Working Paper No.6 (September 2016)

The I-Voting system that was designed and implemented in Estonia in 2005 is the first Internet voting system to have been adopted anywhere in the world. Since its inception, it has been met with both praise and scrutiny. Concerns include in-person election observations, code reviews, and adversarial testing on system components. As a result of these concerns, some parties have concluded that there are various ways in which insider threats and sophisticated external attacks could compromise the system’s integrity and thus the voting process.

There has recently been huge expansion in the availability of systematic data on peacekeeping missions. Data capturing the size and composition of peacekeeping operations has improved in depth and breadth, and is now complemented by a collection of disaggregated and geo-coded data. This means that rather than simply measuring the presence or absence of peacekeeping within a conflict or state, data is now available on a range of more specific indicators such as the location and response to specific peacekeeping events (cf. Dorussen and Ruggeri, this issue).

Is R2P the most effective tool the international community has to prevent genocide, or the newest neo-imperial norm perpetuated by the most powerful states?  In a dramatic performance of the key debates within R2P, each of these views is presented before Aristotlean and Tocquevillean insights are drawn upon to find a middle ground rooted in citizen resistance against mass atrocity crimes.

What explains the success of criminal prosecutions against former Latin American officials accused of human rights violations? Why did some judiciaries evolve from unresponsive bureaucracies into protectors of victim rights? Using a theory of judicial action inspired by sociological institutionalism, this book argues that this was the result of deep transformations in the legal preferences of judges and prosecutors.