ABSTRACT
The following article examines transformations to international regulations on violence based on a constructivist perspective of International Relations. A particular focus is awarded to shifts in international social practices to have occurred since the end of the last century, as discussing the terms of international regulations that both restrict and reinforce conditions in which violence may be used. The first section briefly maps and examines five sets of international regulations on violence: international humanitarian law, humanitarianism, international human rights law, international criminal law, and the collective security regime. In the second section, we analyze political-normative-social and conceptual transformations to have occurred to the world order since the 1990s, with a particular emphasis placed on the redefining of the concept of security, the new meaning given to the concept of sovereignty, and the process of expansion and convergence of these five sets of international regulations. We argue that such transformations to international laws on violence are both representative of the dislocation of domestic/international dualism and the new place of the individual in international relations. We therefore suggest that significant shifts may be identified in the constitutional architecture of the contemporary world order.
international regulations; violence; international security; sovereignty; world order