du rapport entre territoire et droit. Cette thèse explore, dans un premier temps, les jalons de la méthodologie territorialiste en abordant les prémisses qui sous-tendent l’ascension du principe de territorialité comme paradigme juridique dominant. Les anomalies de ce paradigme sont par la suite présentées, de façon à illustrer un affaiblissement du principe de territorialité. Par la suite, l’auteure entreprend de déterminer le rôle du principe de territorialité dans l’établissement de l’espace occupé par la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés en situation d’extraterritorialité. Les développements jurisprudentiels récents attestent de la prédominance du paradigme territorial, mais de nombreuses difficultés d’application sont rencontrées. Après avoir testé la viabilité de ce paradigme, l’auteure entreprend de définir un nouveau cadre analytique permettant de répondre à la question de l’application de la Charte en situation d’extraterritorialité sans se référer à la position géographique du demandeur, ni à son appartenance à une certaine communauté politique pré-déterminée. Ce cadre repose sur une conceptualisation de la notion d’autorité étatique transcendant l’exercice d’un pouvoir coercitif de l’État fixé à l’intérieur de ses limites territoriales. Une autorité relationnelle, qui s’appuie sur l’idée que tout pouvoir étatique tire sa source de la Constitution et, conséquemment, doit être assujetti à son contrôle. / This thesis is about the relationship between law and territory, and more particularly, about the relationship between the principle of territoriality and the scope of Charter rights. The author first introduces territoriality as dominant legal paradigm and analyses its underlying premises. The challenges that territoriality and methodological territorialism have recently faced are also examined. The purpose of the first part of this thesis is to show that the territorial paradigm is not immune to challenge, and to provide conceptual tools to get out of the “territorial trap”. The author then looks at how, and to what extent, territoriality currently shapes the scope of Charter rights. By analysing cases on point, the author concludes that although territoriality is, officially, the answer to the question of the scope of Charter rights, in practice, the principle does not provide sufficient guidance to the judiciary. The territorial principle’s normative weaknesses are added to its practical inability to determine the scope of Charter rights. In order to examine potential alternatives to the territorial principle, the author examines the parallel debate regarding the extraterritorial scope of American constitutional rights. American courts, rather than endorsing strict territoriaity, emphasize either the membership of the claimant (the subject of constitutional litigation), the limitations on state actions (the object of constitutional litigation), or pragmatic concerns in order to determine whether a constitutional protection applies in an extraterritorial context. The author then proceeds to examining how an alternative model could be developed in Canada in the context of extraterritorial Charter cases. She argues that the personal entitlement approach, when superimposed on the territorial paradigm, brings more injustice, not less, in that people can be sufficiently related to Canada to trigger a state action, but insufficiently connected to trigger Charter protection, hence creating a state of asymmetry. She also argues that territoriality, if understood in Westphalian terms, leads to the belief that a state action is not an action within the authority of the Canadian government if it is conducted outside of Canada, hence shielding these actions from constitutional srcutiny. The model the author advocates is based on a notion of relational authority and it seeks to emphasize not the place where a government act is performed, nor the identity of the persons subject to it, but the idea that any exercise of government power is potentially amenable to constitutional scrutiny.

Certain Small Island Developing States (hereinafter the "SIDS") such as Kiribati or Tuvalu are often incorrectly called "sinking islands" because their highest points are located just a few meters above the sea level. Sea level rise may turn their territories to uninhabitable land gradually disappearing beneath the tide. Worsening of the environmental conditions causes internal displacement, migration and other problems. SIDS repeatedly brought their plight to the United Nations Security Council (the "UNSC") during its meetings in 2007, 2011, 2015, 2018 and 2019. They demanded that the UNSC should deal with their situation as a potential security issue and safeguard more equal distribution of environmental security risks and costs. During the UNSC negotiations, various states attempted to interpret and re-interpreted the UNSC mandate in order to suit their interests. The representatives of SIDS suggested that the UNSC should be a body based on the principles of distributive justice decision-making and thus safeguard fairer sharing of threats and burdens, including those of environmental character. The rapidly developing states strongly opposed; they implicitly claimed that the UNSC should be based rather on the principles of commutative justice, i.e. decide in strictly given situations of violations of...