In October 2016, the United States accused Russia of hacking political organizations involved in the U.S. elections and leaking pilfered information to influence the outcome. In December, President Obama imposed sanctions for the hacking. This incident damaged President Obama's cybersecurity legacy. The “hack and leak” campaign targeted American self-government—a challenge to his administration's promotion of democracy in cyberspace. It created problems for the president's emphasis on international law and norms as “rules of the road” for cybersecurity. The episode exposed failures in his attempts to make deterrence an important instrument of U.S. cybersecurity.

On December 14, 2012, member states of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) approved the Final Acts of the World Conference on International Telecommunications. The ITU is the specialized agency of the United Nations fostering cooperation on information and communication technologies, and, through world conferences, it periodically revises the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), a treaty the ITU adopted in 1988 However, in December 2012, the Final Acts, the manner in which they were approved, and the World Conference proved controversial, and these controversies will adversely affect the impact of the Final Acts and the revised ITRs on international telecommunications law.

Dramatic events involving dangerous microbes often focus attention on isolation and quarantine as policy instruments. The incident in May-June 2007 involving Andrew Speaker and drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) joins other communicable disease crises that have forced contemplation or actual application of quarantine powers. Implementation of quarantine powers, which encompasses authority for both isolation and quarantine actions, is important not only for the handling of a specific event but also because the use of such authority provides a window on broader issues of public health and the legal rules, ethical principles, and governance systems that support it. Debates about quarantine powers reflect political and social attitudes about public health that often tell us more about this policy endeavor than acts of isolation and quarantine themselves.

All Politics Is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes. By Daniel W. Drezner. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 234p. $29.95.

Daniel Drezner begins his book by throwing down a gauntlet: “Globalization is responsible for a lot of bad international relations theory” (p. 3). This assertion caused this reviewer to nod in agreement, but it heightened my expectations for what Drezner would produce. These expectations grew as he identified promulgators of “bad international relations theory,” which ranged from commentators, such as Thomas Friedman, to schools of international relations theory, including realism and liberal institutionalism, but especially theories that privilege the agency of nonstate actors in world politics. By and large, the author met this reader's expectations by crafting a rigorous, robust, and accessible analysis of international regulatory regimes.

Recent catastrophes, and predictions of an increasing potential for more, have stimulated thinking about the best policy responses to these threats. This article explores how security concepts influence catastrophe governance. The article considers how globalization affects thinking about catastrophes and describes ways in which catastrophes have been conceptualized as governance challenges, such as the human rights approach to the provision of health and humanitarian assistance. The article explains how health and humanitarian assistance experienced “securitization” in the post-cold war period, a development that challenges rights-based strategies and creates complex and controversial implications for the prevention, protection and response functions of catastrophe governance.

The World Health Assembly (WHA) adopted the new International Health Regulations (IHR) on May 23, 2005. The new IHR represent the culmination of a decade-long revision process and an historic development for international law and public health. The new IHR appear at a moment when public health, security, and democracy have become intertwined, addressed at the highest levels of government. The United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Kofi Annan, for example, identified IHR revision as a priority for moving humanity toward “larger freedom.” This article analyzes the new IHR and their implications for global health and security in the 21st century.

The WHA instructed the WHO Director-General (DG) to revise the IHR in 1995 because the Regulations did not provide an effective framework for addressing the international spread of disease. Doubts about the IHR's effectiveness had, however, been present long before 1995. The critiques identified the narrow scope of the regulations (applying only to a small number of infectious diseases), the lack of compliance by states, and the absence of a strategy for responding to rapid changes in public health's global economic and technological environments.

At the intersection of new weapon technologies and international humanitarian law, so-called “non-lethal” weapons have become an area of particular interest. This article analyses the relationship between “non-lethal” weapons and international law in the early 21st century by focusing on the most seminal incident to date in the short history of the “non-lethal” weapons debate, the use of an incapacitating chemical to end a terrorist attack on a Moscow theatre in October 2002. This tragic incident has shown that rapid technological change will continue to stress international law on the development and use of weaponry but in ways more politically charged, legally complicated and ethically challenging than the application of international humanitarian law in the past.

In March 2003, the world discovered, again, that I humanity's battle with infectious diseases continues. The twenty-first century began with infectious diseases, especially HIV/AIDS, being discussed as threats to human rights, economic development, and national security. Bioterrorism in the United States in October 2001 increased concerns about pathogenic microbes. The global outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in the spring of 2003 kept the global infectious disease challenge at the forefront of world news for weeks. At its May 2003 annual meeting, the World Health organization (WHO) asserted that SARS is “the first severe infectious disease to emerge in the twenty-first century” and “poses a serious threat to global health security, the livelihood of populations, the functioning of health systems, and the stability and growth of economies.”

This symposium issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics indicates that interest in public health law in the United States is enjoying a renaissance. The focus of the articles reflects this renaissance, as they explore the state of public health law in various contexts within the United States. Additionally, all but one of the symposium authors plies his or her trade at a university, institution, or government agency in the United States. My task here is different: I focus on public health law within the context of international relations.

Analyzing public health law with an international perspective proves no easy assignment. Examining the role of public health law in the proverbial global village takes the analysis out of the familiar territory of law operating within a single sovereign state. The analysis could take two forms. One could compare different national systems of public health law on specific issues. Such a comparative law approach would be interested in, for example, how the public health laws of the United States and South Africa differ in connection with regulating tobacco consumption.