CIAO DATE: 05/2014
Volume: 28, Issue: 1
Spring 2014
Eliminating Extreme Inequality: A Sustainable Development Goal, 2015–2030 (PDF)
Michael W. Doyle, Joseph E. Stiglitz
If the future of human rights is dependent on the capacity of the state to fulfill them, then one must focus on how the private sector interfaces with public values—an interface that directly affects how billions of people survive both economically and with dignity. During the last few years reports about multinational corporations shielding phenomenal profits from meaningful taxation have troubled governments and individual taxpayers alike. But there has been little effort to associate such tax avoidance schemes with corporate abdication of responsibility for advancing critical societal goals. Instead, much of the ensuing debate has centered on how to tax corporate profits fairly and more efficiently. While the ideas being marketed in this area are enlightening, there has been less discussion about why corporate taxation is a worthy public goal or what corporations should do voluntarily. The linkage between corporate tax avoidance and “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) has not yet been clearly drawn, but the moment has arrived to bridge the gap. That task may necessitate changing, fundamentally, the ethical framework within which corporate officers, boards of directors, shareholders, tax advisers, and stakeholders in general operate. The higher ethical perspective demands that corporations rise above minimal compliance standards on taxation, whatever their merit, and requires us to define corporate responsibility as directly tied to the true wealth (in terms of wages, health, education, human rights, infrastructure, the environment, and the rule of law) of a society. Any corporate executive pronouncing that his or her company follows the letter of the law (particularly tax law) must not turn a blind eye to the larger issues affecting the livelihoods and dignity of ordinary people.
The Contemporary Relevance of Buddha (PDF)
Amartya Sen
I have often wondered why I have been so deeply moved and influenced by Buddha, right from the time I first encountered his thoughts—when my grandfather gave me a short book on Gautama. I must have been about eleven or twelve then, and I remember that I was completely bowled over. Buddha remains, in some basic sense, very contemporary, and it is that aspect of the heritage of Buddha that is the subject of this essay. When young Gautama left his princely home in the foothills of the Himalayas in search of enlightenment, he was moved specifically by the sight of mortality, morbidity, and disability, each of which agitated him greatly. He was also distressed by the ignorance he saw around him. It is easy to understand the sources of Gautama Buddha’s agony, particularly the deprivations and insecurities of human life. Anchored in the “here-and-now,” Buddha’s thinking proceeded also toward more transcendental reflections—toward a metaphysical understanding of the world. I shall not, however, go into that aspect of Buddha’s thoughts here, and will concentrate instead on his reasoned approach to worldly problems. Since Buddhism is often taken to be a very unworldly religion, what I am trying to present here is an account and analysis of “another Buddha”—one who is no less real than the person who has been revered (and sometimes deified) by the dominant schools of Buddhist religion for over two thousand years. Buddha’s ideas—and the person behind those ideas—have a remarkable approachability that is quite striking. Why does he seem so approachable? One reason it is easier to draw on Buddha’s ideas than those of many other religious leaders is that the story of his life makes it clear that he was concerned about problems that move all ordinary human beings: fear of mortality, the tragedy of old age and disability, the terrible impact of disease on human life. And we too see the dangers of ignorance and of badly organized societies, to which Buddha would give much thought as his own enlightenment proceeded. There is a basic humanity in the story of Buddha’s life that is easy to access and absorb in our own lives.
NSA Management Directive #424: Secrecy and Privacy in the Aftermath of Edward Snowden (PDF)
George R. Lucas, Jr.
Whatever else one might say concerning the legality, morality, and prudence of his actions, Edward Snowden, the former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, is right about the notion of publicity and informed consent, which together constitute the hallmark of democratic public policy. In order to be morally justifiable, any strategy or policy involving the body politic must be one to which it would voluntarily assent when fully informed about it. This, in essence, was Snowden’s argument for leaking, in June 2013, the documents that revealed the massive NSA surveillance program: So long as there’s broad support amongst a people, it can be argued there’s a level of legitimacy even to the most invasive and morally wrong program, as it was an informed and willing decision. . . . However, programs that are implemented in secret, out of public oversight, lack that legitimacy, and that’s a problem. It also represents a dangerous normalization of “governing in the dark,” where decisions with enormous public impact occur without any public input. What, however, is inherent in being fully informed when it comes to surveillance?
The International Rule of Law: Law and the Limit of Politics (PDF)
Ian Hurd
The international rule of law is often seen as a centerpiece of the modern international order. It is routinely reaffirmed by governments, international organizations, scholars, and activists, who credit it with reducing the recourse to war, preserving human rights, and constraining (albeit imperfectly) the pursuit of state self-interests. It is commonly seen as supplanting coercion and power politics with a framework of mutual interests that is cemented by state consent. In light of this apparent consensus, my goal here is to understand what the rule of law means for international affairs, both in practice and as a concept. In this essay I examine how it is used by states and others to shape world politics and from that practice derive a definition. Because it is rarely carefully defined and its alternatives are not explained, the international rule of law appears as a charmed concept, essentially without critics or doubters. I find that, rather than being a universal institution that expresses the shared interests and goals of states, the international rule of law provides political resources with which states and other actors legitimize and delegitimize contending policies. The atomistic nature of the interstate system means that the international version of the concept cannot be modeled on the domestic one, but also that it cannot be reduced simply to the obligation on states to comply with their legal commitments. In practice, the meaning of compliance is the very thing that states are arguing over in many international controversies.
Hobbes on the International Rule of Law (PDF)
David Dyzenhaus
Perhaps the most influential passage on the rule of law in international law comes from chapter 13 of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. In the course of describing the miserable condition of mankind in the state of nature, Hobbes remarks to readers who might be skeptical that such a state ever existed that they need only look to international relations—the relations between independent states—to observe one: But though there had never been any time, wherein particular men were in a condition of warre one against another; yet in all times, Kings, and Persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independency, are in continuall jealousies, and in the state and posture of Gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their Forts, Garrisons, and Guns upon the Frontiers of their Kingdomes; and continuall Spyes upon their neighbours; which is a posture of War. The passage is influential because realists take Hobbes not only to be describing international relations but also making a statement about what international relations should be—an arena in which individual states relentlessly pursue goals that they take to serve their particular interests. It has to be that way, on the view traditionally attributed to Hobbes, because the conditions that make the rule of law possible within a state—namely, an absolute sovereign with a monopoly on the power to make, enforce, and interpret the law—are so conspicuously lacking in the international arena.
International Law and the Mediation of Culture (PDF)
Christian Reus-Smit
When international relations scholars think about international law they either ignore culture or offer highly deterministic accounts of its role. For the majority of scholars, international law is a rational construction, an institutional solution to the problem of order in an anarchical system, a body of rules and practices that reflect the contending interests and capabilities of major states. Issues of culture barely rate a mention. For others, culture is the deep foundation of international law, the structuring “mentality” that gives law its form and content. International law, from this perspective, is a Western cultural artifact, globalized through centuries of imperialism and hegemony. These contrasting views lead to different expectations about the future of international law in today’s culturally diverse international order. For rationalists, law’s fate will be determined by the shifting configuration of interests that accompany new functional challenges and great power transitions. For the more culturally attuned, there are two possibilities. One is that functional utility will replace culture as law’s foundation. International law may well be a Western cultural artifact, but “rational buy-in” will sustain it in a multicultural world. The other, more pessimistic, expectation is that the rule of international law will be fundamentally undermined by cultural diversity, particularly as rising non-Western powers articulate and promote markedly different cultural norms and values.
Drones and the International Rule of Law (PDF)
Rosa Brooks
The international rule of law hinges on the existence of a shared lexicon accepted by states and other actors in the international system. With no independent judicial system capable of determining (and enforcing) the meaning of words and concepts, states must develop shared interpretations of the law and the concepts and terms it relies on, and be willing (mostly) to abide by those shared interpretations. When such shared interpretations exist, key aspects of the rule of law can be present even in the absence of an international judicial system; state behavior can be reasonably predictable, nonarbitrary, and transparent; and accountability can also be possible, albeit mainly through nonjudicial mechanisms. U.S. drone strikes represent a significant challenge to the international rule of law. This is not because recent U.S. drone strikes “violate” international law; ironically, they might be less destabilizing, from a rule-of-law perspective, if they could be easily categorized as blatant instances of rule-breaking. Rather, U.S. drone strikes challenge the international rule of law precisely because they defy straightforward legal categorization. In fact, drone strikes—or, more accurately, the post-9/11 legal theories underlying such strikes—constitute a serious, sustained, and visible assault on the generally accepted meaning of certain core legal concepts, including “self-defense,” “armed attack,” “imminence,” “necessity,” “proportionality,” “combatant,” “civilian,” “armed conflict,” and “hostilities.” This essay will proceed in four parts. First, it will briefly discuss the concept of the international rule of law. Second, it will offer a short factual background on U.S. drone strikes (to the extent that it is possible to provide factual background on a practice so shrouded in secrecy). Third, it will highlight some of the key ways in which post-9/11 U.S. legal theories relating to the use of force challenge previously accepted concepts and seek to redefine previously well-understood terms. Fourth, it will offer brief concluding thoughts on the future of the international rule of law in light of this challenge.
Kosovo to Kadi: Legality and Legitimacy in the Contemporary International Order (PDF)
Ruti Teitel
Whence does international law derive its normative force as law in a world that remains, in many respects, one where legitimate politics is practiced primarily at the national level? As with domestically focused legal theories, one standard answer is positivistic: the law’s authority is based on its origin in agreed procedures of consent. This is certainly plausible with respect to treaty obligations and commitments that derive from the United Nations Charter, but it leaves customary international law vulnerable to legitimacy critiques—of which there is no shortage among international law skeptics. Even with respect to conventional international norms, such as treaty provisions, there is often a sense that such consent is democratically thinner than the public consent to domestic law, particularly fundamental domestic law, constitutional norms, and derivative principles of legitimate governance. State consent in international law, in this view, is often a very imperfect proxy for democratic consent to international legal norms. While it is obvious to international lawyers why (as a matter of positive law doctrine) state consent should make international norms prevail over domestic norms to which there is arguably deeper democratic consent, persistent critics of international law have questioned whether this should be so as a matter of legitimacy. An alternative but also complementary (to a large extent) way of understanding the normative force of international legal rules is through the substantive values and interests that these norms protect or express. This is perhaps clearest in the case of world peace and human rights. The idea of human rights, for instance, has never been absent from modern international law (it is reflected in the significance of natural law concepts in Hugo Grotius and the derivation of cosmopolitan right from practical reason in Kant’s legal theory). But the substantive approach is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it gives international lawyers resources to deal with attacks on customary international law and soft law, but on the other it raises the possibility that positive international law norms could be ignored where the positive law is at odds with the substantive values that justify the compliance pull of international law more generally. On balance, it is fair to say that there has been a rise in substantive justification, with the case for international law embedded in progressive constitutionalist narratives or, more modestly, in a concept of “humanity law” that I have articulated in recent work. However, many international lawyers are uncomfortable with the consequences to this approach. The NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999 and the European Court of Justice ruling in the Kadi case are ideally suited to exploring these increasingly evident complexities concerning legality and legitimacy in international law.
Sovereign Wealth Funds and Global Justice (PDF)
Chris Armstrong
Dozens of countries have established sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) in the last decade or so, in the majority of cases employing those funds to manage the large revenues gained from selling resources such as oil and gas on a tide of rapidly rising commodity prices. Rather than using those revenues for day-to-day government expenditure, sovereign wealth funds ring-fence them for longer-term investments or to smooth expenditure over time in the light of impending pension crises. In building diverse portfolios on international stock and real estate markets, states also reduce their vulnerability to fluctuating exchange rates, volatile commodity prices, or the likely exhaustion of natural resource supplies in the decades to come. The existence and activities of such funds, however, have prompted a number of ethical discussions: how should SWFs be organized in order to ensure that their governance is at least minimally legitimate? Should fund managers avoid investing in ecologically-damaging or otherwise dubious industries overseas? When foreign SWFs provide much-needed sources of investment for countries such as the United States, should this raise concerns about national security and political independence? And though they have received far less attention to date, there are equally important questions about what these funds are for—about how the money in SWFs should eventually be distributed, and to whom. Some funds, as in the well-known Alaskan example, have been used to generate a (modest) basic income for all citizens. A few others are intended to ease shortfalls in pension entitlements. These cases, though, are rather exceptional. Most SWFs, rather than ameliorating inequalities or subsidizing the consumption of the poor, for example, are intended to finance unspecified future infrastructure projects, or, in some high-profile cases, to finance prestige projects for ruling families.
On Rights to Land, Expulsions, and Corrective Justice (PDF)
Margaret Moore
This article examines the nature of the wrongs that are inflicted on individuals and groups who have been expelled from the land that they previously occupied, and asks what they might consequently be owed as a matter of corrective justice. Such cases—in which individuals and groups are expelled, their property is expropriated, and their land is subsequently settled by other people—are not unusual. They include the expulsion of Germans from the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1947; the expulsion of (mainly) Greek Cypriots from the north of Cyprus following the Turkish invasion there in 1974; and the expulsion of Muslim Bosniaks from what is now called the Republic of Srpska, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, between 1991 and 1995. Historically, there are numerous other cases of “ethnic cleansing” and border redrawing. The injustice with which this article is concerned is also foundational to the current dominant societies in the Americas and Australasia. I argue that there are three sorts of potential wrongs involved in such expulsions: being deprived of the moral right of occupancy; being denied collective self-determination; and having one’s property rights violated. Although analytically distinct, all of these wrongs are likely to be perpetrated when people are expelled from their homelands. Although there is substantial literature on corrective justice dealing with such cases, most of that literature focuses on the expropriation of property only, and is therefore unlikely to grasp the full implications of the wrong done or to reveal the full extent of what might be owed to people as a matter of corrective justice. Most theorists writing in the corrective justice tradition distinguish among three different mechanisms for correcting historical injustice: restitution, or giving back whatever it is that has been unjustly taken; compensation, or giving something of a certain value but not the unjustly taken thing itself because restitution is impossible, or in addition to restitution to make good the loss the victim has suffered meanwhile; and apology, again either because restitution is not possible or because there is an independent reason to acknowledge the wrong. Typically, these mechanisms are discussed in terms of the violation of property rights. I do not deny that property rights may be relevant in the analysis of such cases, but I suggest that a fuller analysis of the appropriate remedy requires us to identify which particular rights are violated and to analyze the interaction between that particular right and the interest it is designed to protect, on one hand, and between the particular right and the appropriate corrective justice mechanism, on the other.
Toni Erskine
Coalition of the willing” is a phrase that we hear invoked with frequency—and often urgency—in world politics. Significantly, it is generally accompanied by claims to moral responsibility. (Such appeals recently bolstered calls to establish a coalition of the willing to intervene in Syria.) Yet the label commonly used to connote a temporary, purpose-driven, self-selected collection of states (and sometimes nonstate and intergovernmental actors) sits uneasily alongside these assertions of moral responsibility. This unease might be attributed to its association with a particular case. For some, the label was tainted when the United States led a “coalition of the willing” into Iraq in ostensible response to the threat of weapons of mass destruction: the actual willingness of all of those states initially announced as members is as contested as the legitimacy of the 2003 offensive, the ensuing protracted conflict, and the subsequent occupation. Nevertheless, the idea—and ideal—of a coalition of the willing has persisted beyond the infamy of that one iteration. The problem is, rather, that it is unclear how to speak coherently about assigning moral responsibilities—and apportioning blame—in relation to such ad hoc associations. Can coalitions of the willing be considered bearers of duties? Alternatively, should our calls to action—and our cries of condemnation in the wake of action that is stalled, ineffective, or deemed unjust—be directed toward their constituents? Or should our attention be redirected altogether, toward more formal, enduring and, arguably, legitimate organizations? There has been widespread support for the idea that the so-called international community has a remedial moral responsibility to protect vulnerable populations from grave human right violations when their own governments fail to do so, and that this protection may, when necessary, include military intervention. But where exactly is this responsibility located? In other words, which body, or bodies, can be expected to discharge a duty to safeguard those who lack the protection of—or, indeed, come under threat from—their own government? The question is particularly pressing when the United Nations is unwilling or unable to act and there is no one state to fill the breach—no “agent of last resort,” to invoke Michael Walzer’s phrase (along with all of the controversy and potential risks that he acknowledges reliance on such a protector entails). This article examines coalitions of the willing as one (likely provocative) answer to this question, and explores how the informal nature of such associations should inform the judgments of moral responsibility that we make in relation to them.
The Politics and Ethics of Identity: In Search of Ourselves by Richard Ned Lebow
Alan Wolfe
The Politics and Ethics of Identity: In Search of Ourselves, Richard Ned Lebow (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 431 pp., $103 cloth, $34.99 paper. The Politics and Ethics of Identity dazzles the reader with its ambition and erudition. Its theme is grand: nearly all the claims made by social theorists emphasizing the importance of identity are wrong because human beings and the associations they create, including nation-states, can do without it. Its breadth is startling, and includes brilliant textual analyses of, among other things, Greek epic poetry, the operas of Mozart, Germany’s search for a classical past, the contemporary conservative Christian book series Left Behind, and science fiction. If all this is not enough, it also contains important theoretical discussions of the nature of narrative and the question of whether modernity implies a sharp break with the past.
Political Self-Sacrifice: Agency, Body and Emotion in International Relations by K. M. Fierke
Andrew A.G. Ross
Political Self-Sacrifice: Agency, Body and Emotion in International Relations, K. M. Fierke (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 281 pp., $95 cloth. What could we learn from examining suicide bombing, self-immolation, or hunger strikes not through the lens of state security but from the position of those individuals who use such acts to achieve normative change? In addressing this question, Political Self-Sacrifice brings what seem like senseless acts of desperation into focus as strategically intelligible and culturally meaningful techniques of resistance. By disentangling the logic of “political self-sacrifice,” K. M. Fierke offers an important and timely account of the political strategies, cultural meanings, and normative aspirations associated with those participants in international affairs who, as she puts it, “play with a weak hand” (p. 8).
Modern Pluralism: Anglo-American Debates Since 1880 edited by Mark Bevir
George Crowder
Modern Pluralism: Anglo-American Debates Since 1880, Mark Bevir, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 255 pp., $85 cloth. Talk of “pluralism” has become ubiquitous in political theory, but it is often vague. In this edited collection Mark Bevir aims to improve our understanding of this tricky area by clarifying different senses and theories of pluralism and tracking the development of these during the twentieth century. In particular, Bevir wants to acquaint readers with significant versions of pluralism that have been submerged by other ideas, yet may still provide useful resources for us now. The basic idea of bringing together various dimensions, periods, and traditions of pluralism is immediately intriguing. The obvious critical question is, do they really have anything in common, or are there sufficient local overlaps to justify their organization under the unitary category of “pluralism”? This in itself seems to be a problem of plurality. On the whole, Bevir meets this challenge successfully.