In four short years the international landscape has been completely reorganized. The major political fault line of the Cold War has been for the most part erased, and the foundations have been laid for an entirely new era in international relations. Serious focused analysis is urgently needed to help facilitate the process of `ending the Cold War'.
This volume, the product of a Canada-Soviet bilateral conference of jurists and other scholars, specialized in International Law and International Organizatin, and International Conflicts-Resolution, held at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver in June 1990, attempts to provide such analysis. Written by a professionally and scientifically distinguished team of Canadian and Soviet experts, it deals with such issues as the winding up of the Nuclear and General Disarment process, the current main proposals on strengtening the United Nations and on reforming and modernizing its main arenas and institutions, new approaches to International Trade and Commerce on a multilateral basis, developing new norms of International Environmental Protection Law, and the Intrnational protection of Human Rights. It is characterized above all by a common emphasis, Soviet and Canadian, on pragmatism, and on a rigorously empirical, problem-oriented approach and offers not merely a description of international Law as it might now happen to exist.
The result is a suprisingly far-ranging consensus, not merely on the major World Community problems that should be deemed ripe for present study, but also on their most desirable, practical and realizable solutions.