Evangelos Raftopoulos - Böcker

This timely and forward-looking book explores how environmental democracy can be advanced globally through wider accession to the Aarhus Convention (AC), with a particular focus on the Mediterranean region. Drawing on a foundational, internationally authorized study by the author and the MEPIELAN team, Evangelos Raftopoulos presents an innovative legal and policy framework for participatory environmental governance, grounded in the horizontality of international law and the relational nature of treaties.The book highlights the universality of the AC, examining its architecture, governance, and benefits. On the path toward a comprehensive agenda for the entry of non-UNECE Mediterranean countries into the AC, Raftopoulos proposes a structured and creative multilateral Pre-Accession/Preliminary Negotiation Phase to facilitate their effective integration, providing a new avenue for collaborative engagement and strategic diplomacy.Emphasizing the transformative potential of the AC for the acceding countries, Raftopoulos explores theoretical and practical linkages between the Convention and global environmental, trade, economic, and technological regimes, including human rights. He offers a systematic vision for participatory governance and international accountability.Integrating international law, diplomacy, environmental governance, and sustainable development, this book is essential reading for scholars, policymakers, legal practitioners, institutions, and civil society working across environmental law, international relations, trade policy, and global sustainability.

Evangelos Raftopoulos explores international negotiation as a structured process of relational governance that generates international common interest between and among international participants and in relation to the international public order. He challenges prescriptive models of negotiation - developed in international relations and positivistic approaches to international law, which artificially separate treaties from negotiation in the name of 'objectivity' - and opens a window for looking at international negotiations from a novel, international law perspective. Using an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates law, philosophy, politics, and linguistics, he proposes a holistic, theoretical model of multilateral international negotiation that not only offers a 'subjective' view of international law in practice but also demonstrates the importance of understanding the horizontal normativity of international ordering. This work should be read by academics and practitioners of international law and negotiations, officials of international organizations, and anyone else interested in international law and international relations.