CIAO DATE: 02/2012
Volume: 25, Issue: 4
Winter 2011
Security Council Reform: Past, Present, and Future
Shashi Tharoor
Even though it has been more than a year since I left the service of the United Nations, the one question people have not stopped asking me here in India is when our country, with 1.2 billion people and a booming economy, is going to become a permanent member of the Security Council. The short answer is "not this year, and probably not the next." But there are so many misconceptions about this issue that a longer answer is clearly necessary.
Excesses of Responsibility: The Limits of Law and the Possibilities of Politics (PDF)
Kirsten Ainley
Since 1945 responsibility for atrocity has been individualized, and international tribunals and courts have been given effective jurisdiction over it. This article argues that the move to individual responsibility leaves significant "excesses" of responsibility for war crimes unaccounted for. When courts do attempt to recognize the collective nature of war crime perpetration, through the doctrines of "command responsibility," "joint criminal enterprise" and "state responsibility," the application of these doctrines has, it is argued, limited or perverse effects. The article suggests that instead of expecting courts to allocate excesses of responsibility, other accountability mechanisms should be used alongside trials to allocate political (rather than legal) responsibility for atrocity. The mechanisms favored here are "Responsibility and Truth Commissions," i.e., well-resourced non-judicial commissions which are mandated to hold to account individual and collective actors rather than simply to provide an account of past violence.
Cosmopolitan Democracy: Paths and Agents (PDF)
Daniele Archibugi, David Held
One of the recurrent criticisms of the project of cosmopolitan democracy has been that it has not examined the political, economic, and social agents that might have an interest in pursuing this programme. This criticism is addressed directly in this article. It shows that there is a variety of paths that, in their own right, could lead to more democratic global governance, and that there are numerous political, economic, and social agents that have an interest in the pursuit of these. Cosmopolitan democracy is an open-ended project that aims to increase the accountability, transparency, and legitimacy of global governance, and the battery of agents and initiatives outlined highlight the direction and politics required to make it possible.
The Unity and Objectivity of Value (PDF)
Stephen Guest
In this rich, complex, and closely argued book, Dworkin boldly affirms the independence of arguments of value, arguments that remain securely within their own domain. Mostly, but not at all exclusively, he is concerned with moral value. He claims it is wrong to assume that external forces could force conflict between moral values on us, as Isaiah Berlin and others have urged. Rather, he says we should be more confident in justifying our judgments of value by reference to the more abstract values we hold; we also have a personal responsibility for making our judgments coherent. "Value judgments are true, when they are true . . . in view of the substantive case that can be made for them" (p. 11).
These ideas together form what he calls the "unity of value" thesis, the "big thing" that the hedgehog knows in Archilochus's comparison of the fox and the hedgehog, famously used by Isaiah Berlin. Take the well-known supposed conflict between freedom and equality in the distribution of resources. If we think that people are of equal value as human beings but also that people should be free to keep what they have worked for, we must try to see in what ways equality and freedom need to be qualified to respect both values. We cannot simply discard either value if it is inconvenient, say, by denying people equality of bargaining power but affirming maximum freedom for the market: "You cannot determine what liberty requires without also deciding what distribution of property and opportunity shows equal concern for all" (p. 4).
Justice for Hedgehogs is a masterwork that offers many clear and confident solutions to major problems of morality. The first part of the book is a ringing endorsement of Hume's distinction between fact and value, and it claims for value both independence and objectivity. The second half takes up the challenge of justifying our moral judgments and is broadly an endorsement of Kant on morality, with a plausible addition (or extrapolation): that "living well" might responsibly include an integrated balance—even a trade-off—between personal ethics and morality. As usual, Dworkin engages with the best contemporary thinkers who address these sorts of questions and, hence, it is a book that tells us, too, what they have to say. And it is monumentally conceived, for Dworkin asks us to incorporate other large books of his within it, notably on legal philosophy (Law's Empire and Justice in Robes) and political philosophy (particularlySovereign Virtue).
"The Honor Code" by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Sharon Krause
The language of honor is apt to strike the modern reader as quaint, even obsolete, if not downright pernicious. It calls to mind the hierarchies of the ancien régime and the absurdities of the duel, not to mention the horrible "honor killings" that perpetuate the domination of women in some traditionalist societies today. If honor is out of favor, one might think so much the better.
"Cosmopolitan Regard: Political Membership and Global Justice" by Richard Vernon
David Miller
This volume is an impressive addition to the small but growing body of literature on global justice that tries to find a midpoint between cosmopolitanism and statism or nationalism (other books in this category include Kok-Chor Tan'sJustice without Borders and Gillian Brock's Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account). The aim is to make room for the idea that we owe special duties to our fellow citizens by virtue of some feature of our relationship, while at the same time to show that these duties are only defensible if we also acknowledge certain cosmopolitan responsibilities. Vernon follows an original path to this conclusion. The argument is quite intricate, and I cannot engage with all of it in the space of a short review, so I will focus on what I take to be the book's central claims.
"The Practice of Global Citizenship" by Luis Cabrera
Mark Gibney
Human rights are (universally) declared to be universal, yet we continue to live in a world where it is seemingly quite natural to limit human rights obligations to a state's own territorial borders. No doubt, many will accuse me of overstating matters when I say that territorial constraints constitute the single greatest impediment to the protection of human rights. What the territorial approach has done is to perpetuate a world of haves and have-nots among states, in which human rights protection is in large part dependent on the accident of birth. By rejecting the universality of duties, we have made a mockery of the universality of human rights.
"Global Justice and Due Process" by Larry May
Eric Posner
In his latest book, Larry May argues that two rights—the right to habeas corpus and to non-refoulement—should be incorporated into international law as jus cogens norms. Habeas corpus, which is recognized in the United Kingdom, the United States, and a few other countries with U.K.-derived legal systems, is a legal procedure in which a prisoner can appear in court and challenge the basis of his detention. Non-refoulement is the principle that states should not deport aliens who are unlawfully on their soil if the aliens will be persecuted or abused in the state to which they will be returned. There is currently no right to habeas corpus in international law; most states have agreed to recognize limited rights of non-refoulement. Jus cogens norms are norms of international law that bind states even if they reject them, in contrast to ordinary international legal norms, which require states' consent. Torture, slavery, genocide, and aggressive war are generally thought to be on the list of jus cogens prohibitions, and it is to this group that May wants to add the failure to offer habeas corpus and the deportation of aliens to states where they are likely to be abused.
"Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference" by Jane Burbank and Fredrick Cooper
Eva Hausteiner
Recent books on empires—and there have been many—often have quite straightforward titles. Famous examples include Michael Doyle's Empires(1986), Niall Ferguson's Empire (2003), Herfried Münkler's Empires (2008), and Timothy Parsons'sThe Rule of Empires (2010). Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper's Empires in World History is no exception. One reason for this might be that the concept of empire is still not fully established in the scholarly vocabulary when it comes to describing the present. Speaking of empires in the past is widely accepted, but imperial structures as recurring and even contemporary political phenomena are still highly debated. The endeavor of bringing empire back in as a transhistorical concept of heuristic value, complementing existing notions of political order, such as the nation-state, and going beyond the analysis of imperialism, is far from concluded.
"Global Governance and the UN: An Unfinished Journey" by Thomas G. Weiss and Ramesh Thakur
Timothy Sisk
When two of the leading scholars on the United Nations team up to write a definitive overview of the premier international organization managing the great global issues of our day, both scholars and students should take notice. This book, which stems from the work of the United Nations Intellectual History Project, delivers on its primary goal of identifying "gaps" in world order and the ways that the UN has evolved to manage those gaps, albeit in a somewhat ad hoc fashion; and it offers perhaps the most integrated and big-picture perspective of the United Nations in contemporary international relations literature.