Conference Program

Since the 1970s, mining multinational corporations have benefitted from finance loans that combine public and private sources of liquidity. Pioneered by the US in response to the ‘loss of competitiveness’ of its iron, mining and heavy-capital industry, finance loans had two central goals: first, to transfer public sources of money into loanable private capital; second, to use the newly created loanable capital to subsidize Western MNCs competition against Global South mining enterprises on ascent. OECD and multilateral banks quickly granted finance loans, too, boosting an unprecedented global expansion of Western MNCs’ mining operations in 1980s-1990s. Since then, demand for finance loans has expanded, with States increasingly absorbing the costs and serious historical problems of finance capital.

Maritime security is being challenged in many regions, including territorial and maritime disputes, competition for natural resources and threats to freedom of navigation and rights of innocent and transit passage. Such challenges create tensions in sea basins around EU, sharpened by military Russian-Ukrainian conflict. There is also an increase in challenges to maritime security beyond Europe, such as in Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. These challenges have been recently increased by Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. Some non-EU States are strengthening their capabilities and assertiveness at sea, taking unilateral initiatives. This has included the use of force or breaching other States’ national sovereignty. Such initiatives defy the international order based on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea; they affect shipping in international trade. Djibouti Code of Conduct, a regional agreement concerning repression of piracy and armed robbery against ships in Western Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden, was adopted in 2009. Jeddah Amendment (2017) extended the Code’s scope promoting cooperation to repress transnational organized maritime crimes. The proposed paper aims at analysing the Code and its Amendment, considering criticalities, priorities and hierarchies in maritime security to be globally addressed in a new shared word order’s perspective. The role of United Nations, International Maritime Organization and EU will be treated. This analysis will be undertaken within international maritime law and practice. Other regional agreements to counter maritime security threats will be examined, such as the Code of Conduct in South China Sea to be adopted.

After World War II international as well as domestic protections of European national minorities have steadily increased, eventually becoming an essential element of the European international law, with many contributions in this field by, among others, the CSCE, the EU, and the Council of Europe. This typically led minority issues – basically seen as solved – to be putted in the background in most analysis of European international politics of the last decades. However, just to point out the last striking case, one of the main claims made by the Russian Federation to justify its aggression to Ukraine has been the need to protect the Russian minority in Ukraine. Once again, a minority issue contributed to shape the history of Europe, providing dramatic evidence on the need to focus also on this subject to understand the moves of European sovereign states and therefore the European political game. The aim of this paper will be to give an overview of the sensitive issue of the protections of national minorities in European international politics and in European international law from World War II to nowadays. Through the use of case-studies, it will be highlighted that the protections of national minorities in both international and domestic law have steadily improved, but these improvements and their implementation have always been linked to the political momentum and subject to specific political interests rather than being the output of a shared new European sensitivity on this matter.