CIAO DATE: 10/2012
Volume: 26, Issue: 3
Fall 2012
The Peculiar Politics of Energy (PDF)
Ann Florini
Imagine that you could wave a magic wand and provide everyone in the world with easy access to clean and affordable energy. In one stroke you would make the world a far cleaner, richer, fairer, and safer place. Suddenly, a billion and a half of the world's poorest people could discover what it is like to turn on an electric light in the evening. The looming threat posed by climate change would largely disappear. From the South China Sea to the Middle East to the Arctic, geopolitical tensions over energy resources would fade away. Human health would benefit, too, as vaccines and perishable foods could be refrigerated the world over. And many of the world's most corrupt government officials could no longer enrich themselves by bleeding their countries dry of revenues from fossil fuel sales.
Limiting the Killing in War: Military Necessity and the St. Petersburg Assumption (PDF)
Henry Shue, Janina Dill
This article suggests that the best available normative framework for guiding conduct in war rests on categories that do not echo the terms of an individual rights-based morality, but acknowledge the impossibility of rendering warfare fully morally justified. Avoiding the undue moralization of conduct in war is an imperative for a normative framework that strives to actually give behavioral guidance to combatants, most of whom will inevitably be ignorant of the moral status of the individuals they encounter on the battlefield and will often be uncertain or mistaken about the justice of their own cause. We identify the requirement of military necessity, applied on the basis of what we refer to as the “St. Petersburg assumption”, as the main principle according to which a combatant should act, regardless of which side or in which battlefield encounter she finds herself. This pragmatic normative framework enjoys moral traction for three reasons: first, in the circumstances of war it protects human life to a certain extent; second, it makes no false claims about the moral justification of individual conduct in combat operations; and, third, it fulfills morally important functions of law. However, the criterion of military necessity interpreted on the basis of the St. Petersburg assumption does not directly replicate fundamental moral prescriptions about the preservation of individual rights.
International Rescue and Mediated Consequences (PDF)
Ned Dobos
It is generally assumed that, when judging the proportionality of a humanitarian intervention, the relevant costs that must be factored into the equation are not only those brought about directly and immediately, but also those brought about via the interceding agency of other parties; the mediated consequences. Here I want to challenge that assumption. First, I argue that rebels fighting off an oppressive regime cannot reasonably be held to a standard of proportionality under which mediated consequences count fully in the calculus. Given this, I ask whether we can justify holding international rescuers – using similar means in pursuit of similar ends – to a more stringent standard. If the answer is yes, then curiously it turns out that an intervention might fail to satisfy the principle of proportionality despite its expected costs and consequences being identical to those of an insurrection which is rightly judged to satisfy that principle. I argue, however, that every attempt to justify the asymmetry has shortcomings. If this is right, then the standard of proportionality to which we hold states or coalitions engaged in armed international rescue operations should be reviewed and, arguably, relaxed.
Two Cheers for Humanitarianism (PDF)
Tom Farer
Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism, Michael Barnett (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011), 312 pp., $29.95 cloth.
Humanitarianism Contested: Where Angels Fear to Tread, Michael Barnett and Thomas Weiss (New York: Routledge, 2011), 192 pp., $130 cloth, $29.95 paper.
A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, David Rieff (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 400 pp., $24.99 paper.
Famine Crimes: Politics & the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa, Alex de Waal (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997), 256 pp., $20.95 paper.
Over the last two decades a spate of books, led by the ones cited in this essay, have illuminated and debated the bristly questions confronting contemporary "humanitarianism." The definitional or, one might say, foundational question is whether the adjective "humanitarian" should be limited to only those independent agencies that are engaged (without reference to a political context) in the impartial delivery of emergency relief to all those in existential need-or, in the unique case of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), engaged in monitoring the application of the Geneva Conventions to armed conflict. An answer in the affirmative could be considered the "classic" position of the humanitarian, and one still championed by the ICRC. Today, however, many NGOs, such as CARE, OXFAM, and Catholic Relief Services, which certainly regard themselves as humanitarian agencies, engage in a broad range of rehabilitative and developmental activities and continue to deliver emergency relief, and they are prepared to do so under circumstances where their work has conspicuous political implications. The same is true of such UN agencies as UNICEF, UNHCR, and the World Food Programme, which are not infrequently involved in complex peace operations that have clear political goals as specified by the Security Council. Further, well-known humanitarian activists and writers, notably Bernard Kouchner and Samantha Power, also reject the ICRC's definitional canon. The unsettled boundaries of what properly constitutes humanitarianism brings a number of difficult questions to the surface, including:
• Should relief be provided even if it could prolong a conflict, or could indirectly assist a belligerent, or possibly identify the relief giver with a government's political ends? And should the nature of those ends influence relief efforts?• Should relief agencies also assist in addressing the causes of humanitarian emergencies by joining in efforts to resolve a conflict, foster economic development, rebuild state institutions, and strengthen the protection of human rights?• Should such agencies accept funds from governments where governments specify how the funds are to be used?• Where necessary, should they advocate armed intervention to protect their personnel as well as the recipients of their aid?• In terms of the way they organize and structure themselves, should nonprofit agencies dedicated to humanitarian relief follow private-sector models?• Can organizations dedicated to the effective provision of emergency relief pursue that end without creating a culture of dependence, without discouraging local initiative, and without violating the liberal "right" to participate in life-shaping decisions?• Finally, how does humanitarianism relate to human rights, the other leading expression of what I would call "the humanitarian impulse"?
Echoes of a Forgotten Past: Mid-Century Realism and the Legacy of International Law (PDF)
Oliver Jütersonke
The Realist Case for Global Reform, William E. Scheuerman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 200 pp., $69.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.
John H. Herz: Leben und Denken zwischen Idealismus und Realismus, Deutschland und Amerika, Jana Puglierin (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2011), 335 pp., €48 paper.
The Concept of the Political, Hans J. Morgenthau , edited by Hartmut Behr and Felix Rösch , translated by Maeva Vidal (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, [1933] 2012), 176 pp., $85 cloth, $35 paper. 1
Those studying the work of Hans J. Morgenthau, widely considered the "founding father" of the Realist School of International Relations, have long been baffled by his views on world government and the attainment of a world state-views that, it would appear, are strikingly incompatible with the author's realism. In a 1965 article in World Politics, James P. Speer II decided that it could only be "theoretical confusion" that explained why Morgenthau could on the one hand advocate a world state as ultimately necessary in his highly successful textbook, Politics Among Nations, while writing elsewhere that world government could not resolve the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States by peaceful means. According to Speer,
Morgenthau posits at the international level a super-Hobbesian predicament, in which the actors on the world scene are motivated by the lust for power, yet he proposes a gradualist Lockean solution whereby the international system will move, through a resurrected diplomacy, out of a precarious equilibrium of balance-of-power anarchy by a "revaluation of all values" into the "moral and political" bonds of world community, a process whose capstone will be the formal-legal institutions of world government.
This oscillation between Hobbes and Locke, Speer asserted, must be the result of Morgenthau's "commitment to the organismic mystique that comes out of German Romantic Nationalism," although he admitted in a footnote that his reflections on the intellectual sources of Morgenthau's theories were "mere speculation."
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (PDF)
Jack Snyder
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, Francis Fukuyama (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 608 pp., 35cloth,18 paper.
The Problem of Harm in World Politics: Theoretical Investigations (PDF)
Andrew Hurrell
The Problem of Harm in World Politics: Theoretical Investigations, Andrew Linklater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 320 pp., 102cloth,30.99 paper.
The International Human Rights Movement: A History (PDF)
Samuel Moyn
The International Human Rights Movement: A History, Aryeh Neier (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 379 pp., $35 cloth.
Humanity's Law (PDF)
Martti Koskenniemi
Humanity's Law, Ruti G. Teitel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 320 pp., $35 cloth.
Democratic Legitimacy: Impartiality, Reflexivity, Proximity (PDF)
Democratic Legitimacy: Impartiality, Reflexivity, Proximity, Pierre Rosanvallon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011), 240 pp., $35 cloth.
Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (PDF)
Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 320 pp., $29.50 cloth.