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CIAO DATE: 06/06
May 2006
Critical Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility
Fear, interest and honour: outlines of a theory of International Relations RICHARD NED LEBOW
This article justifies the need for a new paradigm of politics based on the spirit. Fifth-century Greeks considered it one of three psychic drives, the other two being appetite and reason. The spirit reflects the universal human need for self-esteem, which is achieved by emulating the skills, character and accomplishments of people considered praiseworthy by our society. According to Socrates, the spirit loves honour and victory. It responds with anger to any impediment to self-assertion in private or civic life. It desires to avenge all slights of honour or standing to ourselves and our friends. It demands immediate action, which can result in ill-considered behaviour, but can be advantageous in circumstances where rapid responses are necessary. Even a cursory examination of international relations in this modern period indicates the continuing importance of the spirit, and the need to conceptualize it in a manner that helps us to understand this important but hitherto ignored dimension of politics at every level of social aggregation.
International political theory and the question of justice TERRY NARDIN
The aim of the international justice theorist is to find coherence among ideas about justice at the international or global level. Linking justice to coercion and law can bridge the gap between just war theory and theories of international distributive justice. The idea of humanitarian intervention illustrates how the argument might go. Underlying that idea is the idea of a duty to protect. That duty is often thought to be an imperfect and therefore unenforceable duty based on a principle of beneficence. But we can also think of it as a perfect, enforceable duty to resist the violent, where that duty rests directly on the principle of respect, unmediated by beneficence. Respect also implies action to prevent non-violent harms. To do nothing while people are dying of starvation or disease is to fail to respect them as human beings by making their wellbeing a matter of indifference. We can therefore justly be compelled to prevent such harms by being taxed to support efforts to prevent them. A theory of justice that made the duty to protect central would ground the theory of international distributive justice in the justice—coercion link that underlies just war theory.
International law, International Relations theory and post-atrocity justice: towards a genuine dialogue CHANDRA LEKHA SRIRAM
For much of the twentieth century, a chasm divided the disciplines of international relations and international law, with relatively little communication and even less mutual comprehension. In particular, this period saw the increasing exclusion of international law from the study of international relations, with key texts removed from reading lists. Perhaps the most obvious and significant reason for this exclusion was the dominance of the realist, and later, neorealist schools of thought in international relations. This phenomenon was certainly most notable in the United States, where the dominance of realism was most extensive. However, in recent decades, a rapprochement between the two disciplines has been attempted, led in the first instance largely by international lawyers. Despite significant efforts at bridging the gap, however, this article argues that a genuine dialogue has yet to emerge. Using insights from debates in and across each discipline about appropriate responses to mass atrocities, this article offers suggestions for creating such a dialogue.
The evolution of international political economy AMANDA DICKINS
The 'invisible college' of international political economy (IPE) is a house divided. The field is split between the rationalist species that dominates in the US and a diverse genus of critical scholars. Recent developments in IPE suggest, however, that there is scope to rebuild the invisible college. An increasing awareness of normative questions should make rationalist scholars more receptive to critical work, while critical scholars are discovering an independent identity as they reinvent themselves in the tradition of classical political economy. There is much to gain from a renewed exchange between rationalist and critical scholars, particularly in the context of empirical work, as demonstrated by the vivid politics of the global bioeconomy.
Beware of false prophets: biology, human nature and the future of International Relations theory DUNCAN BELL
The disciplinary history of International Relations (IR) has been marked by confrontation between those who believe that the study of politics can and should be modelled on the natural sciences, a position defended most forcibly in the United States, and those who have dissented, viewing this ambition as methodologically unjustified and ethically undesirable. But the scientific template against which to judge such claims is constantly shifting. In this article it is suggested that mainstream IR theorists are likely to turn increasingly to the biological sciences for inspiration and intellectual legitimacy. Some of the possibilities and problems involved in this move are explored, focusing in particular on the prominent role played by evolutionary psychology in the social sciences. A variety of reasons are offered, political and theoretical, as to why IR scholars should be extremely wary of looking to the biological sciences to provide universalistic accounts of human behavioural patterns.
Normative theory and Europe LYNN DOBSON
European integration has fascinated students of international relations and of history since the 1950s. Over the past 15 years or so it has begun to attract attention from political philosophers too. As a result, the nature of the theorizing has altered. Accordingly, this article presents some remarks on the transition from explanatory theory to normative political theory in relation to the EU, and on the context and nature of recent theoretical work. A topic of wide concern is whether and how the EU might be justified, and this is discussed in the light of an approach to public justification associated with the philosopher John Rawls. Some difficulties in applying this approach to international institutions are noted.
In praise of folly: international administration and the corruption of humanity WILLIAM BAIN
Advocates of international administration tend to embrace conduct and utterance that proposes to vindicate fundamental human rights and freedoms by suspending an important part of its content: the principle that human beings should not be subject to coercion except where they have given their consent. This article begins by arguing that the character of this dilemma is obscured by a vocabulary of technique that divests the category 'international administration' of its normative coherence. In fact, international administration discloses two distinct modes of association—contract and trust—which presuppose different values, different obligations, and different expectations. The article proceeds in arguing that a trust instituted among equals is susceptible to objection in so far as trustee and beneficiary are necessarily joined in a coercive relationship that rules out the possibility of consent. The article concludes by arguing that recent attempts at reconciling this sort of relation with the demands of human rights entails a kind of corruption that is intelligible in making ordinary language correspond with the ideal, so that what was once described as the denial of human dignity—subjection to alien rule—is now described as the promotion and protection of fundamental human rights.
Apocalypse now? Continuities or disjunctions in world politics after 9/11. KENNEDY-PIPE, CAROLINE & RENGGER, NICHOLAS
An international civilization? Empire, internationalism and the crisis of the mid-twentieth century MARK MAZOWER*
This article explores the notion of an international civilization in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century thinking on international relations and the state system. This idea was fundamental to Victorian thinking about relations between Europe and the rest of the world, and was particularly important in reconciling the universal claims of liberal thought with the spread of European imperial control in Africa and Asia. Between the First and Second World Wars, however, the collapse of liberalism and the rise of ideological conflict within Europe led to the gradual retreat from eurocentric claims to civilizational predominance. The emergence of a genuinely global international order after 1945 through the United Nations occurred simultaneously with the collapse of the idea of an international civilization.
Britain, Switzerland and the Second World War. MACSHANE, DENIS
Books reviewed in this article:
Human rights and ethics
International law and organization
Foreign policy
Politics, democracy and social affairs
History
Europe
Middle East and North Africa
Asia and Pacific
North America
Latin America and Caribbean