The FIFA Legal Monopoly: Can FIFA Be Fixed?
Introduction FIFA, or the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, is the lawmaking body for world soccer. It is responsible for not only creating the laws of the game on the field, dictating what qualifies as a handball or when using the newly designed...
The Challenge of Repatriation of Women and Children Connected to the Islamic State
Over the course of the growth of the Islamic State (IS), almost half of recruited sympathizers were women coming from over 50 nations, globally. Once a part of IS, the roles of these women were varied – some were female fighters and others were simply wives caring for...
Consequences of COVID-19 on Global Food Insecurity
An overlooked, but detrimental element of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the food insecurity faced by millions throughout the United Nations (UN). Food insecurity refers to “a lack of available financial resources for food at the household level.” In 2019, it was...
SAPs in Disguise: Modern IMF Programs Have Similar Negative Effects to their Criticized Predecessors
(image link) The International Monetary Fund’s (“IMF'') current loan programs to support low-income countries (“LICs”) are simply Structural Adjustment Programs (“SAPs”) disguised under new names. These programs, created in response to staunch criticism of the IMF’s...
False Hope & Broken Promises: Chinese Compliance with the WTO
Preface China is certainly not the only country to flout WTO’s mandates or to engage in protectionist economic policies. Notably, there has been a recent political debate regarding the merit of continued WTO membership in the United States. Furthermore, the United...
The Story of Sialkot: The Soccer Ball Capital
In 1996, Life Magazine published an article about Tariq, a 12-year-old boy from Sialkot, Pakistan, who stitched soccer balls for Nike at 60 cents per ball. International media coverage, public outrage, and consumer pressure have forced major multinational corporations...
Taking Stock of the UN’s Femicide Watch Initiative
Image Attribution: Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos from Washington, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons Pictured above is Dubravka Šimonović, the former Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its...
Panda Diplomacy
Bao Bao during her public debut at the National Zoo in 2013. Her birth appeared on the zoo’s live panda cam and generated a surge in viewership that crashed the site. Is there something more to these beloved bears than munching on bamboo and bumbling around? April 16,...
The Future of International Criminal Law in Domestic Courts: Syrian War Crime Trials in Germany
In January 2022 the first war crimes trial for atrocities committed in Syria concluded with a guilty verdict for Anwar Raslan. Raslan was a Syrian intelligence officer charged with committing the crimes of rape, murder, and sexual assault while working at a prison...
The Strange Death of the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline
On March 1st, just five days after Russia’s surprise invasion of Ukraine, Switzerland-based energy company Nord Stream 2 AG filed for bankruptcy. The company’s future had already been imperiled the previous week by the German government’s decision to withdraw...