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The resurgence of the Holy Roman Emperorship in the decades after the Peace of Westphalia (1648) has received considerable attention in recent historiography. In this respect the particular importance of the Imperial Court of Justice (Imperial Aulic Council, Reichshofrat) has been stressed: It is assumed that it played a key role within the Imperial government, that it had helped to secure the imperial loyalty to the postwestphalian constitutional order and that it contributed to the skillful use of the Imperial prerogatives by the Vienna Government. Against this backdrop, the position of the Aulic Council regarding the creation of the Ninth (Hannoverian) electorship by Emperor Leopold in 1692, which hitherto has not been examined in detail, reveals a different historical picture. On the one hand, the Imperial Aulic Council was not included in the decision processes concerning the electorship, it was not even officially informed and rebuked for accepting a remonstration against the electorship. On the other hand, the Aulic Council in return criticised the creation of the Ninth electorship quite frankly in its self justification in April 1693 with regard to the procedures and its possible dangerous political consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The balance-of-power idea became a crucial concept in the discourse of international affairs by the mid-seventeenth century. Nonetheless, the concept of balance of power was not even explicitly referenced in the Peace of Westphalia (1648). Instead, the legal principles of status quo ante and uti possidetis reigned supreme. Even though the balance-of-power principle was not mentioned in the Peace of Westphalia, it was often referenced during the negotiations and its implicit presence or practical balance of power was evident in the treaties trying to reach stability in the inter-state system. Several alliances, concluded mostly against France and Louis XIV in the second half of the seventeenth century, implied the balance of power and, more specifically, the balance of sea power. The paper argues that the balancing process became less theoretical and more pragmatic as evidenced by interactive alliance treaties that established reciprocal responsibilities and numerical equilibrium. By the Peace of Utrecht (1713), the balance of power or the balance of Europe became a leading principle and it was referenced repeatedly in the treaties in different languages. The paper traces the balance-of-power idea from the diplomatic background to the diplomatic foreground as the idea moved from natural law to positive law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violent struggles in the Middle East and North Africa have led many experts to compare this era to the Thirty Years' War, a set of interlinked and extremely deadly and destructive conflicts in Europe (1618‐48). Like that conflagration four centuries ago, they involve internal uprisings, civil conflicts, proxy wars, foreign intervention, geopolitical struggles, great‐power competition, and the participation of many regional political players. At root, all these conflicts are fights for sovereignty, one of the most important pillars upon which the state is based, the violation of which often leads to the outbreak of war. For this reason, many assert that the time is right to try to solve contemporary problems by forging a new Westphalia treaty. This study analyzes the Thirty Years' War and the groundbreaking treaty that emerged from it, then presents a strategy to preserve state sovereignty and seek peace in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socio-economic disparities can pose threat to the security of a nation-state. They may even threaten a state's survival. Thereby States have to adopt a comprehensive security approach to address socio-economic disparities. Pakistan is also challenged by socioeconomic disparities caused by several internal and external factors. National Security Policy (NSP) 2022-2026 has duly recognised these factors and proposed a comprehensive security paradigm for the country. This study deploys a Comprehensive security approach as propounded by Copenhagen School to understand the linkage between socio-economic disparities and the national security of Pakistan. It attempts to explain how socioeconomic disparities affect Pakistan's national security and what can be done to address them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the potential effectiveness of the Peace of Westphalia treaty as a solution to eliminate human rights violations in the Middle East through the harmonization of international law and power.

Copyright of Journal of Management & Economics Research is the property of Journal of Management & Economics Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article explores the origins of public international law and outlines steps toward the recognition of humanitarian organizations and civil society as subjects of international law. Topics discussed include how states became the defining actors in international law and highlights the role of sovereign states in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the civil society in the 1859 Battle of Solferino, and nongovernmental (NGO) organizations in the adoption of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

The article focuses on U.S. policies under the regime of the U.S. president Donald Trump and effect of Trump's rule on U.S.-led international order. It highlights Trump's foreign policy, his administration's strategic vision and America First radical attitude. It discusses liberal international order as a framework of rules and expectations among states. It discusses examples of conventions that took place to bring about world order and prevent war, which includes Peace of Westphalia and Congress of Vienna.

The article presents a report from an August 31-September 1, 2017 conference in Bonn, Germany on the social and cultural history of the Peace of Westphalia. Topics of presentations delivered included the alleged impact of the Peace on Swedish military history, the Catholic Church's role in the peace process, and the resolution of the Holland states.

This article participates in efforts by IR theorists to clarify aspects of modern sovereignty – an idea currently in rupture and being rethought – by returning to its founding ‘Westphalian moment’. While recent work has reconnected modern sovereignty to religion, considering Westphalia as a religious settlement and Christian concerns persisting in the groundwork of IR, our work looks beyond Christian concerns and asks how Westphalian sovereignty addressed non-Christians. We trace a yet-untapped discussion of the Jews – presented as a paradigmatic religious ‘other’ – among architects of Westphalian sovereignty from Bodin through Grotius, Hobbes, Harrington, and Spinoza. We demonstrate that foundational theorists of modern sovereignty considered religious diversity a political problem. Some cited essential sameness, minimising difference between Jews and Christians. Others considered the possibility of Jewish sovereignty long before this idea is usually considered to have entered modern consciousness. While the discussion of Jewish sovereignty among architects of modern sovereignty may seem to justify a Jewish state in a world of Westphalian states, it also emphasises Westphalia’s territorialising of religious difference. This aspect of the Westphalian framework is surely inadequate today, when territorialising religious difference is neither normative nor likely possible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author discusses the concept of security in relation to that of sovereignty from the Peace of Westphalia up to the early Cold War period. In this context, it is shown that the existing theories related to sovereignty, tributary to determinism to a large extent, are also marked by dynamism, in order to meet the challenges specific to different periods in history. As for the beginning of the Cold War, the two different visions of security, which were dominant, are mentioned, namely security through cooperation and political-economic integration, obeying the right of peoples to self-determination, promoted by the Western world, and security through encouraging dissensions between the capitalist states, protecting the interests of the Soviets. Thus, the so-called security dilemma became a major concern, being mainly generated by the lack of trust between states in terms of ensuring security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major question of our days is the proliferation of violent "non-state actors" such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (DAESH), Boko Haram and PYD in northern Syria. These developments confront the scholarly community with a basic question: why are these violent "non-state actors" emerging and how will they affect the nature and future of the modern nation-state, which is the building block of the modern international system since the 1648 Peace of Westphalia? This paper tries to tackle these questions by focusing exclusively on DAESH as the quintessential model of violent "non-state actors" and comparing it with the distinguishing features of the modern nation-state from other forms of governance and the competing theories regarding the emergence of the modern nation-state. This paper suggests that violent "non-state actors" like DAESH are proliferating precisely because they have taken over many of modern state's defining attributes. It concludes by pointing out that DAESH as such has challenged the modern nation-state in terms of empirical statehood but not juridical statehood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Peace of Westphalia, few great powers have “died”, while the “death rate” and proliferation of small states has been dramatic at times. What causes these fluctuations? In this paper, I claim that the dominant reason for the extinction, emergence and proliferation of the small state over the last three and a half centuries is to be found at the system level. Ultimately, small state survival is determined by the particular set-up of the state system. I advance this argument from the perspective of international relations theory, integrating the relevant scholarship of the English School and realism, especially structural realism. The latter’s systemic perspective provides the basis for arguing that small states are structurally irrelevant. It is this feature of the small state, its irrelevance with regard to the power-based structure of the state system, which has caused the small state to “struggle for existence” in the past, and which has allowed small states to proliferate during the bipolar Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Given the abundance of evidence that disputed territory matters, we know remarkably little about the origins of territorial claims. We argue that the presence of competing historical border precedents is central to the emergence of territorial claims. We outline why precedents provide opportunity to make claims and provide two possible explanations for why leaders have incentive to claim along precedents. One possibility is consistent with the conventional wisdom that incentive derives from territorial characteristics such as natural resources or strategic significance. A second and more novel explanation is that the persistent coordination effects of historical boundaries provide the incentive to draw claims along them. We use new data on the location of historical boundaries from the peace of Westphalia until the start of the French Revolution to show that historical border precedents drive the emergence of territorial claims after the Congress of Vienna and that persistent coordination effects provide incentive to dispute historical precedents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The success of the treaties of Westphalia in preserving the religious peace in the Holy Roman Empire after 1648 has been a popular scholarly theme. Many historians also realize, however, that confessional tensions and confrontations persisted well into the eighteenth century. Exploring an early eighteenth-century German confessional crisis centered in the Palatinate, this article focuses on the degree to which judicial, political, and diplomatic mechanisms successfully regulated and deescalated confessional strife. In short, it looks at the “juridification” of confessional conflict in the Empire. In so doing, it addresses a number of underresearched themes, such as the reactions of the Catholic princes and the Emperor, the internal dynamics within the Corpus Evangelicorum, as well as the international dimension of European great power politics. This not only provides a multiangle analysis of a crisis that saw the emergence of a new regime in the politics of religion, but also offers greater insight into the relationship between the powerful, militarized Protestant territorial-states of northern Germany and the Habsburg emperorship, specifically with regard to the judicial authority of the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From the very beginnings of diplomacy, material culture has been a significant factor in intercultural relations, even if its outward appearance and symbolic meaning have changed over time. What has hardly changed, however, is the genuine multi-sensual nature of diplomatic communication, something that has for a very long time been neglected by historians. The following article applies a material culture approach to diplomatic history, outlining the most important dimensions of materiality in diplomatic encounters. These include the materiality of diplomatic documents, the material equipment of diplomatic actors, the architecture and furnishing of the sites used for diplomatic negotiations, the arrangement of diplomatic accommodation, and diplomatic gifts. It proposes a number of research methods for investigating the material culture of diplomacy and addresses methodological pitfalls, such as separating material practices from political objectives in the course of interpretation. Finally, the article explores the gain in knowledge that the focus on material culture can potentially offer to diplomatic historians. For example, it can provide valuable insights into the financial and economic history of diplomacy. It also enables historians to analyze processes of cultural transfer and cultural hybridization, and globalization in the context of diplomacy. The history of diplomacy and foreign policy in modern times is once again the focus of historical research. With regard to the early modern period it has turned to social and cultural perspectives of diplomacy such as, for example, diplomatic networks, experiences and perceptions of diplomatic actors abroad, their practices of self-staging at foreign courts, and their part in processes of knowledge transfer.1 Historians have studied concepts of the office of early modern envoys. In theory these were shaped by notions of the parfait ambassadeur.2 In practice they were strongly influenced by the state of relations between the political entities involved in negotiation, between the diplomatic principal and his diplomatic agent, by the power relations at a foreign seat of government and also by the variety of tasks the envoys had to fulfill in the course of a diplomatic mission. In particular, this applies to residents as an instrument of diplomacy which, not incidentally, certain Italian rulers started to implement in the fifteenth century, before it spread to other regions of Europe as well, and which still may be considered a factor as well as an indication of an evolving European state system.3 Other scholars focused on the role of diplomatic ceremonial that was increasingly differentiated and regulated after the Peace of Westphalia (1648), even though legal scholars and diplomatic practitioners frequently criticized ceremonial procedures as inefficient and tiresome.4 Regarding the modern period, new approaches to the history of diplomacy were mainly inspired by groundbreaking studies in the realm of international history and international relations, although conventional diplomatic history is still very - and even, once more, increasingly - influential.5 Apart from a persistent dominance of traditional political history in the history of foreign relations in general, two developments may appear responsible for this situation. Firstly, international research was influenced by American scholars who were socialized in a political system in which sophisticated diplomatic protocol and the aristocratic ancestry of diplomatic personnel did not play as decisive a part as it did in many European countries even after the Second World War. Not surprisingly, the cultural history of contemporary diplomacy in the United States focuses on public diplomacy6 and cultural diplomacy7 as spheres of diplomatic activities in a wider sense. Both these spheres are considered to have been essential in postwar U.S. foreign policy regarding, for example, West Germany and several East Asian regions. Not only American scholars claimed a leading role for U.S. dealings concerning public diplomacy and particularly cultural diplomacy after the Second World War. Secondly, German research into the field of diplomacy was strongly influenced by postwar German history - by the formation of two German states, which both tried to distinguish themselves from the Third Reich, albeit with different objectives and in different ways.8 Both had to delineate a version of diplomatic protocol as an indispensable framework for diplomatic activities. This task was especially difficult regarding fundamental issues in foreign policy such as sovereignty, international bloc-building and the existence of two German states at the same time. In West Germany, even a new capital with a distinctly provincial appearance had to be adapted to the needs of nevertheless refined diplomatic procedures. Here, politicians used to complain about time-consuming and annoying protocol regulations, though only so long as they themselves did not feel downgraded by these. As was the case already during the eighteenth century, by ridiculing protocol politicians and diplomats tried to ostentatiously stage themselves as enlightened and efficient office-holders. This approach, combined with an unrelenting focus on great men and great deeds in Germany's political sphere, was reflected by historical research in this field, until prominent representatives of German Sozialgeschichte, above all Hans Ulrich Wehler, started to discredit political history and especially the history of diplomacy as old-fashioned and even reactionary. At the same time the striking dominance of Sozialgeschichte in German historical research in the 1970s and 1980s hampered the establishment of cultural approaches to the history of diplomacy. Only during the last two decades can we observe an increasing number of German studies concerned with the cultural history of diplomacy, for example, with regard to state visits9 and to public10 and cultural diplomacy.11 Some examinations of certain objects in specific historical situations notwithstanding, the material culture of diplomacy has hitherto hardly played an important role in historical research regarding both early modern and modern times. Only a very few monographs have been published which explicitly focus on the early modern material culture of diplomacy in its entirety: for example, Helen Jacobsen's book on the Material World of the Stuart Diplomat.12 This situation may seem even more surprising if we look at early modern times as a period in which central elements of today's diplomatic system evolved: for example, permanency and reciprocity, diplomatic privileges, standards of diplomatic communication and diplomatic documentation, etc.13 At that time, ostentatiously staging and exchanging artefacts was considered of major significance in foreign policy negotiations all over the world. Even today, material practices play a role, which many, though not all politicians - and, significantly, many scholars studying contemporary diplomacy - tend to underestimate. To give just a few examples which refer to different dimensions of the material culture in recent diplomacy: In 2009, tensions arose between Great Britain and the United States when a bust of Winston Churchill was removed from the White House.14 Though officials on both sides at first tried to downplay the event, it led to a whole series of more or less unfortunate attempts by the White House to settle the conflict. For example, officials initially refused to comment, then produced visual evidence that the bust was still there (wrong bust), then admitted the transfer but shielded the new president, Barack Obama, from any responsibility while rejecting any political significance to the incident, and then ceremoniously unveiled the same bust inside the United States Capitol. In 2011, the imbalance of gift exchange between French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Obama caused speculations on the state of relations between both states. Among other things, Obama received fine crystal, an Hermes golf bag, table lamps on silver pedestals, and a sculpture of Alexander the Great's horse - in short: a mixture of very traditional and very modern diplomatic gifts, worth in total more than $41,000.15 They were supposed to represent the distinguished French luxury industry as well as the almost monarchical largesse of the French president. And what did the King of Bling16 receive in return? A collection of DVDs. In 2015, the Iranian president Hassan Rohani declined to take part in a state dinner in Paris, since the menu included red wine.17 He even rejected the compromise that French authorities quickly offered to smooth intercultural tension: a petit-dejeuner served without alcoholic drinks. In Rohani's opinion, any kind of meal described as petit would be unable to adequately reflect either his position as head of state or the prestige of his country. The chapters in this volume focus on the challenges and pitfalls of intercultural diplomacy in an increasingly globalized world, one in which diplomatic actors are nevertheless expected to quickly adapt to diverse political systems, legal cultures, languages, religions, and customs. Whereas scholars of the early modern period18 have analyzed intercultural negotiation processes for some time - though there is still plenty of room for new research projects - scholars concerned with the modern period19 still largely neglect this dimension of diplomacy. Moreover, even if they do address the intercultural dimension of diplomatic encounters, they hardly do so systematically and with regard to theoretical concepts such as hybridity, transnationality, intercultural contact or material culture. This modus operandi may explain why master narratives, such as the Westernization and Europeanization of diplomacy, which were established with regard to European history, are still immensely powerful, even though Eurocentric approaches to diplomacy and international law are being more and more criticized.20 The same applies to simplifying juxtapositions such as, for example, old diplomacy and new diplomacy.21 To define the potential fields of investigation and to illuminate the methods which we should apply while researching the material culture of diplomacy, I address the following methodological questions in the subsequent sections of this introductory chapter What do I mean by diplomacy in the present context (I)? What do I understand by the material culture of diplomacy (II)? What methods can historians apply while researching the material practices, what problems might arise by doing so and how might these be solved (III)? And, finally, what do we actually gain by researching the material dimensions of diplomatic interaction in early modern and modern times (IV)? By analyzing selected material dimensions of diplomatic interaction in early modern and modern times and in diverse regions of the world, the papers of this volume are meant to explore the potential gain in understanding the dynamics of early modern und modern diplomatic procedures which the approach of material culture may have to offer to historians. In doing so, they are not meant to completely rewrite the history of diplomacy which would not be possible anyway at this early stage of research into this field. Rather, they attempt to demonstrate how complex material dimensions of diplomatic interaction in both periods could be and in how deliberate a manner diplomatic actors tried to exploit artefacts to promote negotiations in foreign policy as well as to serve specific political objectives that their rulers or they themselves pursued. This applies particularly to intercultural negotiations, in which political actors sometimes simply had to rely on material aspects because they were unable to understand anything their hosts said. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report from a September 18-20, 2014 conference in Tübingen, Germany on the historical perceptions and interpretations of war in central Europe during the early 17th century. Topics of presentations delivered included the reintegration of veterans during the Peace of Westphalia, the 1604-1606 Hungarian Reformer movement led by Calvinist prince István Bocskai, and memorials to the 1632 battle of Lützen, Germany.

The article focuses on the concept of sovereignty and its inscription on the book "Leviathan" by Hobbes. Topics discussed include sovereignty that is linked to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648; analogized private property concepts of Roman law and Chamber of the International Court of Justice (ICJ)'s judgment on case involving the Maritime Frontier dispute between El Salvador and Honduras and the Gulf of Fonseca.

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In this article, the authors discuss how societies around the world dealt with legacies of systematic injustice and mass violence as a constitutive part of their democratisation. Also cited are the Thirty Years' War that was ended by the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the creation of the modern international system, as well as the events in the Second World War and the Holocaust.

The article discusses the ritual and conceptual repertoires of tribal cultures in European and historical context while exploring the resources of the centuries of practice before the Peace of Westphalia might hold for modern peacemaking and peacekeeping. It notes the Greek variety of realism about human nature that often leads to creative and unstinting acts of fellowship. The evidence of creative improvisation on the part of both the European Christians and the Muslims is tackled.

The article presents a roundtable discussion with international law professors Martti Koskenniemi and Anne Orford who address various aspects of international law and interdisciplinary legal scholarship by authors such as Mark Mazower and Antony Anghie. Criticism by international law scholar Jacob Katz Cogan is mentioned, along with Eurocentrism and the historical aspects of Christianity. The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and European history are also examined.

The article focuses on the social history of tolerance with reference to the European churches and its social order. Various topics discussed include how tolerance promotes contention, multiconfessionalism in 1648, challenges that capitalists faced in the capitalization of their power and agreements of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

The article presents a report on a conference on diplomatic congresses in early modern Europe, held in Baden, Switzerland, from September 5-6, 2014. Topics of discussion included the Congress of Baden in 1714, the congresses in Münster, Germany, and Osnabrück, Germany, that led to the Peace of Westphalia, and the Peace of Utrecht, Netherlands.

The model of secularism as the overarching framework for managing the relationship between religion and politics has come under increasing scrutiny in recent International Relations (IR) scholarship, particularly in the wake of the so-called “postsecular turn”. Where once religion was thought to be an entity that was easily identifiable, definable and largely irrelevant to politics and public life, these assumptions are being increasingly brought into question. This special issue makes a specific contribution to this recent questioning of secularism within IR by noting and interrogating the multiple ways in which the boundaries between the religious and the political blur in contemporary politics. Our contributors explore the multifarious dimensions of this critical issue by asking whether the relationship between religion and politics has taken on significant new forms and dimensions in our contemporary globalised age or if we are simply beginning to recognise a pattern that has always been present. In this introduction we canvass some of the parameters of current debates on the religious and the political. We note that there are multiple and (at times) competing understandings of such key terms as religion, secularism, secularisation and the post-secular that shape and are shaped by ongoing discussions of the relationship between religion and public life. Our goal is not to close down these important points of difference through the imposition of singular understandings. We simply wish to highlight the points of contestation that continue to be significant for how we understand (or obscure) the boundaries between the religious and the political. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For researchers and students of International Relations (IR), one date looms larger than all others: 1648. The end of the Thirty Years War, formalized by the signing of the Treaties of Osnabrück and Münster, led to a period known as the 'Peace of Westphalia.' Westphalia represented a fundamental change in the power balance of European politics: instead of the Holy Roman Empire holding supreme authority, power would now rest with states themselves, manifested in terms of sovereignty, territory and equality. One of the chief ways in which these 'Westphalian' states would cement this authority was through the use of maps. Before 1648, there was little on a European map to indicate where one country ended and another one began. But after 1648, this all changes: these new Westphalian states are represented with bright colors and clearly marked boundaries, defining borders and becoming an important part in creating the state and justifying its sovereignty. The role which maps have played in the spread of the Westphalian state is only just beginning to be researched. Yet the limited efforts to date have all focussed on Europe. This is unfortunate, as today, while Europe has, according to some observers, moved into a stage in which Westphalia is no longer a useful model with which to understand the state and the ways in which it relates to sovereignty, government, power and the individual, the old Westphalian model of the state has more recently been exported all around the world. This paper presents the first part of a project which aims to look at this expansion. The European angle will be presented in this paper; future research will be carried out in China, Japan and Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article critiques the book "The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law," edited by Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters, focusing on Eurocentrism and the bilateral and multilateral operations of various independent political entities. The Treaty of Westphalia and the legal practices in India, African, and Arab countries are mentioned. The Ottoman Empire and reportedly unequal treaties in East Asia are examined, along with peace movements and Japanese concepts of territory.

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The article reports on a conference on scholarly electronic publishing and digital libraries in the humanities and social sciences, held in Berlin, Germany, from October 8-9, 2013. Several case studies were discussed, including the websites "Acta pacis Westphalicae," available at http://www.pax-westphalica.de, "Deutsches Textarchiv“ (DTA), available at http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de, and "Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien" (TITUS), available at http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/indexd.htm.

What was the intellectual vision that led to the Arab Spring and what are its roots? This article investigates how that vision took shape in the years immediately before the Arab Spring through the work of poets and popular Arab singers like Hamza Namira and Maher Zain. It argues that the vision in art and politics mirrored the desire of many Arabs and Muslims to find new ways to solve the challenges plaguing their societies. The vision also reflected a) how the downturn in the global economy after 2008 combined with major environmental changesto galvanize millions to act in the Arab World b)how social media and new communications tools helped to mobilize dissent and to limit the ability of governments to effectively repress their populations. More than two years after the Arab Spring began in late 2010 the movements it spawned are radically reconstructing societies in the Middle East. They are also undermining some of the basic assumptions of the international system, many of which have been in place since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the advent of state sovereignty with the Peace of Westphalia, powerful Western nations have determined and applied international law in a manner that advance their national interests. In short, the international legal process has been a mechanism of hegemony, and powerful Western nations have been hegemons through this process over less-developed countries. Since the 1990s, however, the fall of the Soviet Union, the spread of technology, and the advent of multinational corporations have led to a new order wherein corporate capitalism has become a primary force in international law and states mostly serve corporate interests. This new order was seen in action in Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi was recently overthrown by rebels who received aid from Western organizations, mostly because of Gaddafi's unreliable history of partnering with Western corporations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article surveys early 21st-century historiography on the Peace of Westphalia and the Thirty Years' War more broadly. Focusing primarily on scholarship by German historians and published in Germany, the author discusses several themes in this research literature, including the constitutional history and politics in the Holy Roman Empire, diplomacy and international relations in 17th-century Europe, and the perception and interpretation of the peace treaty. Information about the "Acta Pacis Westphalicae" (APW), an edition of the records of the Westphalian peace conference in Münster and Osnabrück, Germany, in 1648-1649, is also provided.

The article focuses on the provisions for religious toleration and freedom in relevance to the Peace of Westphalia, series of peace treaties. It discusses the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC in which the court held that federal discrimination laws are inapplicable in hiring of leaders for religious work. It mentions that the Peace of Westphalia has helped in far bringing the liberty of free exercise of religion.

What happens when a satellite owned by a private company in one state crashes into another state's satellite? International space law has an answer. The solution, however, reflects a bygone, state-centric era created by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. A better system must meet demands of the emerging commercial space sector. The treaty framework governing state activities in outer space reflects Cold War fears. Consequently, the space liability regime favors diplomatic, cooperative dispute resolution between states. States, therefore, must sponsor private entities' claims. If the treaty process is ineffective, state responsibility and international liability fill the gaps left by the space liability regime. Today, space is increasingly crowded as commercial ventures launch into space. For them, a state-centric liability regime is ineffective. I conclude by suggesting that states back commercial ventures by subsidizing liability insurance and encourage the private sector to circumvent the treaty framework through contractual allocation of risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Treaty of Westphalia, a series of peace treaties signed between May and October 1648, in the context of literary progress of tragedies. It explains that the Treaty is considered as a transitional moment in the period of territorial states after a long period of religious war in Europe. It informs that the Treaty established the secular state on the place of church and confessionalism.

Although the Westphalian model takes many forms the association of Westphalian and sovereign equality is a prominent one. This article argues firstly that sovereign equality was not present as a normative principle at Westphalia. It argues further that while arguments for sovereign equality were present in the eighteenth century they did not rely on, or even suggest, a Westphalian provenance. It was, for good reasons, not until the late nineteenth century that the linkages of Westphalia and sovereign equality became commonplace, and even then sovereign equality and its linkage with Westphalia were disputed. It was not until after the Second World War, notably through the influential work of Leo Gross that the linkage of Westphalia and sovereign equality became not only widely accepted, but almost undisputed until quite recently. The article concludes by suggesting that not only did Gross bequeath a dubious historiography but that this historiography is an impediment to contemporary International Relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]