ICON S Conference 17 – 19 June 2016 Humboldt University Berlin

16 TERRITORY AND ITS LEGAL
IMPLICATIONS I
Panel formed with individual proposals.
Participants
Name of Chair
Room
Ricardo Pereira
Erika Arban
Manal Totry-Jubran
Karin Loevy
Michael William Dowdle
Karin Loevy
UL6 2070A
Ricardo Pereira: Maritime boundary delimitation
as a security concern of coastal states:
challenges for natural resource governance in
the Artic and East China Sea
The ongoing interstate disputes surrounding maritime
boundary delimitation in the Arctic and East China
Sea pose considerable challenges for natural resource
governance in those regions, not least because of the
geopolitical tensions arising from those disputes. The
conflicting claims by the Arctic coastal states over an
extended continental shelf in the Arctic may be settled
in the pending cases before the Commission on the
Outer Limits of the Continental Shelf created by the
1982 UNCLOS. Likewise, the dispute over the sovereignty
of islands in the East China Sea attests to the
great significance of that dispute not only in geopolitical
terms but also from a legal perspective. This paper
aims to assess the extent to which the principles of
maritime boundary delimitation developed by the jurisprudence
of international courts and tribunals could
contribute to the settlement of the ongoing interstate
maritime disputes in the Arctic and East China Sea.
Erika Arban: Re-drawing the boundaries of local
and territorial governance: the implementation of
metropolitan cities in Italy and the accommodation
of strong distinct communities in vast areas
After the constitutional reform of 2001, Italian regionalism
is again under transformation: law 56/2014
created ten metropolitan cities (MCs), while a constitutional
bill under discussion will eliminate provinces
from the list of constituent units of the Republic. These
interventions are re-shaping the boundaries of local
government in Italy and strengthening the asymmetrical
nature of the regional paradigm. The implementation of
MCs addresses the need to better respond to the pressures
of densely populated areas, also, the raise of MCs
testifies to a return to the bottom, to the local dimension.
What are the prospective legal consequences? This
presentation takes Italian MCs as the point of departure
to explore whether MCs have the potential to become
the new strategic level of governance to accommodate
strong communities in vast areas displaying specific
socio-economic and political traits, and the legal stratagems
through which this could be achieved.
Manal Totry-Jubran: The Impact of Gated Communities
on Gating Communities: Israeli Mixed
Cities as a Test Case
This presentation explores the physical seclusion
of urban spaces in Israel; referred to in the academic
literature as “Gated Communities”. This phenomena
highlights and intensifies the already existing segregation
between groups because it creates exclusivist,
elitist communities that exclude non-members and
delineates subdivisions within the city. All of which have
an enduring effect on both those that reside within and
outside of these spaces. Based on national inventories
of gated communities in Israel, the presentation
explores some of the articulations and functions of
the enclosure have on Arab citizens – non members
of gated communities as conceptualized in legal procedures.
It focuses on what is defined as “mixed cities”;
cities in which Arab and Jewish residents reside
side by side in the same urban space and illustrates
the relations of power between the majority and the
minority. Accordingly, socio-legal reading of gated
communities reveals a complex understanding of the
phenomenon that draws heavily on the sub-discipline
of spatial geography.
Karin Loevy: The Sykes Picot Agreement:
Drawing Lines of Development in a New and
Open Space
This paper is a part of a book project in history
of international law in the Middle East in the period
leading to the Palestine Mandate (1915-1922). Revisiting
major legal and diplomatic documents from the
period it traces a set of regional visions that were
actively at work in the minds of the various officials negotiating
a new world order for post- Ottoman Middle
East. These visions were readily obscured by the later
nationalistic-centered conflicts that still plague the
region today. But at that transitional period the Middle
East was not yet imagined as jurisdictionally divided
but as a new territory opening up for different types
of political possibilities. The chapter about the Sykes
Picot Agreement (May 2016) uncovers one such vision.
Negotiating in secret, imperial agents did not imagine
a jurisdictionally divided space. Instead, they saw a
broad region opening up for a variety of development
activities and administrative creations.
Michael William Dowdle: The Geographies of
Public Law
This paper explores how the distinct spatial aspects
of the state – economic geographies, cultural
geographies, political geographies – impose unique
regulatory needs upon the state and how the state
addresses these needs.
Concurring panels 44