This essay suggests that the accountability trends explored by Stian Øby Johansen and Gisela Hirschmann in their respective monographs should be viewed as indicating the emergence of a right to justification in global governance. Both Johansen and Hirschmann seek to advance the interdisciplinary conversation about the accountability of international organizations—Johansen by developing a normative framework assessing the quality of IO accountability mechanisms, and Hirschmann by seeking to identify the variables that shape the evolution of what she calls pluralist accountability. Building upon their analyses, I put forward a set of hypotheses about the procedural and substantive dimensions of the right to justification as well as the conditions for its consolidation in global governance.

Monica Hakimi has offered a thought-provoking and timely analysis of how the jus ad bellum operates, placing on the agenda of international legal scholarship a regulatory dynamic that has thus far remained underappreciated. While I believe that a discussion of this dynamic is overdue and thus welcome her plea to take informal regulation seriously, I find some of her underlying assumptions about the nature and function of international law problematic. Therefore, rather than applaud the manifold insightful points Hakimi makes, this essay zeroes in on two related assumptions in her article that I find questionable: first, Hakimi's reasoning about the law-creating effects of informal regulation and, on a related note, the distinction between legality and legitimacy; and second, her tendency to embrace uncritically the particularistic nature of informal regulation. Both points implicate what I term the “hyper-responsiveness” of the law, that is, the (problematic) notion that every momentary political constellation should be reflected in the content of the law. In embracing law's hyper-responsiveness, Hakimi's article sidesteps a discussion of the ambivalent implications of informal regulation.

We can observe some developments that indicate a further strengthening of human rights and the rule of law even after 2001. These developments are puzzling as they occurred despite largely unfavourable scope conditions. This article offers an account of these developments that focuses on dynamics endogenous to the law. These internal dynamics provide a causal mechanism that sets in once a certain threshold of legalization has been reached. We employ the Hartian notion of secondary rules which we think is an especially helpful conceptual tool to analyse the endogenous dynamics of legal systems. To the extent that law is programmed towards consistency, secondary rules become necessary in an environment of rapidly increasing legal density to govern the complexity resulting from this proliferation of norms. Upholding consistency is necessary to maintain the autonomy of law in a Luhmannian sense and the ‘morality’ of the legal system in a Fullerian sense. Our goal is to show this and at the same move beyond an argument of system or normative functionality by identifying causal mechanisms that can explain the law’s built-in drive towards secondary rules, and that are in accordance with broader social science theory. We use some insights from cognitive psychology to develop these causal mechanisms further. While testing these causal mechanisms would be beyond the scope of this paper, we hope to provide the conceptual tools for future empirical research on the dynamics of secondary rule-making and offer some empirical illustrations to demonstrate how dissonance reduction operates in practice.

Sovereign states have a responsibility not only to protect their own citizens, but also to protect— within their own territory—the rights and fundamental security interests of other states. Many states around the world, however, lack the resources to do so. Unable to exercise effective territorial control, these weak states frequently become safe havens for terrorist networks and other irregular groups. Yet the lack of such control is not the only reason for the existence of safe havens around the world; in some cases, the problem is not the host state's inability, but rather its unwillingness, to prevent irregular activity on its territory. The present article analyzes the challenges posed to the jus ad bellum resulting from both types of safe-haven scenarios: states that are unable, and those that are unwilling, to exercise control.

Despite its newness, the concept of the responsibility to protect (R2P) looks back at a stellar career. It has been the subject of numerous conferences and academic publications and has been affirmed by the major UN bodies. Indeed, if one were to assess the development of an international norm by the amount of academic attention and general rhetorical support it enjoys, one could be inclined to believe that the responsibility to protect is rapidly evolving into a norm of customary international law.

This article subjects the R2P hype to critical scrutiny and asks probing questions about R2P's viability as a norm. Beneath the thin veneer of rhetorical acceptance of R2P lies a range of hotly disputed issues – in particular but not exclusively regarding the concept's implications for the use of force – which are unlikely to be resolved in the near future. In this article I examine R2P's potential to ‘ripen’ into an international norm. I argue that in the absence of an intersubjective consensus about what R2P actually means, the concept's chances to ‘harden’ into a norm of customary international law are remote. I posit that R2P cannot be considered a ‘new norm’ or an ‘emerging norm’ as it is frequently called, because the vast majority of states simply does not want to be legally bound to save strangers in remote regions of the world.