In the last decade of the 20th Century Somalia made the headlines around the world as the place where a UN force had been withdrawn from due to losses inflicted on US and other troops by members of groups associated with two warlords. In the latter part of the first decade of the 21st Century Somalia was again in the global headlines, but this time associated with acts of piracy committed off its coastline. Behind these headlines lay a complex mixture of problems stretching back as far as the early colonisation of the lands that became Somalia and populated with western European concepts ill suited to the peoples of those lands. The loss of effective government opened the door to neo colonial issues of illegal fishing and hazardous waste dumping that contributed to the piracy problem. Finely interwoven amongst all these issues runs a thread of international law. This thesis examines that thread as it runs through the concept of state failure and asks if it is a legal term and what legal consequences, if any, are attached to it. It examines the international legal frameworks that support fishing and hazardous waste dumping and seeks to understand why they have not prevented illegal fishing and the illegal dumping of hazardous waste off the coast of Somalia. This thesis then examines the concept of piracy as applied to Somalian pirates and seeks answers to questions as to what it is and how it has been applied. It looks at the use of private security as a response and seeks to find the legitimation for their actions in relation to pirates. Sewn throughout is a comparison of responses and suggestions for improvement to international law.

Magister Artium - MA / Illegal dumping is a global environmental problem that receives significant management and research attention from various fields of study. Illegally disposed waste (in all of its formats) can cause negative impacts on natural and human environments, and often requires multilevel interventions to abate, or to solve the resultant problems. The impacts of illegal or unsustainable disposal of waste on land, water bodies and the atmosphere contribute to various environmental problems and their levels of intensity at global, regional, national and local scales. Illegal waste disposal also infringes on fundamental human rights that are associated with clean and safe living environments.

Since the 2018 Chinese plastic waste import ban, the global plastic waste trade has been increasingly problematized, especially considering the correlated global environmental issue of marine plastic pollution. Therefore, governance approaches are required to curb marine plastic pollution and regulate the plastic waste trade to prevent situations of “waste dumping” in Global South countries. This thesis will examine the connection between the 2019 changes Basel Convention as a global governance approach and the tendency of Southeast Asian countries to implement import regulations due to an increase in plastic waste exports to the region and resulting environmental concerns.  The empirical context of both plastic problems and the central theoretical concepts of waste distancing and environmental justice associated with a postcolonial, environmental theory approach are discussed in the literature review. The 2019 changes to the Basel Convention will be first examined with a content analysis and then the changing international context resulting in national import regulations will be studied with a process-tracing approach focused on the cases of Malaysia and Thailand. To conclude the Basel Convention provided a regulative framework for certain plastic waste imports and can also be related to the Southeast Asian countries’ response of repatriating illegal imports.

A generic conflict model is developed to analyze international toxic waste disposal issues, and then, to provide feasible strategic resolutions for this serious environmental dispute. With the rapid growth of the global economy, toxic waste traffic from the advanced to developing nations has become a serious side effect of this globalization. The illegal transboundary movement of toxic wastes not only aggravates the burden on the poorer nations, but also negatively impacts the worldwide environment. In this thesis, the ongoing toxic waste disputes are divided into two stages consisting of the dumping prevention and dispute resolution stages. The analyses based on the methodology of Graph Model for Conflict Resolution are used in both stages in order to grasp the structure and implications of the conflict from a strategic viewpoint. The in-depth modeling of the toxic waste dumping disputes, which consist of historical and generic situations, specifies the involved parties and their options. By synthesizing the economic, political and legal factors, the relative preferences for each party can be determined. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the Decision Support System (DSS) GMCR II simplifies the processing of calculations. The analytical research furnishes investigators or other interested parties with possible resolutions for the disputes arising from an international waste dumping event. Sensitivity analyses are also conducted to provide a comprehensive understanding of the different situations that may occur in real-world cases. The case study of the Ivory Coast waste dumping controversy is used to demonstrate how to practically implement the generic multi-stage graph model.

A generic conflict model is developed to analyze international toxic waste disposal issues, and then, to provide feasible strategic resolutions for this serious environmental dispute. With the rapid growth of the global economy, toxic waste traffic from the advanced to developing nations has become a serious side effect of this globalization. The illegal transboundary movement of toxic wastes not only aggravates the burden on the poorer nations, but also negatively impacts the worldwide environment. In this thesis, the ongoing toxic waste disputes are divided into two stages consisting of the dumping prevention and dispute resolution stages. The analyses based on the methodology of Graph Model for Conflict Resolution are used in both stages in order to grasp the structure and implications of the conflict from a strategic viewpoint. The in-depth modeling of the toxic waste dumping disputes, which consist of historical and generic situations, specifies the involved parties and their options. By synthesizing the economic, political and legal factors, the relative preferences for each party can be determined. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the Decision Support System (DSS) GMCR II simplifies the processing of calculations. The analytical research furnishes investigators or other interested parties with possible resolutions for the disputes arising from an international waste dumping event. Sensitivity analyses are also conducted to provide a comprehensive understanding of the different situations that may occur in real-world cases. The case study of the Ivory Coast waste dumping controversy is used to demonstrate how to practically implement the generic multi-stage graph model.