CIAO DATE: 07/2008
Volume: 23, Issue: 3
Fall 2009
More Money, Less Cure: Why Global Health Assistance Needs Restructuring [Full Text]
Daniel E. Esser
Is more money for global health always good news? No, argues Esser, who suggests that many of the problems that plague decision-making in global health assistance lie not in the global South but in the North, where the monetary flows originate and where most policies are conceived.
Pious Words, Puny Deeds: The "International Community" and Mass Atrocities [Full Text]
Rajan Menon
Most of the large-scale violence in the world will continue to occur within societies rather than between or among states. Yet the international community still has not developed the ethical-legal consensus or the institutions required to manage this terrible problem.
Treaty Norms and Climate Change Mitigation [Full Text]
Darrel Moellendorf
UNFCCC norms tightly constrain the range of acceptable agreements for the distribution of burdens to mitigate climate change, restricting us to two viable guiding principles: the equitable distribution of responsibilities and the right to development. Both principles place much heavier mitigation burdens on industrialized countries.
Justice and the Convention on Biological Diversity [Abstract]
Doris Schroeder, Thomas Pogge
Benefit sharing as envisaged by the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is a relatively new idea in international law. Within the context of non-human biological resources, it aims to guarantee the conservation of biodiversity and its sustainable use by ensuring that its custodians are adequately rewarded for its preservation. Prior to the adoption of the CBD, access to biological resources was frequently regarded as a free-for-all. Bioprospectors were able to take resources out of their natural habitat and develop commercial products without sharing benefits with states or local communities. This paper asks how CBD-style benefit-sharing fits into debates of justice. It is argued that the CBD is an example of a set of social rules designed to increase social utility. It is also argued that a common heritage of humankind principle with inbuilt benefit-sharing mechanisms would be preferable to assigning bureaucratic property rights to non-human biological resources. However, as long as the international economic order is characterized by serious distributive injustices, as reflected in the enormous poverty-related death toll in developing countries, any morally acceptable means toward redressing the balance in favor of the disadvantaged has to be welcomed. By legislating for a system of justice-in-exchange covering nonhuman biological resources in preference to a free-for-all situation, the CBD provides a small step forward in redressing the distributive justice balance. It therefore presents just legislation sensitive to the international relations context in the 21st century.
The Right to Relocation: Disappearing Island Nations and Common Ownership of the Earth [Abstract]
Mathias Risse
"On Torture" Edited by Thomas C. Hilde [Full Text]
Karen Greenberg
This edited collection is an excellent addition to the literature on the torture policy of the Bush administration during its war on terror. The contributors explore the history and practice of torture beyond the U.S. and what these non-American examples say about the U.S role in this area.
"What's Wrong with the United Nations and How to Fix It" by Thomas G. Weiss [Full Text]
Barbara Crossette
Drawing on his own UN experience and studying it from outside, Weiss clears away a lot of the debris of superficial critiques to uncover the deeper explanations for why the more world problems become interconnected and global in scope the less the UN seems able to cope with them.
Carole K. Fink
Faced with the political, economic, and social challenges of a globalized planet, are we bereft of any coherent political guideposts or do we still possess realistic and robust idea-systems? Steger, a prolific scholar of globalization, adopts a cautiously optimistic version of the second position.
"National Responsibility and Global Justice" by David Miller [Full Text]
Miller builds on his seminal work on national identity and special duties to co-nationals to carve out a position on such issues as global poverty and immigration that is distinct from both the recent stream of cosmopolitan theories and a narrow "citizens-only" account of obligations.