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Young people's gender practices and the function of the school in shaping these practices have become a contentious issue in Chinese public discussions over the past decade. This article explores an emergent strain of thinking within this debate: that schools should promote the notion of gender equality. Focusing on the case of Daode yu fazhi (Morality and legal rule) textbooks currently used in all junior high schools (Grades 7-9) across the country, the article employs qualitative textual analysis to examine whether and how the gender equality principle is presented to youth in the Xi Jinping era (2012-). The study finds that the Xi-era textbooks promote the principle of equality between men and women and urge young people to fight for the implementation of this principle. In a notable break from the past, the books also acknowledge the existence of diverse gender practices among contemporary youth. At the same time, the textbooks endorse the notion of "natural" gender difference and "harmonious" gender complementarity. The books also censor gender/sexuality expressions that do not conform with hegemonic binary gender norms. Reflecting patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies reinforced by nationalist politics and a growing moral anxiety about the blurring of boundaries between masculinity and femininity, the Xi era curriculum ultimately leaves little space for flexible gender formulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores two aspects of the privatization of childhood in contemporary urban China: the emergent discourse on children's privacy and children's growing seclusion within the home. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the author describes urban caregivers' engagement with the issue of children's privacy, and argues that we are now witnessing a transformation in Chinese notions of childhood, privacy and subjectivity. The result of a complex interaction between official discourses, demographic changes and economic forces, this transformation is also a product of the persistent influence of Confucian values, and the unique childhood experiences of a particular generation of urban Chinese parents. (Contains 15 notes.)

In a recent decision the Israeli High Court of Justice, the highest instance in the Israeli judicial system, authorized the forcible transfer of some 1,000 Palestinians from a West Bank community. Much like a biopsy sample, the article draws on its microanalysis of this individual case to expose a malady afflicting the body politic and entire corpus of judicial decisions concerning Israel's conduct in the occupied Palestinian territory. This malady's symptoms are increasingly evident across the global legal order. The proposition advanced in this article is three-fold: first, from the perspective of international legal doctrine, the judgment lacks any foundation, bringing about tragic consequences for the affected communities while offering a farcically inadequate account of international law. Second, the measures employed to displace the community are but an example of myriad legal technologies developed by the Israeli authorities and facilitated by Israeli courts that have fragmented the occupied territory into numerous zones, relegating Palestinians to a "no-place" while Jewish settlers take over their land. Third, while the judiciary has always been complicit in this process, the Israeli High Court of Justice's farcical treatment of international law in the case is indicative of change in its approach to international law. The Israeli court, however, is not alone in signaling disengagement from international law: the withering away of the "global community of courts" is a phenomenon of the times we live in, suggesting both that the cost attached to blatant violations of international law may be minimal and that we are moving from a rule of law to a rule by law paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schools constitute key sites for legal socialisation, the process whereby youth develop their relationship with the law. Yet, what does legal socialisation entail in the context of an authoritarian party-state such as China? The article examines this question by analysing Chinese citizenship education textbooks of the Xi era. The study finds that China's current textbooks contain elements associated with both a coercive and a consensual approach to legal education. Nonetheless, it is the consensual orientation that receives greater stress, as the books highlight the positive benefits of legal compliance and endorse the idea that youth should advance beyond the external supervisory stage to the self-discipline level of legal consciousness. Reflecting the attempt of the Chinese Communist Party leadership to draw on legality as a key source of legitimacy, this approach is nonetheless undermined by the propagandist tone of the textbooks and their ambiguous messages regarding citizens' ability to challenge China's existing laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most well-known and widely cited literature in the multidisciplinary field of childhood studies has been undertaken by scholars based in the Global North, who have produced theoretical frameworks and conceptualisations about childhood frequently deployed by Northern and Southern scholars alike. These are often based on priorities developed in Northern academic institutions, sometimes in response to funding calls by grant-making agencies also based in the North. As a result, when Southern scholars contribute to the dominant childhood studies literature, a field of study in which the majority of well-known articles tend to be published in Northern-based Anglophone journals, their contributions stand mainly as empirical variations of mainstream Northern theories whose scholarship foregrounds theoretical and methodological frameworks designed with particular childhoods in mind. The resulting outcome is that Global South childhoods – in their plurality and diversity – do not contribute epistemically to the construction of a transnational childhood scientific discourse. This ultimately limits the quality of global childhood studies and hinders the development of more conceptually sophisticated, eventually divergent, theoretical frameworks that can account for multiplicity and diversity in childhoods. Therefore, this volume sought to explore locally driven perspectives of childhoods in diverse contexts in the South for the purpose of gaining insights into the knowledge that can be produced about Southern childhoods when research is driven by priorities, demands, and needs of locales in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schools worldwide have long engaged in various forms of 'war education'. In China, an extensive 'Patriotic Education' campaign and an expanded 'National Defense Education' curriculum have led to an increase in youth-oriented military programs in the 2000s. Previous work on the implementation of these programs in Chinese schools has mostly focused on urban elite youth, while overlooking the reception of these programs by non-urban, non-elite populations. The present study addresses this issue by examining youth perceptions and experiences of military training courses in urban and rural high schools. Drawing on the analysis of Chinese publications in the 2000s and on data from field interviews with students of different backgrounds, the study finds that youth military training constitutes a contentious program. Although the Chinese government promotes the program as crucial for military strengthening and the fostering of a patriotic spirit, PRC academic and media writers provide alternative rationales for the program, which at times undermine the logic of government articulations. Meanwhile, interviews with youth document divergent attitudes and even resentment towards the program, especially among city youth. This finding casts doubt on the assumption that military-training courses necessarily contribute to the increased 'militarization' of Chinese youth and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, the Chinese party-state has attempted to teach its youth how to think and speak about the nation through a "patriotic education" campaign waged in schools, the media and on public sites. The reception of these messages by youth of different social backgrounds remains a disputed issue, however. Drawing on a multi-sited field study conducted among rural and urban Han Chinese youth attending different types of schools, this article explores the effects of the patriotic education campaign on youth conceptions of the nation by examining the rhetoric high-school students employ when asked to reflect upon their nation. The study reveals that a majority of youth statements conform to the language and contents of the patriotic education campaign; however, there are significant differences in the discursive stances of urban youth and rural youth and of those attending academic and non-academic, vocational schools. These findings call into question the party-state's current vision of China as a "unified" national collectivity. They highlight the existence of variances in the sense of collective belonging and national identity of Chinese youth, while underscoring the importance of social positioning and perceived life chances in producing these variances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing prevalence of foreign media consumption, including from Japan, has received considerable notice in recent work on PRC youth culture. To date, however, few studies have considered how youth of different social backgrounds perceive their consumption of Japanese popular culture in the context of the Party-state’s ‘patriotic education’ campaign waged in schools and in the mass media. Studies have also overlooked how rural and urban youth in China juxtapose the images and themes conveyed in the Japanese media that they consume with school and domestic media messages. Drawing on interviews with middle school students in Shanghai and Henan, the present study addresses these issues. It finds that while a majority of youths from different backgrounds express animosity toward Japan, they separate these feelings from their passion for Japanese popular culture. In some cases, consumption of Japanese media also allows teenagers to feel that they ‘know’—or even appreciate—the other country better. Amid the anti-Japanese messages currently circulating in PRC schools and domestic media, consumption of Japanese popular culture manifests a form of ‘expressive individualism’ among teenagers, who creatively construct their own notions of patriotism, national memory, and Sino-Japanese relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the subject-matter of a symposium on international law and science-fiction. The impact of new technologies on human rights, humanitarian issues and indeed on what it means to be human in a technological age, suffers from a paucity of international legal attention. The latter has been attributed to various factors ranging from technophobia and technological illiteracy, inclusive of an instrumentalist view of technology, to the sense that such attention is the domain of science-fiction, not of international law. The article extends an invitation to pay attention to the attention science-fiction has given to the man-machine interaction and its impact on the human condition. Placing this invitation in the context of the ‘‘law and literature’’ movement, the article exemplifies its value with respect to two technologies, one directed at creating life or saving it (cloning and organ donation) and the other at ending life (lethal autonomous robots). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continuous Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory may well have exhausted the international community and exasperated the Palestinians, but it still stimulates the Israeli legal imagination. In 2012, the Israeli government established an expert committee to examine the status of Jewish construction in the West Bank. The committee's report concluded that from an international legal perspective, the West Bank is not occupied territory; the law of belligerent occupation is not applicable to the area; the "prevailing view" is that Jewish settlements are lawful; and that Israel has a valid claim to sovereignty over the territory. This Article, combining a doctrinal analysis with both Cover's notion of 'Nomos and Narrative' and Kuhn's 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions, ' posits that the report is epistemologically groundless and ethically blemished. The committee's reading of international law substitutes an ideology for professionalism. The ideology, resurrecting the long discredited colonialist/Orientalist paradigm, reflects an idiosyncratic utopian vision, one that is simultaneously hegemonic and insular. Consequently, its legal position is methodologically extraneous to the structure of international law, substantively at odds with the compelling commitment of the international community to self-determination, and ethically dystopian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 2000s, the Chinese military has been engaged in the production of military- and war-themed cultural products which increasingly employ new media and new technologies. Many of these products specifically target children and youth, and many are also a result of collaborations between the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and commercial forces. This article offers a preliminary exploration of how such PLA–civilian productions attempt to package and market war and the military to contemporary Chinese children and youth. It compares these current endeavours to previous depictions of war and the military in the youth culture of the Maoist period, and reflects on what this comparison can tell us about recent changes in official as well as popular conceptualizations of childhood, youth, and violence in the People’s Republic of China. The analysis demonstrates that contemporary PLA products for children and youth display positive attitudes toward the military and toward officially sanctioned military violence. However, these products also subscribe to new public sensitivities about children and their involvement in acts of brutality, thereby reflecting the changing needs and interests of the PLA and of the Chinese Communist Party in the post-Cold War, post-Tiananmen era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a response note to a review essay, authored by Dr. Robbie Sabel, published in the "Israel Law Review." It negates Sabel's representation of the thesis that occupation is legal it is less than a year. It notes that the review neglects to mention that the prohibition on settlements is absolute and that the construction of the wall between Hague and Jerusalem is illegal.

The article focuses on the decision of the Israeli MilitaryAdvocaté General (MAG) to charge an officer who ordered the shooting of a handcuffed, blindfolded Palestinian demonstrator, and the soldier who executed the order, for 'conduct unbecoming' It advances the following propositions: (i) from the perspective of the applicable international law, the facts of the case qualify the shooting as a war crime; (ii) said decision of the Israeli MAG is indicative of a policy of tolerance towards violence against non-violent civilian protest against the construction of the Separation Wall; (iii) the implication of such policy is twofold: first, it might transform 'conduct unbecoming' - which as a matter of law is a war crime - into a crime against humanity; second, it may well be construed as an invitation to the international community to intervene through the exercise of universal jurisdiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the legal implications of the construction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ or the Court) of the duty to punish genocide under Article VI of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro judgment. It posits that the Court's discussion of the duty to punish is satisfying in terms of what it says and less satisfying in terms of what it is silent about. It is satisfying in the sense that the Court's construction of the duty to cooperate with international tribunals prosecuting genocide as including a duty of extradition, seems to extend beyond the plain language of the Convention and indeed beyond the parties' original intent. It is not fully satisfying because the duty to prosecute remains quite limited. It is further argued that the obligation to punish genocide as established in Article I and the obligation to prosecute genocide as established in Article VI should be understood as two distinct obligations. Article VI merely sets the institutional arrangements for prosecution. Other normative sources support the conclusion that a general duty to prosecute perpetrators of genocide or extradite them for prosecution elsewhere applies even in those cases where the offence was not committed in the territory of a contracting state or when the offender is prosecuted by an international court that has jurisdiction over the state where the alleged perpetrator is found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of the inconclusive conclusion of its analysis (to the effect that it cannot be determined whether targeted killings are always legal or always illegal, but the matter must be established on a case by case basis), the judgment delivered by the Israeli Supreme Court is important in many respects. Although it inquires into the legality or illegality of targeted killings from the viewpoint of state responsibility, it also takes into account the possibility of individual criminal liability arising out of acts contrary to international humanitarian law, and suggests the dialectics between these two classes of responsibility. The fact that the judgment sets out guidelines for permissible and impermissible actions involving targeted killings provides the condition for investigating the criminality of some of these actions and indeed invites such investigations by the Israeli judicial authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the case Public Committee Against Torture in Israel v. Government of Israel. It mentions that the Supreme Court of Israel investigated the legality of preventive targeted killings of Palestinian militants. The Court decided that such activities are not always allowed nor forbidden. During international armed conflicts, international law requires civilians to be protected from attacks by the army. However, the court differentiated from innocent civilians and civilians who participate in the hostilities taking place. In case a civilian directly participates in the hostilities, that person will not be granted civilian rights and will be considered a legitimate target of attacks.

This article deals with the legal and moral imperatives arising out of the Kapo trials, which took place in Israel between 1951 and 1964. Section 2 considers substantive aspects of the Israeli Nazi and Nazi Collaborators Law (adopted in 1950), as well as the moral quagmire embedded within this Law. Section 3 explores the dialogue that these trials advanced (and the dialogue that they failed to advance) in Israeli society. Section 4 offers some reflection on the reasons why these trials have been expunged from Israel's collective memory. The authors also attempt to shed some light on the impact that this deliberate collective forgetting has had on the construction of Israel's national identity and examine the central role that judicial institutions have played in reconstructing the past and providing meaning for the Kapo trials as a nation-building mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores whether the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory conquered in 1967 is legal or illegal. Fundamental legal principles to which the legality of the phenomenon of occupation is to be measured; Legal matrix of occupation; Purpose and nature of the occupation.

The comment focuses on the construction of time in the normative regime of occupation. Beginning (in section 2) with a critique of the ICJ's reading of Article 6 of the Fourth Geneva Convention concerning the scope of applicability ratione temporis of the Convention in cases where the duration of an occupation lasts longer than one year, the comment proceeds (in section 3) to argue (a) that the gap between the working assumption informing Article 6 (of relatively short-term occupations) and reality (of prolonged occupations) defines a problem which the Court erroneously construed as a solution; (b) that the problem of prolonged occupation has allowed for the substitution of an indefinite for a temporary duration of an occupation, a move which defies the basic tenets of the normative regime of occupation; and (c) that a proper solution involves the construction of the notion of "reasonable time" into the Fourth Geneva Convention. The comment includes (in section 4) a proposal designed to minimize the temporary/indefinite blurring of boundaries in situations where an occupation has not ended within one year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a critique of the 2002 decision of the Israeli High Court of Justice that the Israeli policy of ‘targeted killings’, being a means of warfare against terrorism, is non‐justiciable. The critique, resting on the domestic, transnational and international ramifications of the decision, proposes that that decision is (i) inconsistent with the jurisprudence and practice of the court; (ii) inappropriate in terms of judicial policy; and (iii) ill‐advised in view of the nascent global (international and universal) criminal legal discourse, which encourages domestic courts to subject alleged crimes to their review. Such review gives domestic courts the opportunity to address both the international and the domestic communities, signalling to the former, that the domestic system participates in the global legal discourse, and to the latter, that normative behaviour may well advance the national interest. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Analyzes the Israeli policy of targeted killings. Discussion of the competing narratives of the al-Aqsa Intifada and the Israeli policy of targeted killings; Conditions of applicability of the laws of war; Definition of the persons targeted by Israel under the applicable laws of war.

Are human rights norms applicable to occupied territories in general, and to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in particular? The article examines the controversy that had arisen between Israel and the UN treaty monitoring bodies in relation to this question and critically analyzes Israel's three objections to such applicability: 1) the mutual exclusivity of humanitarian regime and human rights regime in occupied territories, the former being thus the only applicable law; 2) a restrictive interpretation of the jurisdictional provisions treaties; and 3) the lack of effective control in some of the territories. The article posits that the universal object and purpose of human rights treaties, which inform the proper interpretation of their jurisdictional clauses, require their applicability in all territories subject to the effective control of the state parties, as well as to other extra-territorial exercises of government power directly affecting individuals. Consequently, international human rights law and international humanitarian law apply in occupied territories in parallel and not to the exclusion of one another. This position is confirmed by extensive practice of the international human rights monitoring bodies, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and by some decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court. In conclusion, the paper posits that Israel's refusal to apply the six principal human rights treaties to which it is party to the Occupied Territories is incompatible with its international law obligations and proceeds to propose modalities for the co-application of both human rights and humanitarian law in occupied territories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the legitimacy of representative governments of United Nations member states. Elements in the construction of a legal regime governing the question of representation; Account on the representation of Cambodia; Comparison of government legitimacy between member states; Proposal for determining the representative nature of governments.