Mikael Baaz

• Full Professor of International Law; Associate Professor of Political science and Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies; Distinguished University Teacher and Member of the Pedagogical Academy, University of Gothenburg.
• Professor (Full) at University of Gothenburg

An increasing body of literature focuses on negotiations of transitional justice, but not much has been written so far regarding contestations over its practices and the refusal of states and individuals to participate. Given the remaining legalistic dominance, this is particularly true regarding the field of international criminal law. Very little...

Resistance has often been connected with anti-social attitudes, destructiveness, reactionary or revolutionary ideologies, unusual and sudden explosions of violence and emotional outbursts. This book goes beyond these conventions. Exploring various key questions, ranging from concept definitions of affect and temporality, to complex entanglements of...

This entry introduces the unique legal structure of the ECCC. More in detail it presents, in order, the establishment, founding documents, jurisdiction, and composition of the tribunal as well civil party participation in and the judicial process and caseload of the ECCC.

The concept of resistance within the peace-building literature has received considerable attention as well as becoming central to the critique of liberal interventions. Scholars approach to resistance within the 'local turn' literature has resulted in more elaborate studies ; even so, local agency is typically narrowed down and concep-tualised as a...

This article explores the meaning of “resistance” and suggests a new path for “resistance studies,” which is an emerging and interdisciplinary field of the social sciences that is still relatively fragmented and heterogeneous. Resistance has often been connected with antisocial attitudes, destructiveness, reactionary or revolutionary ideologies, un...

Two significant developments – (1) the rapidly changing world order, and (2) significant gaps in current social science scholarship – call for a further exploration of resistance theories. In this paper, we identify some of the gaps and inconsistencies within the current bulk of research, and seek to contribute to the understanding of resistance, i...

Resistance, in Foucault’s texts, is sometimes described as resistance against authorities (sometimes the state and other governing units, and sometimes local authorities; Foucault 2009, 201; Foucault 1982, 329–331; Foucault 1991, 149). In other texts, however, he describes resistance as a discursive phenomenon. Discursive resistance, which appears...

The neoliberal globalization characterizing this century has unleashed new strategies of governing. This paper elaborates on a growing form of governing; that is, governing that extorts subjects’ desires for improvement and creativity to control and profit from these subjects. This, what we would like to call, ‘artepolitics’ could be seen as a part...

This article revolves around the legal and epistemic battles around “homosexuality” in Sweden in 1979, which led to the abolition of homosexuality being classified as a “disease”. Among other things, gay activists “called in sick” to the Social Insurance Agency (SIA) and claimed that they were unable to work because they were homosexuals (read as m...

Recent sex ratio data indicate that the number of “missing” women and girls has reached approximately 200 million. This is a significant increase since 1990, when roughly 100 million women and girls had “disappeared.” What are the contemporary discussions concerning the widespread practice of the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genita...

This entry aims to present a contextualized overview of the negotiation process that led to the establishment of a ‘hybrid’ or ‘mixed’ criminal tribunal to try the leaders of the Khmer Rouge (‘KR’) for crimes committed during the period of Democratic Kampuchea (‘DK’) (17 April 1975 to 7 January 1979)

This special issue addresses the connections and crossroads between knowledge and resistance. In the current political landscape, such a research endeavour is both topical and needed. Social media platforms, like Facebook, and the development of new technologies have made it possible to spread disinformation through political channels, which has la...

This paper examines how Case 002/01 in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia emerges as a space within which the roles of history and international justice are contested. It focuses on how the criminal trial appear to fortify the hegemony of some contested historical narrative over others in dealing with the past. The paper introduce...

Borders now seem to be everywhere, just like it is often said in heritage studies that the past is everywhere. In this edited volume a multidisciplinary group of scholars explore what happens, philosophically and in practice, when these two concepts and phenomena, heritage and borders, are combined. The findings show that heritage, as well as borde...

This paper discusses the potential of different Preah Vihear temple replicas to resist “discursive orders” that have been used to legitimate war in the border area between Thailand and Cambodia. The replicas of the Preah Vihear temple are embraced as “repeats” of the “original”; by this, we take off from linguistic theorizing of repetitions. The te...

In this chapter, which is based mainly on various official documents, a number of semi-structured interviews made by the authors in Cambodia between 2012 and 2017, scholarly writings, media reports and op-eds, we will highlight ‘resistance’ that promotes peace and reconciliation – what we would like to call ‘peace-building resistance’ (PBR) – rathe...

International law and international politics are closely linked. Despite this, the phenomena are most often studied in isolation, not only within the sub-fields of e.g. International Law and International Politics but also within multi- or interdisciplinary fields such as Global Studies, International Studies, International Relations, Peace and Con...

This book discusses different ways in which the cross-roads between emotions and resistance can be theorised. While the sociological field focuses primarily on emotions that are entangled in the relationship between the individual and collective, the cultural studies field has recently started to emphasise affects as a `rescue' from the determinist...

This article uses the concept of ‘time’ in order to better understand the situation of precarious migrants in Sweden. Through analysing a number of reports and interviews undertaken with newly arrived migrants in Sweden, it displays how different temporal understandings of the migrants are linked to and managed by governing bodies, laws and regulat...

This book discusses different ways in which the cross-roads between emotions and resistance can be theorised. While the sociological field focuses primarily on emotions that are entangled in the relationship between the individual and collective, the cultural studies field has recently started to emphasise affects as a `rescue' from the determinist...

This article explores the meaning of “resistance” and suggests a new path for “resistance studies,” which is an emerging and interdisciplinary field of the social sciences that is still relatively fragmented and heterogeneous. Resistance has often been connected with antisocial attitudes, destructiveness, reactionary or revolutionary ideologies, un...

This paper deals with civil society mobilizations and resistance in relation to a world heritage site—the ninth-century Khmer temple Preah Vihear, which is located in the northern province of Cambodia and borders eastern Thailand. In particular, the paper explores resistance in terms of (re)categorizations from a historical and discursive–materiali...

Resistance is both a common and somewhat unusual concept. It appears often in political debates and the media. Members of various non-governmental organizations and social movements also frequently use resistancewhen they refer to their various activities. In spite of the significant growth regarding the use of resistance during recent years, the d...

Editorial ... all the poetics of the dispersed marginal sexual, ethnic, lifestyle, ‘multitudes’ (...) ‘resisting’ the mysterious central (capitalized) Power. Everyone ‘resists’ – from gays and lesbians to Rightist survivalists – so why not draw the logic conclusion that this discourse of ‘resistance’ is the norm today (...)? (Žižek 2002, p. 66). Fr...

The world as a whole has not been at peace since 1914, and it is definitely not at peace today. David J. Dunn argues that this state of affairs may be due, in no small part, to aspects of the conventional wisdom that informs practical foreign policy and diplomacy. For example, the ancient notion si vis pacem, para bellum [if you desire peace, prepa...

This article describes and analyses the tensions, ambivalence, and hybridity that prevail in the nexus between discourses of gender and the legal pluralism of the new, formalized, and customary ways of handling land titles. Based on empirical research in Cambodia, it reveals a number of mechanisms, challenges, and inconsistencies in the practice of...

Lately, the concept of ‘resistance’ has gained considerable traction as a tool for critically exploring subaltern practices in relation to power. Few researchers, however, have elaborated on the inter-linkage of shifting forms of resistance; and above all, how acts of everyday resistance entangle with more organized and sometimes mass-based resista...

This book is about political orders, historical ones, the current one but also future alternative ones. An understanding of how the contemporary world order came to be what it is and how it may develop in the future, is an exploration of the expansion of the international society of European states across the rest of the globe, its transformation f...

On an overall level, this text is about “international orders” – in the past, present and future. More specifically, it is a paper on (i) the transformation of the contemporary “international order” – which was “acknowledged” by the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and encapsulated the idea of a “society of states” (Armstrong 2011: 42); and (ii) some of...

Offering a comprehensive overview of the current situation in the country, The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia provides a broad coverage of social, cultural, political and economic development within both rural and urban contexts during the last decade. A detailed introduction places Cambodia within its global and regional frame, and the handbook...

This paper explores civil-society mobilisations around the Preah Vihear Temple, today a world heritage site located in Cambodia, on the border with Thailand. More specifically, the paper seeks to increase our understanding of the ‘peace-building’ resistance that is played out by different civil-society actors with regard to the Temple. This case di...

Following the end of the Cold War, it became a widely held belief that, after more than 70 years in exile, Russia would finally “return” to Europe—a sphere to which it had belonged since the time of Peter the Great—politically as well as normatively. Quite early on, however, it became clear that the country was choosing its own way, in ideological...

In the recently published book, The Crime of Conspiracy in International Criminal Law , Juliet R. Amenge Okoth suggests that Article 25(3) of the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) should be revised. She claims that this should be achieved through the introduction of a new sub-paragraph, providing that ‘a person shall be criminal res...

This paper offers a new interpretation of the 'resistance' carried out by local civil society organisations in Cambodia against intimate partner violence (IPV). In this, the paper explores the nexus between 'rupture', 'resistance' and 'repetition' and concludes that different 'repetitions' can contribute to acts of violence while simultaneously cre...

This article aims to add to the discussion on civil society, resistance, and environmental politics by departing from the concepts of affects, time, and temporality. In essence, the article suggests two things. Firstly, when theorizing civil society, we argue that we should depart from the idea that the present is not a singular, linear moment, but...

Since the end of the Cold War, societies from the former Soviet Union and others throughout Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America have overthrown dictators and other authoritative rulers in the hope of allowing democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. In some cases, the change has been violent and drawn out, while in other cases the...

International Criminal Law - Hybrid Justice: The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia by CIORCIARI John D. and HEINDEL Anne. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. 433 pp. Hardback: $70.00. - Volume 5 Issue 2 - Mikael BAAZ

Traditionally, feminist research has focused more on the content and the supposed effects of gender norms and their relations to power, than how the gendered power relations may change. However, there has been a tenet within feminism and—more recently—masculinity studies, which more specifically discusses how to change these power relations. A furt...

This article analyzes the gap between globally promoted definitions of liberal democracy and the different ways in which the concept is interpreted by individual politicians and civil society representatives in Cambodia. By taking as our point of departure the gap between “hegemonic” views of democracy and locally lived democracy experiences and st...

This article will examine irrationality in relation to the concept of resistance. Is there such a thing as an irrational resistance? While one tendency has been to irrationalise the ‘other’ and their resistance in order to construct a subaltern identity position, within the social sciences, an opposing tendency can also be identified; there is a tr...

The overall aim of this chapter is to make an intervention in the (re)emerging discussion on middle-ground ethics (MGE). This is done by problematizing the principle of the responsibility to protect, understood as a constructive balance between, on the one hand, state sovereignty (order) and, on the other hand, individual human rights (justice) or,...

Baaz, Mikael and Niclas Lantz (2010): ”Svagt FN hinder för afghansk fred”, Svenska Dagbladet, Brännpunkt (2010-04-19).

Baaz, Mikael and Niclas Lantz (2009): ”Våldsförbudet undermineras”, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, Aktuella frågor (2009-11-25).

Principerna statssuveränitet och humanitär intervention samt deras inbördes relation utgör denna artikels fokus. Syftet är att analysera och diskutera respektive princip, såväl ur ett legalt som ur ett moraliskt (legitimt) perspektiv, samt om, och i så fall hur, dessa principer kan förenas inom den internationella rätten i all- mänhet och FN-stadga...

Inledning I en artikel publicerad i Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift 1984 skriver professor Lennart Lundquist att statsvetenskapliga analyser vanligen arbetar med ett aktörsperspektiv och att om man till äventyrs stöter på en explicit strukturaspekt är den oftast av marxistisk observans. Problemet med denna typ av strukturanalyser är att de normalt sakn...

Baaz, Mikael (2006): ”Katastrofal doktrin”, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, Aktuella frågor (2006-05-03).

Baaz, Mikael (2006): ”Stoppa Bush kärnvapenplan”. Svenska Dagbladet, Brännpunkt (2006-04-29).

Baaz, Mikael (2006): ”Så kan ett enat Europa balansera USA.” Göteborgsposten (2006-03-20).

Baaz, Mikael (2006): ”Rysk utpressning”, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, Aktuella frågor (2006-01-30).

Baaz, Mikael (2005): ”Europas viktiga vägval”, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, Aktuella frågor (2005-10-01).

The article takes its point of departure from the fact that the world is in a phase of deep and turbulent transformation. Unfortunately, our theories for understanding where we are, how we have got there, and for outlining proposals of where we can possibly go have not kept pace; we find ourselves in a theoretical vacuum. However, a few interesting...