In some cases, these might be topics that were under-covered. Others received significant coverage but still may have implications that merit more attention.

There are of course far more developments that are noteworthy than a single recap can capture, and we encourage you to keep an eye out for other “looking back, looking ahead” style articles on Just Security in the days and weeks ahead. But in the midst of a news environment dominated by attention-grabbing headlines and algorithms commodifying our attention, we hope that this compilation will provide an opportunity to step back and reflect on some of the important trends shaping our world today.

Climate Milestones and Misses

Global climate progress in 2025 was, in a word, uneven, reflecting an ever-widening gap between ambition and the ability to mobilize that ambition into concrete global action. Two highly-anticipated advisory opinions – from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in May and from the International Court of Justice in July – took strong positions with respect to States’ obligations in relation to climate change, as analyzed on Just Security here and here.

But in practice, climate diplomacy produced relatively weak results; at COP 30 in Belém, for example, there was little progress on crucial questions such as countries’ specific individual commitments to emissions reduction. Earlier this year, analysts described a much-anticipated climate announcement from China as likewise underwhelming, and the year of course was also marked by the United States’ highly visible retreat from global climate engagement – with some signs that U.S. state and local governments may be seeking openings to engage even as the national government pulls back.

Meanwhile, one relatively undercovered story in climate diplomacy was the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement (BBNJ), or High Seas Treaty, which received sufficient ratifications this fall to enter into force in January 2026. It creates the first comprehensive legal framework for protecting biodiversity on the high seas, an area covering nearly half the earth’s surface, and is notable as a milestone in climate-biodiversity governance and as a sign that international treaty-making continues to function even in an environment of increasing uncertainty.

(Readers may also be interested in Just Security’s Climate Archive.)

In the Age of Generative AI, How Do We Know What We Know?

This year saw what seemed to be a near-constant rollout of generative AI tools, including new versions of consumer-facing large-language models (LLMs), an explosion in AI video content, and the continued development of sector-specialized generative models. Among the many complex questions raised by the ubiquity of generative AI, one relatively under-covered angle involved epistemic risks: how society and institutions create and understand knowledge, and how we validate what information to trust.

This can play out in different ways across different types of use. Some specialized AI models used for professional purposes may develop faster than users – even very expert users – can fully understand the model’s inputs, limitations, and biases, potentially degrading the quality of knowledge production and eroding public trust in information. In general consumer uses, the ubiquity of AI-generated content may threaten the (already tenuous) social agreement about reality. AI video, for instance, presents new challenges for civilian protection and evidence collection: not only that manipulated images will be taken as true but also that very real evidence, including of atrocities, might be dismissed as AI.

Scholars have been grappling with these questions for several years now. But with the explosion of public-facing AI, the risk becomes that products will move into common use, and policymakers will be charged with regulating them, before the relevant public fully understands those risks and limitations. In July of this year, for example, some scholars expressed concern about this very knowledge gap when the EU released its General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, providing guidance on how the 2024 AI Act should be applied to general-purpose AI tools like LLMs.

With AI now shaping our physical world as much as our digital one, understanding and communicating about these epistemic gaps is likely to be a key theme of 2026.

(Readers may also be interested in Just Security’s archive of artificial intelligence articles.)

“A Tale of Two Courts” at the ICC

The story of the International Criminal Court (ICC) this year was, in the words of Just Security Editorial Board member and former ICC Prosecutions Coordinator Alex Whiting, “a tale of two courts.”

On the one hand, developments like sanctions in connection to the Palestine situation and allegations against Prosecutor Karim Khan, now on leave pending investigation, drew headlines.

But against that backdrop, the Court also managed to continue its work and achieve meaningful progress in many areas this year: the arrest of former President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, convictions in the Sudan Situation and a case from the Central African Republic, the first arrest and surrender of an accused in the Libya Situation, the confirmation of charges in absentia in the Joseph Kony case, and launching of new policies, including on environmental crimes and cyber-enabled crimes. (Readers may also be interested in Just Security’s ICC coverage, in which authors analyze a number of these developments.)

Observes Whiting: “This is not to minimize the challenges faced by the Court, or some of the structural problems that may exist within the Rome Statute, but under the direction of the Deputy Prosecutors and the judges, the Court is continuing to function and do its work. The Court is not invulnerable, but it is resilient.”

ICRC Updates Civilian Protection Guidance to Reflect Realities of Modern Warfare

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) this year published its updated Commentary on the Fourth Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilians (GCIV), the core humanitarian treaty governing civilian protection in international armed conflict and occupation. This marks the last in a cycle of modernizing the commentaries to the Geneva Conventions, after which the ICRC will turn to the Additional Protocols.

The Commentaries provide interpretive guidance on how the Geneva Conventions’ rules should be applied in real-world situations. Given the importance of GCIV in the protection of civilians while under increasing threat in conflicts around the globe (see, for example, the next entry on this list), and the many ways in which armed conflict has changed in the 60-plus years since the last round of Commentaries, this update was particularly anticipated. There is no expectation, of course, that it will provide a panacea, but by updating the guidance to reflect the conditions of today’s armed conflicts, the ICRC reaffirms the centrality of the fundamental legal protections owed to civilians.

Watch this space for a series from international humanitarian law experts analyzing the updated Commentary, coming jointly from Just Security, the ICRC, and EJIL:Talk! early in the new year.

Humanitarian Catastrophe in Sudan

The brutal civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), now well into its third year, has triggered the largest displacement crisis in the world, with approximately 12 million people forcibly displaced as of Dec. 1, and estimates from earlier this year of over 30 million people in need of humanitarian aid. Civilians are subjected to direct and brutal violence from the conflict itself, while also suffering from a health system under strain; malnutrition, and in some areas famine; and repeated outbreaks of cholera, dengue, and other diseases.

As authors writing on Just Security and elsewhere have repeatedly observed, the scale of global attention – in the press, from the public, and from policymakers – fails to match the scale of the atrocities. At the same time the global community faces the urgent task of addressing the humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan, it also faces the question of how one of the worst global crises has unfolded with so little international attention.

A Power Vacuum in Public Health Leadership

While the Trump administration’s controversial cuts to public health programs, including the dismantling of Centers for Disease Control initiatives, the dissolution of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO), dominated headlines, a less-publicized consequence was the response to the resulting power vacuum in public health leadership.

Within the United States, regional public health alliances emerged, primarily among Democratic-led states in the west and northeast. However, even as state and local governments stepped in to fill the gaps, they faced deep budget cuts from federal health programs.

Globally, a July 2025 study in The Lancet estimated that U.S. cuts to public health aid could lead to 14 million additional deaths by 2030. A December 2025 response from other scholars argued that the study’s assumptions were being contradicted by real-world developments. “People, institutions, and governments in several countries have responded to the moment,” they noted, by shifting budgets, reforming supply systems, and increasing aid from other nations—challenging the notion that U.S. leadership is indispensable to global health efforts.

But while European countries, China, and global solidarity networks have been suggested as alternatives to fill the gaps, a real funding shortfall remains. The UK and European Union member states, led by Germany (which recently became home to a new WHO center) have visibly assumed a more prominent role in global public health leadership. However, many are also scaling back their overseas development assistance due to their own budget constraints. China’s public health contributions, especially in Africa, are notable but far smaller than the resources previously provided by USAID.

Ultimately, these cuts have sparked efforts to explore alternative solutions, both domestically and internationally, but these initiatives are constrained by undeniable resource limitations.

(Readers may also be interested in the Collection: Just Security’s Coverage of Trump Administration Executive Actions.)

The Double-Edged Sword of U.S.-Belarus Rapprochement

From Just Security Washington Senior Editor Viola Gienger, who curates much of the site’s content on rule of law and diplomacy related to eastern Europe:

Belarus generally garners little attention in the Western news media, and that includes this year’s curious rapprochement between the Trump administration and longtime Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenka, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Trump overtures even merited the appointment of a specific U.S. special envoy for Belarus, former Trump lawyer John Coale.

The result has been several major releases of Belarusian political prisoners in exchange for easing of sanctions — the husband of opposition leader in exile Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya in June, a mass release of 52 prisoners in September and another of 123 in December, the latter of which included Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski and opposition figures Maria Kolesnikova and Viktar Babaryka.

Despite the recent prisoner releases, Lukashenka (whose 2020 electoral “win” was widely recognized by impartial monitors as fraudulent) continues to play a double game, cracking down on dissent and jailing others, under conditions of abuse and torture, even amid the periodic releases.

Lukashenka has played the West off against Putin for decades, and he became an influential, though still minor, factor after Putin’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when the longtime Belarusian leader allowed Russian troops onto his territory for their military operations against Ukraine while at the same time declining to send his own forces to aid the Russians on the battlefield. There also have been persistent reports that Lukashenka allowed Russian nuclear weapons onto Belarus territory, and he played a role in the saga of the failed apparent coup against Putin by Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in 2023 that ended in his demise a few months later in a plane crash. Given this history, Lukashenka’s latest opening to the West merits a close watch as the United States seeks to broker a peace agreement to end Russia’s assault on Ukraine.

U.S.-Canada Tensions: More Than a Meme

While new U.S. alliances emerged in 2025, other longstanding partnerships faltered. Perhaps nowhere was this more evident than in diplomatic fractures that appeared between the United States and Canada, long one of the world’s most stable relationships.

Although President Donald Trump’s repeated suggestions to make Canada the “51st state” generated headlines, memes, and jokes, the absurdity of the situation itself became the story, obscuring a more consequential and potentially lasting geopolitical shift.

The Canadian public, already sensitive to issues of sovereignty and autonomy, increasingly viewed U.S. rhetoric as disregard for the bilateral relationship. In an Ipsos poll this fall, six in ten Canadians surveyed said they could never trust Americans in the same way again, while seven in ten anticipated similar trade and economic disputes between the countries for at least several years to come.

Despite these tensions, Canada and the United States continue to maintain productive diplomatic relations on issues like mutual defense under the North American Aerospace Defense Command and Arctic cooperation. However, Canada is also exploring new partnerships, including closer links to Europe. And while it has often followed the U.S. lead on foreign policy issues such as China, it may soon face new questions about whether to chart its own independent path in the new geopolitical landscape.

Latin America’s Rightward Swing

In Chile, a presidential candidate who openly praised former dictator Augusto Pinochet won with a tough-on-crime and anti-immigration platform. In Bolivia, after two decades of socialist rule, a centrist candidate triumphed, his closest opponent not from the left but from the right. In Argentina, libertarian President Javier Milei’s party enjoyed a “decisive” congressional elections win despite governing amidst continued economic turmoil, with voters apparently unconvinced they would fare better under left-wing policies.

Elections in Latin America in 2025 didn’t universally swing right; in Honduras, for example, left-wing incumbent President Xiomara Castro appears to have won against a Trump-backed challenger. (Author’s note, Dec. 26: In fact, conservative candidate Nasry Asfura was finally declared the winner of the Nov. 30 election on Dec. 24, with claims of irregularities still maintained from both sides.) But there was certainly an observable trend, as populist rhetoric, “law and order” pledges, and economic frustration seemed to fuel a shift toward more conservative or centrist candidates in a region where the left had done well in recent decades, and where right-wing governance had often been associated with the legacy of dictatorship.

But as a recent Foreign Affairs article observed, “the idea that the right is inherently or uniquely authoritarian has lost traction in today’s Latin America, where all three cases of clear-cut dictatorship are on the ideological left: Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.” Traditional left-wing promises of social progress appear to be less convincing to voters than frustration with the political establishment’s perceived failures to address crime and inflation.

High-profile elections in the region will continue in 2026, including in Peru, where one of the leading candidates is the daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori, who was convicted for human rights abuses from his time in power in the 1990s; and Brazil, where recent polls have the left-wing incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ahead of potential rivals, including the son of imprisoned ex-president Jair Bolsonaro. But with the elections months away, much can still change.

The post Nine Stories That Deserved More Attention in 2025 – and Might Shape 2026 appeared first on Just Security.

Just Security, as a co-sponsor of the event, is pleased to feature a series in connection with the weekend. Prior to ILW, the series launched with articles by ABILA President Michael Scharf and ILW Co-Chairs William Aceves, Amity Boye, and Jessica Peake. Other analyses coming out of the weekend, including by both established and emerging international law scholars, will further explore this theme.

This series contains the following articles and will be updated regularly: 

• Michael P. Scharf, “Crisis as Catalyst in International Law” (Oct. 16, 2025)
• William J. Aceves, Amity Boye, and Jessica Peake, “Crisis as Catalyst: Past, Present, and Future of International Law” (Oct. 21, 2025)
• Chiara Giorgetti, Milena Sterio, Rebecca Hamilton, and Megan Corrarino, The Just Security Podcast: Reflections on International Law Weekend 2025 (Nov. 3, 2025) 
• Coalter Lathrop, “Crisis as Catalyst: Seabed Minerals and the (Un)Making of International Law” (Nov. 24, 2025)
• Naida Softic, “Crisis Without Consent: What Intergovernmental Organization Refusals Reveal about Mandate, Liability, and Legitimacy” (Forthcoming)  
• Emmanuel U. Osayande, “When Crises Become Courtrooms: How Africa’s Engagement with the ICJ is Rewriting the Playbook of International Law” (Forthcoming) 

The post A Series on the Occasion of ABILA’s International Law Weekend 2025 appeared first on Just Security.

In this special episode co-produced with ABILA’s International Law Chats podcast, which Giorgetti and Sterio co-host along with Alison Macdonald KC, the guests — each of whom also participated in International Law Weekend — discuss the weekend’s theme, “Crisis as Catalyst on International Law”; takeaways from panels on topics ranging from the proposed Crimes against Humanity Treaty to international environmental law and more; and how international lawyers and law students might think about their role in the present moment. 

Show Note: 

• International Law Chats – an ABILA podcast 
• Crisis as Catalyst in International Law by Michael P. Scharf (October 16, 2025) 
• Crisis as Catalyst: Past, Present, and Future of International Law by William J. Aceves, Amity Boye and Jessica Peake (October 21, 2025)  
• A Series on the Occasion of ABILA’s International Law Weekend 2025

The post The Just Security Podcast: Reflections on International Law Weekend 2025 appeared first on Just Security.

Nevitt, Commander, JAGC (ret.), is an Associate Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law. He was previously the Class of 1971 Distinguished Military Professor of Leadership & Law at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, Associate Professor at Syracuse University College of Law, and the Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Prior to law school, Nevitt served as an accomplished naval tactical jet aviator and was awarded the Air Medal. After completing a J.D. and LL.M. with distinction from Georgetown, his Navy JAG assignments included serving as criminal defense counsel in Lemoore, California; international law and ethics attorney with the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet in Naples, Italy; Deputy Director for Administrative Law for the Office of the Judge Advocate General at the Pentagon; and the Department of Defense’s Regional Environmental Counsel in Norfolk, Virginia.

Today, Nevitt works, teaches, and publishes widely on emerging legal and policy issues, particularly at the intersection of environmental law, climate change, and national security as well as on legal issues governing the domestic use of the U.S. military.

In addition to his scholarship, he has contributed to Just Security’s growing content in these areas, including by promoting the work of global voices and emerging scholars. We are delighted for him to continue to share his expertise as a member of our outstanding Editorial Board.

The post A Warm Welcome to Mark Nevitt as a Just Security Editorial Board Member! appeared first on Just Security.

Kathleen Claussen is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of International Economic Law with expertise in international law, trade, investment, international business and labor, and national security and cybersecurity law. Previously, she served on the Executive Council and Executive Committee of the American Society of International Law (ASIL) and was Associate General Counsel at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. She is the author of more than five dozen works concerning trade, investment, and international dispute settlement and has acted as counsel or arbitrator in over two dozen international disputes. Earlier in her career, she was Legal Counsel at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.

She holds a BA from Indiana University, an M.A. from Queen’s University Belfast, and a J.D. from Yale Law School. 

Tom Dannenbaum is Associate Professor of International Law at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, where he is also Co-Director of the Center for International Law & Governance. Prior to joining Fletcher, he taught at University College London and Yale Law School. Dannenbaum writes on the law of armed conflict, the law governing the use of force, international criminal law, human rights, shared responsibility, and international judging. His articles have received multiple awards, including ASIL’s International Legal Theory Scholarship Prize in 2022 for his work on siege starvation and ASIL’s Lieber Prize in 2017 for his work on the crime of aggression. 

He holds a BA from Stanford University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a PhD from Princeton University.  

Eliav Lieblich is a professor of law at Tel-Aviv University’s Faculty of Law. He teaches and researches public international law, with a focus on the laws on the use of force, international humanitarian law, and the history and theory of international law. In recent years, he participated as an expert in various international forums, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross’ expert group on proportionality and the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons’ expert meeting on autonomous weapons systems.

He holds an LL.B. from Hebrew University, and a J.S.D. and LL.M. from Columbia Law School.

* * *

We are delighted to welcome these thoughtful scholars and practitioners to our Editorial Board. 

IMAGE: businessman opening stage curtain (Getty Images) 

The post Welcoming Kathleen Claussen, Tom Dannenbaum, and Eliav Lieblich appeared first on Just Security.

Today, Oct. 14, is Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the United States. Last year, we presented a selection of recent Just Security articles analyzing Indigenous issues at the intersection of law, policy, climate, justice, and more; because these articles all remain so timely, we are re-featuring the collection in connection with the holiday today, with the addition of several more articles published in the past year.

Also new this year: the list ends with a collection of recently released media — a symposium, a documentary film, a set of podcast, and a book — from beyond our pages, that may further illuminate some of the issues we cover.

Climate and Indigenous Issues

Climate change disproportionately impacts Tribal Nations in the United States and Indigenous communities worldwide, and Indigenous activists have been at the forefront of worldwide climate leadership — even as their efforts face repression. As climate litigation grew in 2024, Indigenous communities played a key role, both at the State level — as small islands States in the South Pacific led litigation — and pushing for action within countries.

We encourage readers to peruse the full climate archive and writing on Indigenous peoples’ issues. Some examples of recent coverage include:

• Why Criminalize Ecocide? Experts Weigh In, curated by Rebecca Hamilton
• The Just Security Podcast: The ‘Year of Climate’ in International Courts by Naima Te Maile Fifita, Joana Setzer and Paras Shah
• The Climate Crisis and Aging: Capitalizing on Traditional Knowledge and Innovation by James O’Neil and Miguel Cotes Ramírez
• Will Canada Stand Up for Indigenous Rights or Continue Supporting Big Oil? by Whitney Gravelle, Lindsay Bailey, Tamara Morgenthau and Marco Simons

Series on Native Sovereignty in U.S Supreme Court Cases

• On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Reflections on Tribal Sovereignty in Haaland v. Brackeen by Amanda L. White Eagle:

Today, on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Indigenous people grapple with colonialism, history, and trauma. A future that truly honors Indigenous people and Tribal Nations must be rooted in sovereignty and begin from a place of self-determination – including jurisdiction over a sovereign Tribe’s own members. Tribal sovereignty has a storied history with a complex legal relationship with the United States. Contemporaneous indigeneity allows Indigenous people and allies to see that history while simultaneously recognizing and celebrating the exercise of tribal sovereignty. The intersection of the past and present provide education, resilience, and hope.

• Denezpi v. U.S.: Double Jeopardy, Dual Sovereignty, and Tribal Courts by Rebecca Plumage:

The assimilationist project failed once before. But in Denezpi and other cases challenging Native sovereignty, modern-day proponents seek to revive it under the guise of concerns over individual rights. This particular case is framed around double jeopardy, but that should not be allowed to obscure its deeper purpose: as part of a long line of efforts to chip away at the sovereignty of Native nations.

• Penobscot v. Frey: A Chance to Correct Course on Sovereignty Jurisprudence by Rebecca Plumage:

A nation’s sovereignty and security are inherently bound up with the right to control its territory. There are few greater threats to national security than the arbitrary loss of territory – and there are few sovereigns whose national security is more precarious than Native nations, sovereigns within a sovereign that have seen their rights eroded time and again.

Intersectional Writing on Justice and National Security

Professor Aziz Rana, in National Security Law and the Originalist Myth – published in connection with the Oxford University Press/Just Security volume Race and National Security (Professor Matiangai V. S. Sirleaf, ed.) – writes:

Ultimately, any genuine project of national security reform requires more than reviving a fictive eighteenth century of checks and balances. It instead entails treating foreign interventionism as only one expression of a broader colonial imagination and infrastructure, present since the framing and never adequately uprooted. Alongside challenging the state’s international police power, such a reformist approach includes ending the colonial status of all the existing territorial dependencies – in line with the genuine political desires of local and self-determining communities. It also revolves around everything from sharing sovereignty with Native peoples and land return to reparations, decriminalizing the border, transformative and structural reforms to intelligence and policing apparatuses, and providing judicial avenues for the remedy of past colonial crimes as well as contemporary national security ones.

A growing number of our authors explore national security through a lens that grapples with the consequences of settler-colonialism, past and present, in the United States and elsewhere. While these themes cut through various Just Security articles, recommended starting points include:

• Lieber at Sand Creek: A New Critical Reinterpretation of the Laws of War by John Fabian Witt, engaging with Settler Empire and the United States: Francis Lieber on the Laws of War by Helen M. Kinsella
• Racing National Security Symposium, edited by Matiangai Sirleaf

Beyond Our Pages

Finally, for your holiday reading, listening, and watching, readers may be interested in the following recent releases:

• Symposium on Johnson v. M’Intosh in the Tribal Law Journal, University of New Mexico – School of Law (Aug. 2024). Leading academics examine the legacy of a 1823 Supreme Court case that has shaped and continues to shape U.S. law as it relates to Tribal Nations. The symposium ends with a keynote lecture from Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.
• By the Fire We Carry by Rebecca Nagle. The host of This Land podcast has a new book, released in September, subtitled “The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land.” It may be of particular interest to readers looking for more on the themes of sovereignty discussed in our series above.
• Bad River (film), now streaming and at screenings through December, explores issues at the intersection of sovereignty and environmental justice, through the experiences of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.
• Undammed: The Klamath River Story (podcast: Spotify, Apple), airing now with new episodes weekly, offers an example of Indigenous climate leadership. It covers the “largest dam removal in history,” the result of decades of Tribal-led advocacy that centered on the importance of salmon and steelhead to Native culture and to the economy of the Klamath River basin region, on the Oregon-California border. After more than a century away, salmon were documented swimming freely in the river earlier this month, just days after the dam removal was completed.

IMAGE via Getty Images.

The post Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2024: Recommended Reading appeared first on Just Security.

Over the past few years—and even before then—many of the United States’ national myths have been reconsidered. This includes both narratives about American past and present that exclude Indigenous, Black, and other people of color, and women and sexual minorities, but also stories Americans tell ourselves about the stability of the global order, the inevitability of the peaceful transition of domestic power, and the resilience of democratic institutions. The decline of shared national narratives has also coincided with the rise of a more fractured media landscape, each consumer atomized by their own personalized algorithm. It now often feels difficult to pinpoint what stories—apart from those of despair, such as the narrative of ever-deepening political polarization—might take their place.

And yet shared national narratives are crucial to national security: both at the social and existential level, in reinforcing cohesion across a large country where belief in shared values can provide social glue; and at the more specific, policy level, as stories we tell about issues like climate, policing, or counter-terrorism inform what the public thinks of as a problem and how policymakers conceptualize solutions. Ceding the national narrative to stories of divisiveness and despair, and the public square to be dominated by those who can tolerate and perhaps even thrive on a certain kind of ugliness, does little to help Americans conceive of how shared stories might help us strive toward the common purpose of a more perfect union.

To that end, we’ve asked members of the Just Security community to recommend books, movies, or other media for this holiday weekend—with a focus on stories that illuminate common threads between people in the United States or help to articulate new or renewed visions for America’s future.

Many thanks to Monica Bell, Kate Brannen, Tess Bridgeman, Eugene Fidell, Bishop Garrison, Rebecca Ingber, Jameel Jaffer, Barbara McQuade, Maya Nir, Stephen Pomper, Laura Rozen, Matiangai Sirleaf, and others for recommendations included here.

Books, Poems & Short Stories

• Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman
• Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership: In Turbulent Times
• Edward Everett Hale, The Man Without a Country
• Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
• N. K. Jemisin, The City We Became
• Laila Lalami, The Other Americans
• Ursula Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
• Jon Meachum, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels (also a documentary)
• Suketu Mehta, This Land is Our Land
• Natalia Molina, A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community
• Vivek Murthy, Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World
• Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
• Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
• Studs Terkel, Hope Dies Last: Keeping Faith in Troubled Times
• Alice Walker, I Will Not Deny
• C. Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

Movies, Television & Plays

• The American President (movie)
• The Bear (Hulu)
• Come from Away (play)
• Finding Your Roots (PBS)
• First Cow (movie)
• Glory (movie)
• Independence Day (movie)
• Reservation Dogs (FX)
• Resident Alien (SYFY)

Speeches

• Frederick Douglas, What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?
• Abraham Lincoln, A Call for Reconciliation

Other Media

• Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms (paintings)
• Zoe Mulford as performed by Joan Baez, The President Sang Amazing Grace

IMAGE: Fireworks explode over the National Mall in Washington, DC. (Photo by PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP via Getty Images)

The post Renewing American Stories: A July 4th Weekend Reading, Watching, and Listening List appeared first on Just Security.

On May 21, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), also known as “The Oceans Court,” delivered an advisory opinion holding that countries must take all necessary measures to prevent, reduce, and control pollution of the marine environment from greenhouse gas emissions. This is the first time that an international court has ruled directly on countries’ international legal obligations to mitigate climate change. The European Court of Human Rights found similar State obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights in April.

The ITLOS decision is a major victory for the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law, COSIS, a coalition of nine nations from the Caribbean and the Pacific. For small island States, climate change is an existential threat. Protecting the world’s oceans, which act as important heat and carbon sinks, is key to maintaining fish stocks, reducing the frequency and intensity of devastating storms, and preserving plants and wildlife.

What exactly did the Tribunal decide? How might this groundbreaking ruling impact future climate policy?

Co-hosting this episode is Just Security’s Managing Editor, Megan Corrarrino, and joining the show to discuss the Tribunal’s decision and its potential impact are Catherine Amirfar and Ambassador Cheryl Bazard.

Catherine is Chair of the Subcommittee on Litigation Management of COSIS’s Committee of Legal Experts and the Co-Chair of the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton’s International Dispute Resolution Group. She is also the Co-Chair of Just Security’s Advisory Board. Ambassador Cheryl Bazard serves as The Bahamas’ Ambassador to Belgium and the European Union. The Bahamas is one of the nine COSIS States that sought the opinion.

Listen to the episode by clicking below.

The post The Just Security Podcast: A Landmark Court Opinion on the Ocean and Climate Change appeared first on Just Security.

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, Acting Assistant Attorney General (Criminal Division) Nicole M. Argentieri, and Assistant Attorney General (National Security Division) Matthew G. Olsen discussed DOJ’s white collar enforcement activities and announced several updates to the Department’s corporate criminal enforcement policies, some of which were also reflected in recent updates to the Justice Manual.

The announcements included a range of enforcement tools, such as new rewards for whistleblowers, ongoing adjustments to DOJ’s voluntary self-disclosure programs, review of corporate compliance statements with stiffer penalties for recidivism, and strengthening tools for identifying and prosecuting corporate crimes. A significant number of these developments included a national security dimension, reflecting DOJ’s view that, as Monaco put it in 2023, “Today corporate crime intersects with [U.S.] national security – in everything from terrorist financing, sanctions evasion, and the circumvention of export controls, to cyber- and crypto-crime.”

Some key national security takeaways from the recent remarks follow.

Corporate enforcement remains a National Security Division priority. As Monaco’s 2023 remarks indicate, DOJ has increasingly emphasized the importance of cases at the intersection of corporate enforcement and national security. Following Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she announced a “sea change” in which sanctions enforcement would become a heightened Department priority – the “new FCPA.” And late last year, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Marshall Miller announced DOJ was “surging resources to address the [national security] challenge – adding more than 25 new corporate crime prosecutors to our National Security Division and increasing by 40% the number of prosecutors in the Criminal Division’s Bank Integrity Unit.”

Olsen provided further updates from the National Security Division on Friday, saying that they had “more than doubled the number of prosecutors working on violations of sanctions, export control, and foreign agent laws” and “brought on two veteran prosecutors to serve as the division’s first ever chief and deputy chief counsel for corporate enforcement.”

He also discussed three recent national security-related corporate enforcement actions: a case against Syrian concrete company Lafarge for material support to terrorism resulting in a guilty plea and $778 million penalty (also covered extensively by authors on our pages); a $629 million criminal penalty against a British tobacco company’s subsidiary for violating sanctions against North Korea; and an Iranian sanctions case resulting in a guilty plea by cryptocurrency exchange Binance, involving a $4.3 billion penalty.

DOJ opens notice and comment period, takes other initial steps pursuant to Biden’s Executive Order limiting foreign acquisition of U.S. bulk data. On Feb. 28, President Joe Biden signed Executive Order 14117 on “Preventing Access to Americans’ Bulk Sensitive Personal Data and United States Government-Related Data by Countries of Concern.” The Executive Order, the White House said, “authorizes the Attorney General to prevent the large-scale transfer of Americans’ personal data to countries of concern and provides safeguards around other activities that can give those countries access to Americans’ sensitive data.”

Last week, Olsen announced three initial actions that DOJ is taking to implement the Executive Order: (1) a Mar. 5 Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking outlining the Department’s proposed approach, to be followed by a public notice and comment period and “multiple rounds” of stakeholder engagement; (2) development of an enforcement and compliance strategy, which Olsen said would have “real teeth … and be backed by the full suite of civil and criminal authorities under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act,” including “investigatory authorities and subpoena authority;” and (3) increased staffing and resources, including at the Foreign Investment Review Section’s Compliance and Enforcement Unit, where Olsen said the Department has also appointed a new Deputy Chief for National Security Data Risks.

Foreign Extortion Prevention Act (FEPA) takes effect. “We will use the recently enacted Foreign Extortion Prevention Act (FEPA) to hold corrupt foreign officials accountable,” Argentieri said, speaking about the law signed by Biden in December after being passed as part of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. The Act makes it a crime for a foreign official to demand or accept a bribe from a U.S. citizen, resident, corporation, or issuer, or from anyone while within the territory of the United States.

Anti-corruption advocates had long encouraged Congress to enact such a measure to criminalize “demand-side” cross-border corruption, just as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) does for “supply-side” corruption, i.e. U.S. persons or entities offering or making a bribe to foreign officials.

Argentieri said that the Criminal Division would draw on experience prosecuting foreign corruption in its FCPA Unit and the Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section’s Kleptocracy Initiative, and that “the same attorneys who investigate and prosecute FCPA violations [will] also handle cases brought under FEPA.” Updates to the Justice Manual issued on Thursday also clarified “that the department will handle FEPA cases the same way [it has] treated FCPA cases — with centralized supervision by the Fraud Section, working in partnership with U.S. Attorneys’ Offices across the country,” she said.

Monaco in her remarks also said that acts of both domestic and foreign corruption, including those prosecutable under FCPA and FEPA, were among DOJ’s highest priorities for whistleblower tips.

Enforcement plans will consider artificial intelligence and other disruptive technology risks. Building on remarks on artificial intelligence (AI) made at the University of Oxford last month, Monaco said she had directed the Criminal Division “to incorporate assessment of disruptive technology risks – including risks associated with AI – into its guidance on Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs.” She also said that the Department planned to use sentencing enhancements to impose additional penalties for crimes committed using AI. And she announced a new “Justice AI” convening series that will bring together government, civil society, academic, and business stakeholders to discuss the technology’s impact.

Olsen also mentioned AI, noting that the national security risks of potential bulk data misuse “will only increase with the explosive growth of artificial intelligence.”

A heightened enforcement approach recognizes impunity as a rule of law threat. These updates – both those directly related to national security and those applicable to general corporate crime – are in keeping with the Department’s heightened enforcement approach, which Monaco initially announced in an October 2021 speech and subsequently developed in a 2022 Department-wide memorandum and intervening policy updates and statements. Argentieri, in her speech last week, emphasized that “[c]ompanies only act through people,” and that the Criminal Division’s “number one goal is holding culpable individuals accountable – including corporate executives, no matter how prominent or influential.”

Even in cases that may not fall under an obvious “national security” rubric, the Department’s heightened enforcement approach and emphasis on individual accountability may nevertheless serve important national security purposes. Corporate criminal activity functions as a national security risk on multiple axes. Lax compliance can allow malignant actors to evade national security protections like sanctions and export controls, or exploit weak points to engage in activities like cyber attacks. But lax compliance can also contribute to a culture of impunity that weakens the rule of law and fuels a feedback loop in which malignant actors seeking to shelter their ill-gotten gains further hollow out the institutions that shore up democratic societies. We live in an age of kleptocracy-driven geopolitical conflict – as corrupt networks embed themselves in the United States to take advantage of its stability and institutions while also acting as global drivers of democratic decline. Meaningful enforcement accordingly requires addressing corporate crime as the multidimensional national security threat that it is.

IMAGE: A vehicle drives past the Department of Justice building in Washington, DC, on February 9, 2022. (Photo by STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)

The post National Security Takeaways from DOJ’s Corporate Criminal Enforcement Policy Updates appeared first on Just Security.

What constraints, for example, does the doctrine of sovereign immunity pose on seizure of Russian assets – and what avenues remain open? How are different jurisdictions approaching reparations under national or regional law, and how do (or don’t) those frameworks track with international law? Other pieces will provide updates on the international claims commission on Ukraine and proposals for how the doctrine of collective countermeasures might be used in the reparations context. Across these topics, the series will feature leading international law scholars, including Ukrainian voices and critical perspectives.

Articles will be listed here as they are published:

• How to Make Russia Pay to Rebuild Ukraine by Maggie Mills, Thomas Poston, and Oona Hathaway
• Decisions Without Enforcement: Ukrainian Judiciary and Compensation for War Damages by Ivan Horodyskyy
• Sovereign Immunity and Reparations in Ukraine by Chimène Keitner
• Reparations for Ukraine: Three Proposals from Europe by Philippa Webb
• Canada’s Special Economic Measures Act Under International Law by Preston Lim
• Transferring Russian Assets to Compensate Ukraine: Some Reflections on Countermeasures by Federica Paddeu
• Past Time to Liquidate Russian Assets by Harold Hongju Koh
• Making Russia Pay: Obtaining Compensation for Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine in American Courts by Robert Shaw and Svitlana Starosvit

IMAGE: Meeting of the General Assembly for a special session in the General Assembly Hall at United Nations Headquarters on Nov. 14, 2022 in New York City, to hold a vote on a draft resolution brought by the Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the United Nations, calling for the UNGA to create an “international register” to document claims of damage, loss, or injury to Ukrainians caused by Russia. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

The post Introducing Just Security’s Series on Reparations in Russia’s War Against Ukraine appeared first on Just Security.