By My Tweets…

I never was enthusiastic about Twitter the first time I learnt about it. My thinking then was that there were already too many social media that seemed to duplicate themselves. It didn’t occur to me that Twitter offered anything different than say Facebook or LinkedIn for instance. I now know better. Twitter, since I got a handle on it and figured out how to leverage its benefits has since displaced Facebook as my social media of choice when looking for real time information. But make no mistake about it; I didn’t abandon Facebook altogether. In fact rather than mutually exclusive alternatives, I have since discovered that Twitter and Facebook could, and do reinforce one another. Twitter appears to thrive on its own pace and fury. There is always the danger that you might lose helpful information and materials unless you pick them up while they are still fresh off their source. That could be a lot of work. But if you synchronized Twitter and Facebook such that your tweets also appear on your Facebook timeline you could in fact be building an informal library. As an aspiring academic, I feed these days off information in my area of research. Before Twitter, I used to get snatches of materials that interest me. They used to trickle in once in a while. Now with Twitter, I seem to have unlocked a treasure trove. Information that might interest me now arrives in torrents. The magic has been to select twitterers that I “follow” carefully. I have to be certain they produce and disseminate the kind of information that is of interest to me. My experience suggests therefore that you could know a person by reading her/his tweets. The same applies to me as well. I have taken stock of some of my tweets in the last month and how they did swing from the serious to the light-hearted and to the downright hilarious. One of them comes from a discussion on a different social media platform, Linkedin which wondered why up to 54 per cent of the cases before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights fail the admissibility test. A different tweet contained a list of seven important international treaties yet to be ratified by the United States, strengthening its core case to popular exceptionalism. Yet another tweet told the story of five smaller countries calling for more transparency at the United Nations but which, according to a diplomat from one of those countries, earned them “several clear notices both in our capitals and here in New York to say ‘don’t do it.’” One more serious tweet was addressed to the most important choice before legal graduates: are they to follow the worn path of pure legal industry business or should they be concerned with social justice issues? The Yale Law School 2012 Commencement Speaker had advised its graduates to remember the poor and work for equal justice. Among the more lighthearted tweets included one indicating that more than a third of divorce filings in the United States contain the word “Facebook.” Another let it be known that courts in parts of Canada are turning to video conference testimonies to cut costs. At the more professional and career level, I had tweets on what it takes to get a dissertation or thesis published as well as on how to swallow criticism without taking it personally. The last of these tweets is especially significant for younger academics entering the new worlds of peer-review and critique. What my experience prowling the twitter-sphere tells me is that social media is changing the way we think about accessing precious information as well as how one could keep abreast of helpful events as they happen in real time.

Globalization and the Changing Face of International Law II

Why does it matter that FIFA forced the Nigerian government to bow to its threats and how does this indicate a new direction in international law? Nigeria’s capitulation matters because it demonstrates how states which used to be the main actors on the international law arena are being rendered irrelevant by a posse of newer actors and institutions. These newer actors are taking over the previous role of states by the sheer dint of globalization as well as the apparent failure of traditional mechanisms for the regulation of state behavior in international law. The United Nations is today almost out of focus, paralyzed by the manipulative use of the veto by the permanent members of its Security Council. The same paralysis afflicts the activities of the International Criminal Court except cases involving Africans indicted by the system. The international criminal justice system is being undermined by the world’s most powerful nations. Nor could any binding agreement be reached on the framework for international climate change governance. The UN system tried in Kyoto, in Copenhagen and most recently in Durban to put together a binding instrument with no breakthrough achieved. Yet there are challenges that these failed processes should be confronting – war crimes, gross human rights abuses, confronting the dangers of climate change. They require solutions that can only wait with disastrous consequences. And as international law is suffering paralysis on the most crucial issues facing the world community, solutions are being sought in the private sphere which unlike the public institutions that are trapped in a legitimacy bubble, offers more functional and practical alternatives. While some of the mechanisms are hybrid, incorporating private/public elements like the World Trade Organization and World Bank, others like the international Financial Action Task Force (FATF) are intergovernmental/voluntary and at first brush private but do impact the public sphere in very significant ways. FIFA on its part is purely a non-governmental institution registered as a public charity. It is different from the WTO, World Bank and FATF that has states as members. FIFA’s membership is drawn from national football associations which like FIFA itself ought to be non-governmental. But in reality they (especially those in Africa) are not. African football associations take government funds to run their activities. Yet they are difficult to control by those same governments. And while prevailing orthodoxy holds that sports (football included) do not mix with politics, the reality is different. Sports and politics can no longer be effectively separated. Otherwise why would some Western European governments threaten to use the occasion of the EURO 2012 in Poland and Ukraine to protest the treatment of Ukrainian opposition politician, Yulia Tymoshenko? Popular sport is therefore now a powerful globalizing force as well as potent international governance tool. How sport is deployed, in addition to its relationship to other international governance mechanisms, demonstrates that at present governance is supplanting law at the international level. It also shows that rather than international law, it might be more correct to speak in terms of global governance as the new direction for international relationships. This suggests a rethinking of scholarship in the entire field.