This book addresses conflicts involving how law relates normative orders. The assumption behind the book is that law no longer automatically claims supremacy, but that actors can pick and choose which code to follow.

ABSTRACTPrevious accounts of International Relations research have extensively focused on deontological ethics in analysing Responsibility to Protect. At the same time, discourse ethics – alo...

Roy Bhaskar's Social Cube model based on critical realist philosophy has not been dealt with in theory of decision-making at any length, nor has it raised any notable debate in social theory in general. The model demonstrates that decision-making is regulated and transformed by a constantly evolving complexity of mechanisms emerging from physical, mental, material, human and social levels of reality. With the help of this device, Graham Allison's argument against the Rational Actor Model that decisions are not so much (...) acts of unitary decision-makers but more outputs of large organisations can be elaborated and converted into a statement that decisions are products of a complexity of knowledge-producing mechanisms. The openness of social systems revealed by the Social Cube therefore requires methodological pluralism, for example the application of psychological theories in order to explain political phenomena. By applying the Social Cube model and by drawing new empirical evidence from the Linda Melvern Rwanda Genocide Archive, this article demonstrates that the Somalia effect on the UN's failure in Rwanda was more complicated than the existing literature claims; it was “multi-layered”, generated not only by intentional political calculations, as previous studies argue, but also by a multiplicity of other mechanisms operative at various levels, particularly cognitive dissonance in organisational learning at the unintentional or subconscious level. (shrink)