Ethics & International Affairs articles from April 2003

Ethics & International Affairs archives from April 2003

Editor's note.(Editorial)
April 1, 2003... The completion of this journal takes place amid high alerts for terrorist activity and heated rhetoric in the UN Security Council. Seventeen months after September 11, 2001, the tragic events of that day continue to rattle the foundations of...

Evaluating the preemptive use of force.(Editorial)
April 1, 2003... In soliciting these articles, the editors of Ethics & International Affairs asked authors to respond to several questions. First, preemptive and preventive uses of force are often justified by claiming either that there is substantial risk of a...

Self-defense in an imperfect world.
April 1, 2003... In his address at West Point on June 1, 2002, President George W. Bush appeared to be signaling America's willingness to regard the mere possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by potential enemies as grounds for an anticipatory war....

Letting the exception prove the rule.(self-defense, weapons of mass destruction, Iraq)
April 1, 2003... It is unlikely that George W. Bush feels constrained by international law when deciding whether to use military force abroad. Nevertheless, many of the United States allies are reluctant to cooperate with and participate in military actions...

Striking first: a history of thankfully lost opportunities.
April 1, 2003... Although much of this roundtable focuses on the legal status of preemptive war, international law has rarely, if ever, constrained governments from initiating hostilities. It may impel decisions to go to war, if the motive is to enforce legal...

Just war, not prevention.
April 1, 2003... The debate over going to war in Iraq has in many quarters become a debate about the ethical implications of preemption and prevention rather than about the war itself. But neither prevention nor preemption can have any moral standing in the...

The slippery slope to preventive war.
April 1, 2003... The Bush administration's arguments in favor of a preemptive doctrine rest on the view that warfare has been transformed. As Colin Powell argues, "It's a different world... it's a new kind of threat." (1) And in several important respects, war...

Beyond coalitions of the willing: assessing U.S. multilateralism.
April 1, 2003... Since the end of the Cold War, both the wisdom and the appropriateness of multilateral action have been subjects of fierce disagreement within the U.S. foreign policy community. In practice, the United States has oscillated between going it...

Assistance with fewer strings attached.(Achieving Global Economic Justice)
April 1, 2003... Since the late 1980s, it has been standard practice for bilateral donors and international organizations to tie financial assistance to the undertaking of political and economic reforms by recipient states. This practice is known as...

Holding intergovernmental institutions to account.(Achieving Global Economic Justice)
April 1, 2003... Concerns about order and justice in the globalizing world economy have often been addressed to international organizations. Protesters gather in large numbers around meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in order...

Developing just monetary arrangements.(Achieving Global Economic Justice)
April 1, 2003... The existence of money and credit is an integral and probably unavoidable feature of complex, modern societies. The question of how money and credit are supplied, how much, to whom, and when has significant implications for the nature,...

Who should get in? The ethics of immigration admissions.
April 1, 2003... How should the immigration policies of liberal democratic states be constrained, even when one assumes a broad sovereign right to control immigration? One might want to challenge the claim that states are generally entitled to control...

Israel's policy of targeted killing.
April 1, 2003... Since the eruption of the second intifada in September 2000, Israel has openly pursued a policy of targeted killing. The Israelis have identified, located, and then killed alleged Palestinian terrorists with helicopter gunships, fighter...

By any name illegal and immoral.(Response to "Israel's Policy of Targeted Killing")(article by Steven R. David in this issue, p. 111)
April 1, 2003... Israel faces appalling attacks against its civilians. Since the beginning of the current intifada in September 2000 and until December 31, 2002, Palestinians have killed 443 Israeli civilians, among them eighty-three minors. Many more have been...

If not combatants, certainly not civilians.(Reply to Yael Stein)(article in this issue, p. 127, on Israel's policy of targeted killing)
April 1, 2003... Yael Stein presents an impassioned argument against Israel's policy of targeted killing. For Stein, targeted killing is nothing less than assassination and is illegal, immoral, ineffective, and indefensible. She calls for its immediate...

Redefining sovereignty and intervention.(The Responsibility to Protect)(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... The Responsibility to Protect, International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, 2 vols. (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001), 110 pp. (vol. 1), 426 pp. (vol. 2), free; available at www.idrc.ca. In his...

Fairness, responsibility, and climate change.(Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming; American Heat: Ethical Problems with the United States' Response to Global Warming; Ethics, Equity and International Negotiations on Climate Change)(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming, Tom Athanasiou and Paul Baer (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 173 pp., $9.95 paper. American Heat: Ethical Problems with the United States' Response to Global Warming, Donald A. Brown...

Preserving the imbalance of power.(The National Security Strategy of the United States of America)(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America" (Washington, D.C.: White House, 2002), 35 pp., free; available at www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf. In a conversation last summer with two friends--one an American...

Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World.(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Akira Iriye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 255 pp., $29.95 cloth. Henry Kissinger used to complain about how difficult it was to deal with "Europe" in times of crisis because there was no one to call. Imagine his...

Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate & Making Sweatshops: The Globalization of the U.S. Apparel Industry.(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, Naomi Klein (New York: Picador USA, 2002), 304 pp., $13 paper. Making Sweatshops: The Globalization of the U.S. Apparel Industry, Ellen Israel Rosen...

A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis.(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... David Rieff (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 384 pp., $26 cloth. The humanitarian endeavor, David Rieff reminds us, is an approach to human suffering that upholds the status quo: it provides relief, not rescue. Humanitarian assistance...

The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in Trials of the Holocaust.(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Lawrence P. Douglas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 336 pp., $19.95 cloth. In this superb book Douglas contends, against Hannah Arendt, Ian Buruma, Michael Marrus, and others, that Holocaust trials can serve successfully as...

State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples.(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Heather Rae (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 372 pp., $65 cloth, $24 paper. This is an extremely interesting and erudite book, which in some ways serves as the culmination of the growing body of scholarly literature in the...

Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide.(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Alexander Laban Hinton, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 419 pp., $60 cloth, $24.95 paper. What does anthropology have to teach us about genocide? This is the framing question of Annihilating Difference, a collection of...

Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique.(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Makau Mutua (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 252 pp., $49.95 cloth. This book is a synthesis of Makau Mutua's long-standing critiques of the "universal" human rights corpus, or system, that have appeared in several...

Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention.(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Neta C. Crawford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 466 pp., $85 cloth, $30 paper. In Argument and Change in World Politics, Crawford performs a signal service to scholarship on ethics and international affairs. Echoing the...

First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power.(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Warren Zimmermann (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002), 576 pp., $30 cloth. Is peace a product of power or of accommodation? When does the misery of one nation's people become the concern of another nation? By what right does one...

Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations.(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Daniel Philpott (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 352 pp., $65 cloth, $21.95 paper. Acknowledging that recent developments in international relations, such as UN-sanctioned interventions and the merging of states' authority in...

Republic.com & The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World.(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Republic.com, Cass R. Sunstein (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 240 pp., $29.95 cloth, $12.95 paper, $9.95 e-book. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, Lawrence Lessig (New York: Random House,...

Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil.(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Alain Badiou, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2001), 166 pp., $27 cloth, $16 paper. By his own admission, Alain Badiou's essay on ethics is hot-tempered. Badiou, who is one of France's most noted philosophers and a professor at...