Professor Anja Matwijkiw, our U.S. Scientific Coordinator, delivered a research presentation on October 18 at Indiana University Bloomington in her capacity as the 2024-2025 Indiana University Presidential Arts & Humanities (IUPAH) Fellow. Her presentation, Homing in on Philosophy and Ethics in the Context of the “Stakeholder” Trend in Non-Binding and Binding United Nations Law, is a component of her participation in the IUPAH program which is led by Professor and Assistant Vice President for Arts & Humanities Research Edward Paul Dallis-Comentale, and with Ana Maria Valasco as Associate Director of Arts & Humanities Research Development (see https://news.iu.edu/live/news/35801-2024-presidential-arts-and-humanities-fellows).

Professor Anja Matwijkiw’s current scholarly agenda, which is closely tied to the prestigious IUPAH program, consists of various deliverables that are interdisciplinary in nature and scope. As our U.S. Scientific Coordinator for the IECLO, Professor Anja Matwijkiw was particularly excited about the opportunity to demonstrate that legal discourse requires a multidisciplinary approach. 

“Those experts who helped to develop stakeholder theory or strategic stakeholder management as a field tend to focus on corporate social responsibility and free market ideas. But, they don’t venture outside of this field irrespective of the fact that the stakeholder terminology and many insights that follow as spillovers have been adopted within many other areas.”

United Nations law is one of these. Professor Anja Matwijkiw believes that a mapping exercise of different types of imprints from competing stakeholder outlooks is one way of securing more clarity in the case of the United Nations and its legal strategies. In one sense, this organization makes rudimentary and sporadic use of stakeholder concepts and ideas. In another, she stresses, the United Nations’ own stakeholder trend is only consistent with so-called broad approaches. The term “broad” is a reaction against theorists who reduce stakeholders and stakes to monetary concerns. One of the narrow and radical versions can be traced to the economist Milton Friedman. Philosophers have been involved in the critique of Friedman’s laissez-faire capitalism, and Professor Anja Matwijkiw herself thinks it is possible to make the leap from corporate social responsibility to the United Nations cornerstone notion of responsibility, State responsibility, on broad premises that accommodate ethics. More exactly, Professor Anja Matwijkiw is both testing and experimenting with a topic (State responsibility) that the International Law Commission listed for codification back in 1949, and which takes analysis and assessment to the highest level of international law where we find the category of peremptory norms of general international law.

According to Professor Anja Matwijkiw, it is intriguing to see the evolutionary outgrowths of Article 2 of the 1945 Charter of the United Nations whereby the basis for the Organization is “the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.” One of the outgrowths is the rule of law and justice-oriented requirement of “equitable relations between States,” a requirement that is bound to evade narrow stakeholder theory because this treats ethics as a phenomenon that divide stakes in terms of different values that, in turn, amount to nothing more than opinions. This would completely paralyze the United Nations’ global law-making strategy that is anchored in the assumption that there are important interests that affect all states and all peoples because they are grounded in basic human values. These introduce the kind of humanistic dimensions which, in turn, explain why Professor Anja Matwijkiw holds the position that working with the category of peremptory norms of general international law (jus cogens) requires a multidisciplinary approach.

In this regard, she stands on the shoulders of M. Cherif Bassiouni. In an article from 1990, he writes:

Perhaps we cannot expect much progress in this and other multi-disciplinary approaches in an era where the legal generalist has become a downgraded rarity and the highly narrow specialist the upgraded generality. What is needed is a multi-disciplinary approach that can bring together specialists in public and private international law, jurisprudence, philosophy of law and legal methods, and empiricists of various backgrounds. Without such an approach, we will continue to be faced with confusion in this important area of law.[1]

The “highly narrow specialist” is not able to resolve everything. A balance must be reached, with the help of the “legal generalist.” Taking a philosophical perspective on things, the balance concerns law and ethics. Professor Anja Matwijkiw notes that concessions in this regard have been made. Peremptory norms of general international law have been viewed as, for example, “moral-ethical” or “intrinsic moral values” or “intrinsically superior” norms, all of which serve to capture the special status of the category. Professor Anja Matwijkiw also made mentioning of this in her 2024 contribution to the proceedings of the EU-GLOBACT Jean Monnet Module that Professor Anna Oriolo is the Director of,  The European Union and the Push Towards Global Action: Crimes of General Interest, in CRIMINALITÀ TRANSNAZIONALE E UNIONE EUROPEA (A. Oriolo, A.R. Castaldo, A. Di Stasi & M. Nino, eds., Editoriale Scientifica, 2024).

However, while some legal experts may concede to the inescapability of ethics in the study of United Nations norms like the right to self-determination, the prohibition of aggression, and crimes against humanity, Professor Anja Matwijkiw thinks it is a mystery why the legal discourse has not yet moved such public and global stakes to the forefront of the debate about bindingness in the context of United Nations law. “Imagine if we began to take ethics seriously… Now that would be a paradigm-shift that could revolutionize United National law!” Professor Anja Matwijkiw predicts that ethics will gradually be absorbed as a response to the kind of power politics that currently blocks recognition of candidates for new core international norms like ecocide and grand corruption. If the close relationship she envisions will be acknowledged is something that only the future will reveal.

[1] M. Cherif Bassiouni, A Functional approach to “General Principles of International Law,” 11(3) Michigan Journal of International Law 768 802 (1990).