NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

Abstract

Welcome to the first 2023 issue of volume 186 of World Affairs! I am delighted to present to our readers a very full lineup of articles, commentaries, and a letter to the editor in this issue—all spanning a wide range of extremely pressing topics in current affairs. These include: the Paris Agreement and climate change responsibilities, the Ukraine war, human rights violations and the UN Human Rights Council, gray zone warfare, and Moscow’s anti-Western turn, among others. The first two in-depth articles this time examine and problematize the place of legal technicalities and their interpretation in international agreements and organizations and how these can often affect government policy adversely. In “The UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review as a Rhetorical Battlefield of Nations,” Schimmel (2023) questions the efficacy of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in providing sufficient incentives for countries to bring their policies more in line with international human rights law. Taking the case of Saudi Arabia, and moving well beyond it, the author offers a compelling set of arguments showing that many states that habitually violate human rights as a matter of policy use the UPR strategically and rhetorically as mechanism to defend, downplay, and deny their continuing human rights violations. While Schimmel acknowledges the value and positive aspects of the UPR in detail, his findings suggest that, at best, it has not