An oft-heard complaint about the UN is that it does not deliver what it promises. The organization carries the promise of universal peace and security, but sometimes fails to show up in crisis situations, or shows up too late, or does too little. One of the standard replies on the part of the organization is that it lacks the funds, and could do a lot more if only its member states would pay their contributions, and would pay them on time and in good order. And that, in turn, signifies that, however esoteric the topic may seem, the financing of international organizations is of the utmost practical relevance. As Singer put it in the early 1960s: ‘Until the policy decisions of the various organs are translated into budget items, there is no visiting mission to encourage Togoland’s movement toward eventual self-government, no ceasefire observer in the Middle East, no rehabilitation commission in South Korea, and no Public Administration advisor in Santiago.’1

Memory is a critical part of computing systems. In the organization of computers and the programming model, memory was first separated logically from the computing (CPU) part, and then later physically. This separation of CPU and memory in a structure known as the von Neumann architecture was covered in Chapter 2 and is illustrated in Figure 5.1.

The eclectic character of the method is at once apparent. The Conciliation Commission in the ‘Timor Sea Conciliation’ explained that conciliation ‘seeks to combine the function of a mediator with the more active and objective role of a commission of inquiry’.2 If mediation is essentially an extension of negotiation, conciliation puts third-party intervention on a formal legal footing and institutionalises it in a way comparable, but not identical, to inquiry or arbitration. For the fact-finding exercise that is the essence of inquiry may or may not be an important element in conciliation, while the search for terms ‘susceptible of being accepted’ by the parties, but not binding on them, provides a sharp contrast with arbitration and a reminder of the link between conciliation and mediation.

When the parties to an international dispute are unable to resolve it by negotiation, the intervention of a third party is a possible means of breaking the impasse and producing an acceptable solution. Such intervention can take a number of different forms. The third party may simply encourage the disputing states to resume negotiations, or do nothing more than provide them with an additional channel of communication. In these situations, the intermediary is said to be contributing ‘good offices’. On the other hand, the assignment may be to investigate the dispute and to present the parties with a set of formal proposals for its solution. As we shall see in Chapter 5, this form of intervention is called ‘conciliation’. Between good offices and conciliation lies the form of third-party activity known as ‘mediation’.1

While international organizations are generally created for longer periods of time, indeed usually even without any definite time period in mind,1 not all of them manage to survive indefinitely. Some simply disappear without being succeeded to in any way; prime examples are the Warsaw Pact and Comecon, both of which were dismantled after the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. On 26 June 1991, a ministerial meeting of Comecon members decided to dissolve the organization; the Warsaw Pact was disbanded at a meeting of its Political Consultative Committee in Prague on 1 July 1991.2

The constituent documents of international organizations are strange creatures, often said to occupy a special place in international law. On the one hand, they are treaties,1 concluded between duly authorized representatives of states, and as such no different from other treaties.2 Thus, one would expect, they are simply subject to the general law of treaties.

Having reviewed the various ways of attempting to resolve international disputes individually, we are now in a position to consider what this survey as a whole demonstrates about the possibilities open to a state when confronted with a dispute, the factors which influence decisions on whether to use a particular procedure and the prospects for improving this situation in the future. To deal with these issues it will be necessary to consider separately some of the legal and political factors which form the context in which decisions relating to the conduct of disputes are taken, and then to suggest some ways of modifying or developing current methods of settlement with a view to making them more effective and easier to use. First, however, it may be useful to recall in brief outline what our study has revealed about the present situation.

Sequential abstraction has enabled software to manage the complex demands of constructing computing applications, debugging software and hardware, and program composition. However, with the end of Dennard scaling (see Section 3.3.4), we have been unable to create sequential computers with sufficient speed and capacity to meet the needs of ever-larger computing applications. As a result, computer hardware systems were forced to adopt explicit parallelism, both within a single chip (multicore CPUs) and at datacenter scale (supercomputers and cloud computing). In this chapter, we describe this shift to parallelism. In single-chip CPUs, the shift has produced multicore processors with first 2 or 4 cores, but growing rapidly to 64 cores (2020) and beyond. Understanding of multicore chips, parallel building blocks used in even larger parallel computers, provides an invaluable perspective on how to understand and increase performance.

When a disagreement between states on some issue of fact, law or policy is serious enough to give rise to an international dispute, their views on the matter in question may be difficult or impossible to reconcile. In such a case, either or both of the parties may refuse to discuss the matter on the ground that their position is ‘not negotiable’. Alternatively, negotiations may drag on for years until one side abandons its claim or loses patience and attempts to impose a solution by force. It follows that negotiation, even if assisted by good offices or mediation, cannot be regarded as an adequate means of resolving all international disputes.

The very idea of international organizations suggests that those entities are capable of performing acts; creating an entity with a separate identity only makes sense (instrumental sense, at any rate) if that entity can subsequently do certain things. In order to do those things, the organization must be able to adopt or create legal instruments.1

Disputes are an inevitable part of international relations, just as disputes between individuals are inevitable in domestic relations. Like individuals, states often want the same thing in a situation where there is not enough of it to go round. Moreover, just as people can disagree about the way to use a river, a piece of land or a sum of money, states frequently want to do different things, but their claims are incompatible. Admittedly, one side may change its position, extra resources may be found, or, on looking further into the issue, it may turn out that everyone can be satisfied after all. But no one imagines that these possibilities can eliminate all domestic disputes and they certainly cannot be relied on internationally. Disputes, whether between states, neighbours, or brothers and sisters, must therefore be accepted as a regular part of human relations and the problem is what to do about them.