CIAO DATE: 02/07

Ethics & International Affairs
Annual Journal of the
Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs

Summer 2006, Vol 20, No. 2

 

Articles

• Whither the Responsibility to Protect? Humanitarian Intervention and the 2005 World Summit by Alex J. Bellamy

  At the 2005 World Summit, the world’s leaders committed themselves to the “responsibility to protect”, recognizing both that all states have a responsibility to protect their citizens from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and that the UN should help states to discharge this responsibility using either peaceful means or enforcement action. This declaration ostensibly marks an important milestone in the relationship between sovereignty and human rights but its critics argue that it will make little difference in practice to the world’s most threatened people.

  The purpose of this article is to ask how consensus was reached on the responsibility to protect, given continuing hostility to humanitarian intervention expressed by many (if not most) of the world’s states and whether the consensus will contribute to avoiding future Kosovos (cases where the Security Council is deadlocked in the face of a humanitarian crises) and future Rwandas (cases where states lack the political will to intervene). It suggests that four key factors contributed to the consensus: pressure from proponents of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, its adoption by Kofi Annan and the UN’s High Level Panel, an emerging consensus in the African Union, and the American position. Whilst these four factors contributed to consensus, each altered the meaning of the responsibility to protect in important ways, creating a doctrine that many states can sign up to but that does little to prevent future Kosovos and Rwandas and may actually inhibit attempts to build a consensus around intervention in future cases.

• The Gendered Dimensions of Conflict’s Aftermath: A Victim-Centered Approach to Compensation by Sara L. Zeigler, Gregory G. Gunderson

  Although international security studies tend to focus on the nature of armed conflict and how nations fare in the face of such conflicts, our attention has been drawn to the challenge of managing the peace. Specifically, given the enormity of the damage caused by state-sponsored violence, both in terms of property and in terms of human damage, how can the people of a nation that has served as a battleground be assisted in their recovery from the devastation caused by conflict? Ongoing trauma from armed conflict has peculiarly gendered dimensions and requires solutions that are attentive to those dimensions.

  Here, we focus on remedies that shift from perpetrator-centered tribunals to victim-centered compensation commissions. Using the United Nations Compensation Commission established to provide restitution to Kuwaiti citizens following the Iraqi invasion as an example, we argue that the restitution model is a more humane and ethical option for managing the aftermath of conflict than war crimes tribunals, which employ a retributive philosophy. Using the limited evidence available on compensation and rebuilding, we make concrete recommendations for an approach to post-conflict adjudication that makes the well-being of victims its top priority.

• Western Policies on Child Labor Abroad by Roland Pierik, Mijke S. Houwerzijl

  Child labor evokes deep emotions and is cause for growing international concern. Most recent global estimates show that 186 million children are engaged in full time economic activity. This paper discusses the possibilities and pitfalls of Western policies that seek to curb child labor abroad. Since such policies aim to combat practices in other societies, policy-makers should be aware of the many relevant differences between developing and developed countries. We discuss three issues that are central to this debate: different conceptions of childhood and the dominance of the Western conception in these debates; the distinction between child work and child labor; and socioeconomic causes of child labor. We then evaluate the implications of these investigations for direct and indirect policy options against child labor abroad.

Roundtable: "A Threat to One Is a Threat to All": On Nonstate Threats and Collective Security

• Decisiveness and Accountability as Part of a Principled Response to Nonstate Threats by Robert O. Keohane

  The central institutions of the United Nations have substantially lost moral authority since the Millennium Summit of 2000. The inability to act on issues involving the use of force, the failure at the 2005 World Summit to agree on a definition of terrorism, the Oil-for-Food scandal, and the perceived cronyism of so many delegations have undermined the moral authority of the General Assembly and the Security Council. Principled responses to international problems are always desirable for ethical reasons. At a time when the legitimacy of international institutions is challenged, they become important also for political reasons. If an international organization loses legitimacy, its effectiveness suffers. Without legitimacy, the best the United Nations could do with respect to threats by nonstate actors, the topic of this roundtable, would be to serve as a channel for concerted state action.

• Bio-Security, Nonstate Actors, and the Need for Global Cooperation by Bruce Jones

  Today, there is no greater threat posed by nonstate actors than that of bioterrorism.

• Nonstate Threats and the Principled Reform of the UN by Nirupam Sen

  When considering the threats to collective security in the twenty-first century outlined by the report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, two issues stand out. First, in terms of general nonstate threats, I regard poverty as the most significant. Poverty, like war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, is as old as the recorded history of man. Poverty translates into instability and violence at the heart of the international system. Terrorists are seldom poor: they are wretched, but not the wretched of the earth. They do take advantage of poverty, however. Globalization and technology have paradoxically reinforced the threats of poverty and terrorism, but also the means for overcoming these…

• The Crisis of Global Trust and the Failure of the 2005 World Summit by Nancy Soderberg

  Certainly, most Americans would say the most significant threat the world faces today is terrorism. As an American, that is the issue of most concern to me. For citizens of developing countries who live in conflict and abject poverty, however, nonproliferation and terrorism are not such important concerns; they care more about peace, and about addressing poverty, HIV/AIDS, and the burden of sovereign debt. And while they are different threats, those faced by the developing world are global too. Whether you are a U.S. citizen worried about being attacked by terrorists armed with nuclear weapons, or a villager in the Congo worried about getting AIDS and about how to provide a better life for your children, the solutions all require other nations’ engagement…

• International Governance and the Fight against Terrorism by Steven P. Lee

  The present concerns about threats to international security from nonstate actors may lead to some significant strengthening of global governance. To support this claim, I will first discuss the nature of contemporary nonstate security threats and then consider the appropriate and likely responses by states to these threats. Nonstate threats are those that have their direct source outside of the actions of states. Security threats have causes, and the point of referring to a threat as a nonstate threat is to claim that its cause lies with nonstate actors. While security threats may originate from either state or nonstate actors, however, in almost all cases they originate from a combination of the two. Both states and nonstate groups and individuals contribute something to them. When threats originate from both sources, one or the other source will predominate. Thus, we may characterize a nonstate threat as a threat in which nonstate actors (groups or individuals) are the main causal agency…

Review Essay

• Is Globalization Working? by David Singh Grewal (PDF, 15 pages, 180 KB)

  The economic globalization of the 1990s did not go uncontested, either politically or intellectually. Public protests against the WTO at the Seattle Ministerial Conference in 1999, and later in Genoa, Cancun, and elsewhere, were accompanied by critical examinations of globalization by academics and activists alike. Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and Its Discontents and Dani Rodrik’s Has Globalization Gone Too Far? joined protest tracts like Naomi Klein’s No Logo to highlight the problems and shortcomings of neoliberal globalization. It was inevitable that these criticisms would attract counterfire from its defenders and boosters. Two of the most creditable responses in the spate of pro-globalization literature that followed are Why Globalization Works, by the financial journalist Martin Wolf, and In Defense of Globalization, by the economist Jagdish Bhagwati. This article is a review of these two books.

Book Reviews

• Violence and Democracy - by John Keane (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
  Tanni Mukhopadhyay (reviewer)

  John Keane’s book is an important intervention in the debate on the persistent proliferation of violence and its role in political life, especially in democracies. Keane urges the reader to think cautiously about conceptualizing violence: to pause before accepting the traditional bifurcation of the topic along the Hobbesian view of the pre-political ‘‘state of nature” on the one hand and the view of society as consisting of ‘‘symbiotic, equitable relations among diverse partners held together by cooperation, friendliness and love’’ on the other. He argues for conceptualizing violence more ‘‘soberly, with less normative flourish’’—and with that, there can be little ethical argument.

• Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial - By Rebecca Wittmann (Harvard University Press, 2005)
  Jeffrey K. Olick, reviewer

  What is the proper role for courts of law in confronting mass crimes? On the one hand, a justice system impotent to confront genocide and historical atrocities is hardly worth the name. On the other hand, the ‘‘rule of law’’ is valuable precisely because it restricts our desire for vengeance, even when it is well founded; democratic law can hold individuals accountable only for their acts, not for the system of which their acts are a part. There has been a long discourse on these issues over the years, and there have been legitimate arguments on both sides. Nevertheless, the exercise is never purely theoretical, and it is important to take into account who is making the argument, in what context, and for what reasons. Rebecca Wittmann’s monograph, Beyond Justice, is a detailed analysis of one of the most complex and consequential such legal confrontations with the perpetrators of genocide…

• Democracy as Human Rights: Freedom and Equality in the Age of Globalization - by Michael Goodhart (Routledge, 2005)
  Helene Gandois (reviewer)

  Michael Goodhart’s book is not advocating that democracy is a human right that should be protected and promoted as such. The plural in the title introduces a small but significant difference. Starting from the challenges that democracy faces within the context of globalization, the author reconceptualizes democracy as human rights, which he describes thus: ‘‘Democracy as human rights defines a political commitment to universal emancipation through securing the equal enjoyment of fundamental human rights for everyone”…

• The Debt Threat: How Debt Is Destroying the Developing World - By Noreena Hertz
  
  Lydia Tomitova (reviewer)

  Last year’s G-8 meeting in Gleneagles marked a major political commitment to cancel the debts that nineteen poor, heavily indebted countries owe to the IMF, the World Bank, and the African Development Bank.