Ethics of Inclusive Peace and Responsible Governance
Keywords:
Inclusive Peace, Responsible Governance, Dispute Resolution Institutions, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Legal Process, Unregulated Conflict, Wartime GovernanceAbstract
The world faces growing risks from disputes, conflicts, violence, and instability. Building inclusive peace is about much more than ending war. It is about putting in place the institutions and trust that will strengthen the social contract and carry people forward into a peaceful future. It is about resolution of disputes, conflicts, and wars. Inclusion does not mean giving everyone a seat at the negotiating table. It does mean creating opportunities for people with a stake in lasting peace to shape it. Inclusive governance is that the machinery of government is equipped with effective, responsive and accountable institutions capable and empowered to deliver necessary public services to those furthest behind and rebuild public trust in government at the local levels. Governance is most ethically seen in the legal process and the juristic act through which the inclusive peace is achieved. The legal process is the resolution of disputes and conflicts which are actual or occasionally potential, by means of a decision. Pound stresses that law, morals and policy are distinct which can alter the fact that legal decisions are inevitably based on an ideology. Therefore, it is better to face up to this and make a conscious effort to recognize what are the operative values of one’s society and develop the law accordingly, rather than attempt to treat all legal decisions as purely technical exercises in legal logic.
References
From Harare to Port-au-Prince, Beirut to Bogota, Catalonia to Cairo, and in Santiago, Jakarta, Tehran, Baghdad, and New Delhi.
Thematic Paper for the UN Secretary General’s 2020 Report on Sustaining Peace and Peacebuilding Governance for Peace: Strengthening Inclusive, Just and Peaceful Societies Resilient to Future Crises
Good Governance and the Rule of Law, Nik Ahmad Kamal Nik Mahmod , Faculty of Law, International Islamic University Malaysia, Malaysia
Alan Watson. 1977. The Nature of Law, Edinburgh: The Scolar Press Ltd, p. 9.
In resolving a dispute, a process fails to inhibit further unregulated conflict. The crucial case I would suggest is persecution of a group by law, where one method adopted is to institute processes against the group or its members in order either to incite the state’s supporters to violence or to provoke the persecuted group to rebel and be defeated.
Alan Watson. 1977. The Nature of Law, Edinburgh: The Scolar Press Ltd, p. 13.
Ad infinitum is a Latin phrase meaning “to infinity” or “forevermore”.
Alan Watson. 1977. The Nature of Law, Edinburgh: The Scolar Press Ltd, p. 115.
Whether one likes it or not, this authority has much in common with Austin’s idea of a sovereign.
The authority that is relevant here can also easily be found both in international law and primitive law and can exist even where a sanction is lacking.
Alan Watson. 1977. The Nature of Law, Edinburgh: The Scolar Press Ltd, p. 115.
Readers of Anthony Trollope will remember the trial of Mr. Browborough in chapter 44 of Planeus Redux. Browborough was unseated from the Commons after a commission proved there was bribery at his election. But there was no desire that he should be imprisoned. The fact that he bribed voters is made clear to the reader. Yet at his trial the judge’s ‘summing up was very short, and seemed to have been given almost with indolence’, the jury ‘returned a verdict of acquittal without one moment’s delay’ and the Attorney-General who had led the prosecution was by no means disappointed, and everybody, on his own side in Parliament and on the other, thought that he had done his duty very well. The clean-sweeping Commissioners, who had been animated with wonderful zeal by the nature and novelty of their work, probably felt that they had been betrayed, but it may be doubted whether anyone else was disconnected by the result of the trial. Unless it might be some poor innocents here and there about the country who had been induced to believe that bribery and corruption were in truth to be banished from the purlieus of Westminster. The trial of Mr. Browborougfi is a true example of process working well. Not only is this discretion observable for a process but it is a characteristic of law that not all its rules will be equally enforced at any time.
Alan Watson. 1977. The Nature of Law, Edinburgh: The Scolar Press Ltd, p. 118.
At the same time, the generally optimistic and forward-looking character of American society coupled with the extensive attempt to place the study of men in society on a genuinely scientific basis, created a climate of thought where it seemed reasonable to believe that the problems of our society were largely based on ignorance rather than on inherent human defects.
Dennis Llyod, 1964, The Idea of Law, Penguin Book, London, p. 210.
The nineteenth century may have seen freedom of contract as one of its basic assumptions, but as Pound himself noted our own age is now seeing the gradual recognition of new postulates, such as the right to work, and the right to be legally protected against the wear and tear of one’s job. A slow ferment is therefore constantly taking place from which the positive legal norms derive their vital force and their future orientation. Dennis Llyod, 1964, The Idea of Law, Penguin Book, London, p. 211
Dennis Llyod, 1964, The Idea of Law, Penguin Book, London, p. 211.
unlike those of the United Kingdom.
Dennis Llyod, 1964. The Idea of Law, Penguin Book, London, p. 213. Once the law has established a technical rule, such for example as ‘caveat emptor’ (‘let the buyer beware’, i.e. he takes the risk of all defects and so forth) it is so easy to overlook that this simple maxim conceals a whole philosophy of law, the basic postulate of which is economic ‘laissez faire’. As Professor Northrop has remarked: ‘To be sure, there are lawyers, judges, and even law professors who tell us that they have no legal philosophy. In law, as in other things, we shall find that the only difference between a person ‘without a philosophy’ and someone with a philosophy is that the latter knows what his philosophy is, and is therefore, more able to make clear and justify the premises that are implicit in his statement of the facts of his experience and his judgment about those facts. Evaluation of the conflicts inherent in human society in accordance with some accepted or established ideology still leaves open the question how far that ideology itself is susceptible of obtaining some kind of ultimate ethical warrant. It is at this stage that the various types of natural lawyers seek to take over.
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