International legal change is an affair of societal and institutional practices about and around legal norms. Observe these practices, the social facts and not just the texts,. . .and you will see the real dynamics of international legal change. Nico Krisch recently took the matter to heart, and identified five paths of change in international law through social facts: the state action path (‘when states modify their behaviour and make corresponding statements’); the multilateral path (when ‘change is generated as a result of statements issued by many states within the framework of an international organization’); the bureaucratic path (through ‘decisions or statements produced by international organizations in contexts that do not involve the direct participation of states in the decision- making process’); the judicial path (change through ‘decisions and findings of courts and quasi-judicial bodies’); and the private authority path (where ‘change follows statements or reports by recognized authorities in a private capacity without a clear affiliation to or mandate from states or international organizations’, typically taking the form of ‘the production of technical manuals, standards, and regulations’).

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/leiden-journal-of-international-law/article/international-law-in-the-minds-on-the-ideational-basis-of-the-making-the-changing-and-the-unmaking-of-international-law/F7CE42451E97CCF68A87239E6E3485CF

If indeed multiple pathways are required to assess international legal change(s) with respect to pastoralists worldwide, then that topic, “international legal change in pastoralism,” is one ripe for study and action.

Some comparative studies of pastoralists across regions or in terms of World Bank, IMF and other IO programs, along with fewer comparisons of policy and management differences between relevant International NGOs, to which we can add some analyses of cross-country court cases and of international regulations governing the many aspects of livestock production and export hardly constitute a coherent foundation for describing the relevant international legal changes.

I’m just as guilty as others in habitually collapsing the legal under the rubric of “policy and management.” In advance of the 2026 International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. however, we are better advised to take greater care in separating the legal out from the rest in the next steps ahead. This is especially true, I believe, where pastoralist systems are a dominant infrastructure for generating options variety in the face of high uncertainty and complexity (the legal becomes much more obvious and relevant in infrastructure studies).

Consider “the unimaginability of any alternative to the neoliberal status quo.” Surely that’s a glove pulled inside-out. Neoliberalism generates such contingency and uncertainty as to undermine any status quo. It’s the status quo that is unimaginable.

Then again, have status quo’s ever been in practice as they are in theory? To paraphrase the international relations theorist, Hans Morgenthau: Excuse me, but just what status quo have the people committed themselves to? They haven’t, irrespective of what systems are said to do by virtue of their own structures. In situations where indefinite recovery is the new normal, what does the status quo ante even mean today?

. . .we knew the murderer in Edwin Drood because Dickens did actually tell his illustrator: “I must have the double necktie! It is necessary, for Jasper strangles Edwin Drood with it”;

. . .Henri Bergson were the sole example of a philosopher having an unprecedented impact on everyday life, as he’s said to have caused the first Broadway traffic jam in New York City;

. . .Shakespeare should be criticized because he failed to mention that poor people, not just kings, have trouble sleeping (Henry IV, Part 2, act III, scene 1);

. . .the 175 – 200 million workers in China’s factories, mines and construction industry weren’t the world’s largest proletariat;

. . .the only genuine political project were setting tax rates on the rich and emergency management were primarily a matter of “it can’t happen here’; and

. . .”don’t give a man a fish, but teach him how to fish” is now: If one has to fish, ensure the ecosystem bounces back nevertheless.

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When someone asserts that each person has the same human rights as every other person, this move goes from a macro-design principle directly to micro operations of personal behavior. Those making this leap of faith are then upset when macro principles—such as those in the United Nations’ International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights—are qualified by all manner of country-specific protocols and reservations.

But such reservations are not hypocritical. Rather, they must be expected if human rights are to be treated reliably. It has been left up to nation-states to enforce universalized values, and the only way we really know that human rights as macro principles are taken seriously is to see how they are applied through context-specific scenarios, contingent to each country when not to each case.

‘‘Thou shall not kill’’ is all well and good, but we do not know how seriously that principle is treated until we get to grappling with qualifications such as ‘‘except in cases of self-defense.’’ ‘‘Granted that I should love my neighbour,’’ wrote R. H. Tawney, the British economic historian, but ‘‘the questions which, under modern conditions of large-scale organization, remain for solution are, ‘Who precisely is my neighbour?’ and, ‘How exactly am I to make my love for him effective in practice?’’’.

If human rights exist only at the macro level, you counter, are we not all at risk as individuals at the micro level? Yes, but not in the way you may mean. Just because we doubt that human rights actually exist as overarching principles everywhere equally for everyone does not stop us from recognizing that we are at risk in terms of personal and system reliability when systems behave as if those rights did not exist, and that there may be better practices to deal with such situations that are modifiable to the context in which we find ourselves, here and now rather than then and there.

Therefore, we argue that any attempt at reforming AI from within the same interlocking oppressive systems that created it is doomed to failure and, moreover, risks exacerbating existing harm. Instead, to advance justice, we must radically transform not just the technology itself, but our ideas about it, and develop it from the bottom up, from the perspectives of those who stand the most risk of being harmed.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517231219241

About those “risks”. . . Are you quite sure you want to define radical transformation in conventional terms of “risk reduction”?

I am much more skeptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and am even skeptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalization was responsible for the vast reduction in global poverty over the past 30 years. I also no longer defend the idea that the harm done to working Americans by globalization was a reasonable price to pay for global poverty reduction because workers in America are so much better off than the global poor. I believe that the reduction in poverty in India had little to do with world trade. And poverty reduction in China could have happened with less damage to workers in rich countries if Chinese policies caused it to save less of its national income, allowing more of its manufacturing growth to be absorbed at home. I had also seriously underthought my ethical judgments about trade-offs between domestic and foreign workers. We certainly have a duty to aid those in distress, but we have additional obligations to our fellow citizens that we do not have to others.

I used to subscribe to the near consensus among economists that immigration to the United States was a good thing, with great benefits to the migrants and little or no cost to domestic low-skilled workers. I no longer think so. Economists’ beliefs are not unanimous on this but are shaped by econometric designs that may be credible but often rest on short-term outcomes. Longer-term analysis over the past century and a half tells a different story. Inequality was high when America was open, was much lower when the borders were closed, and rose again post Hart-Celler (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) as the fraction of foreign-born people rose back to its levels in the Gilded Age. It has also been plausibly argued that the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the factories in the North would not have happened if factory owners had been able to hire the European migrants they preferred.

Angus Deaton, March 12, 2024 (accessed online at https://www.chronicle.com/article/in-economics-do-we-know-what-were-doing?sra=true)

–“Also in cases where the outcome to be predicted is a numerical value (e.g., a risk score), a prediction can be easily translated into a discrete scale (e.g., low – medium – high risk).”

TRUE AS FAR AS IT GOES, BUT NO ONE WHO RESPECTS COMPLEXITY WOULD MAKE A DECISION BASED ON ONE NUMBER ONLY.

–“The fundamental problem with making climate change a security issue is that it responds to a crisis caused by systemic injustice with ‘security’ solutions, hardwired in an ideology and institutions designed to seek control and continuity. At a time when limiting climate change and ensuring a just transition requires a radical redistribution of power and wealth, a security approach seeks to perpetuate the status quo.”

TRUE AS FAR AS IT GOES, BUT NO ONE SHOULD BELIEVE RADICAL REDISTRIBUTION WOULD “CONTROL” CLIMATE CHANGE BY OTHER MEANS.

–“Suspend and cancel debt payments when a climate extreme event takes place, so countries have the resources they need for emergency response and reconstruction without going into more debt.”

TRUE AS FAR AS IT GOES, BUT NO ONE CAN DEFINITIVELY SAY JUST WHAT SUCH AN EVENT IS TODAY.

–“The combined effect of these interventions is a precarious economic edifice built upon stagnant growth, sapped productivity and monopsony power, with consumption driven by high levels of household debt.”

TRUE AS FAR AS IT GOES, BUT NO ONE ARGUES AGAINST THE LATTER’S DECREASE IN CONSUMPTION INEQUALITY–OR DO THEY?

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Sources.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-024-01886-3

https://www.tni.org/en/publication/primer-on-climate-security#4

https://climatenetwork.org/resource/debt-and-climate-crises/

https://www.cunylawreview.org/the-pitfalls-of-liberalism-at-large-democracy-the-administrative-state-liberalisms-undying-support-of-the-united-states-political-economy/

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii147/articles/cedric-durand-landscapes-of-capital

The article starts with:

Today, it seems impossible to discuss historians’ encounter with post-structuralist theory, the ensuing triumphant surge of the cultural turn, and the establishment of what scholars have recently called the postcultural historiography without the help of such paramount concepts of post-structuralist analysis as contingency, variability, instability, open-endedness, and so on. Having defined the last forty years of theoretical and methodological developments in history, these nowadays conventional tools of critique and interpretation have grown to become synonymous with the post-structuralist conceptual promise and outcome. This article questions this standard and exceptionally generous account. What if, the article asks, we start our account not with the resolute assertion of the radical contingency and variability of the post-structuralist view of history, but with something more fundamental to it—its own fixed and totalizing presuppositions? To show how an intellectual agenda opposed to fixed and totalizing reasoning can end up operating with fixed and totalizing logics of its own, the essay turns to Michel Foucault and his momentous career, to be traced from the 1960s to the 1980s.

The article ends:

For those of us who have never doubted that humans are socially constituted and that they use their socially and, thus, ideologically constituted habits of thought and praxis to enact and unwittingly constrain their lives, the post-structuralist proposition to turn this fundamental dilemma into a fixed and totalizing foundation of social life hardly constitutes a welcome breakthrough in the conversation about human agency, resistance, and struggle. What it does instead is to cut off the critical conversation about radical—that is, ideologically and structurally consequential—forms of social being. It does it by turning the question whether and under what historical circumstances humans can disengage from unwitting and ideological constraints that their societies impose on their social and cognitive life into a conceptual nonstarter. I end this article with this question in order to put it back on the historians’ agenda.

In between these two paragraphs, historian Anna Krylova provides the most forensically incisive critique I’ve read about this kind of historiographical analysis.

Anna Krylova (2024). ‘Foucault, Post-structuralism, and the Fixed “Openness of History”’. Modern Intellectual History: 1–23 (accessed online on October 2 2024 at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/foucault-poststructuralism-and-the-fixed-openness-of-history/EC9D3735BB7929416001A670E8C8601D)

(For other views on the more nuanced forms of contingency and human agency, see https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/06/19/what-if-the-root-cause-is-more-contingency/ and https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/05/08/human-agency-as-the-worlds-global-counternarrative-with-examples/)

When it comes to the crisis management literature, leadership is largely top down (officials direct) or bottom up (self-organizing crisis response), where networks are said to be vertical (hierarchical and chain of command) or horizontal (laterally interacting, official and unofficial).

We add a third category: control rooms. And not just in terms of Incident Command Centers during the emergency but already-existing infrastructure control rooms whose staff continue to operate during the emergency.

Paul Schulman and I argue infrastructure control rooms are a unique organizational formation meriting society protection, even during (especially during) continued turbulence. They have evolved to take hard systemwide decisions under difficult conditions that require a decision, now. Adding this third is to insist on real-time large-system management as the prevention of major failures and thus crises that would have happened had not control room managers, operators and support staff prevented them.

More, a major reason for this high reliability management in a large socio-technical system is to ensure that when errors do happen, they are less likely to be because of this management than to have been forced by other factors, particularly exogenous shocks. High reliability management seeks to isolate the field of blame and root causes, not least of which relate to “bad leadership.”