Articles for author: Gabriel Armas-Cardona

No New Cold War for International Law

With Russia’s war against Ukraine not being the Blitzkrieg that Putin had planned for, there has been discussion that we are entering a new Cold War. During the (old) Cold War, development of international law was stunted due to the need of agreement between opposing political blocs that had fundamentally differing views on the role and content of international law. This blog post argues that even if we enter a new Cold War, we won’t soon have a similar adverse situation for international legal development because the legal understanding of one of the alleged “camps” lacks consistency, legitimacy and broad geopolitical support.

Context Matters

On February 9th, the Armenian parliament authorized a referendum that would allow the Prime Minister of Armenia, Nikol Pashinyan, to remove seven of the current nine justices from the Constitutional Court. Pashinyan has called the decisions of the Court a “threat to democracy”. On its face, this seems like yet another example of a populist leader trying to use a referendum to increase his power. Examining the context of the situation in Armenia, however, paints a different picture.