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31. Christian Just War Reasoning and Two Cases of Rebellion: Ireland 1916-1921 and Syria 2011-Present

Author:
Nigel Biggar
Publication Date:
02-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
The contemporary West is biased in favor of rebellion. This is attributable in the first place to the dominance of liberal political philosophy, according to which it is the power of the state that always poses the greatest threat to human well-being. But it is also because of consequent anti-imperialism, according to which any nationalist rebellion against imperial power is assumed to be its own justification. Autonomy, whether of the individual or of the nation, is reckoned to be the value that trumps all others. I surmise that it is because in liberal consciousness the word “rebel” connotes a morally heroic stance—because it means the opposite of “tyrant”—that Western media in recent years have preferred to refer to Iraqi opponents of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and Taliban opponents of the ISAF in Afghanistan not as “rebels,” but as “insurgents.”
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, Iraq, Taliban, Syria, and Ireland

32. Why We Need a Just Rebellion Theory

Author:
Valerie Morkevicius
Publication Date:
02-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
The Arab Spring has generated a variety of responses from the West. While broad political support was voiced for uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen, the responses to protests in Bahrain and Morocco were muted. The swift decision to intervene in Libya stands in marked contrast to the ongoing hand-wringing on Syria. While political realists might see these contradictions as evidence that geopolitical concerns determine foreign policy, from an ethical point of view these responses also reveal a fundamental tension in Western thinking about rebellion. On one hand, rebellion is viewed with a distrustful eye—as a disruptive, chaotic force that threatens to destroy the day-to-day order on which civilization is built. On the other, rebellion is perceived more optimistically—as a regenerative, creative force that can leave a better civilization in its wake. These two radically disparate ways of thinking about rebellion have deep philosophical and theological roots. The pessimistic view has historically dominated just war thought, as James Turner Johnson's contribution to this roundtable illustrates; whereas the perspective of Enlightenment liberalism offers a more optimistic judgment, as found, for example, in the works of Locke and Rousseau.
Political Geography:
Libya, Yemen, Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain, and Tunisia

33. Sovereign Wealth Funds and Global Justice

Author:
Chris Armstrong
Publication Date:
02-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
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.

34. On Rights to Land, Expulsions, and Corrective Justice

Author:
Margaret Moore
Publication Date:
02-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
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 1945and 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.
Political Geography:
America, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and AustralAsia

35. The Touch of Midas: Money, Markets, and Morality

Author:
Edward Skidelsky
Publication Date:
02-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Money has always inspired obsession, both in those who amass it and in those who think about it. “Man will never be able to know what money is any more than he will be able to know what God is,” wrote the French financier Marcel Labordère to his friend John Maynard Keynes. The analogy is apt. Money, like God, injects infinity into human desires. To love it is to embark on a journey without end. Three new books testify to money's enduring power to fascinate and horrify. The most scholarly of them, The Invention of Market Freedom by political theorist Eric MacGilvray, traces the emergence of the distinctively modern or “market” conception of freedom out of its “republican” predecessor. The general story is somewhat familiar, but MacGilvray complicates it by showing that market freedom did not vanquish its republican competitor in open combat but subverted it from within, like a parasite devouring its host.
Topic:
Economics and Markets
Political Geography:
New York

36. Special Responsibilities: Global Problems and American Power

Author:
Stephen M. Walt
Publication Date:
02-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Special Responsibilities: Global Problems and American Power, Mlada Bukovansky, Ian Clark, Robyn Eckersley, Richard Price, Christian Reus-Smit, and Nicholas Wheeler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 290 pp., $29.99 paper. Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright famously described the United States as the “indispensable nation,” entitled to lead because it “sees further than others do.” She was one of the many government officials who believed their country had “special responsibilities,” and was therefore different in some way from other states. Such claims are sometimes made to rally domestic support for some costly international action; at other times they are used to exempt a great power from norms or constraints that weaker states are expected to follow.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
United States, America, and Europe

37. A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change

Author:
Paul Wapner
Publication Date:
02-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Climate change is the most intractable environmental issue, and Stephen Gardiner has written extensively about it, especially from an ethical perspective. He recognizes that climate change is not merely a technical, economic, or political challenge but fundamentally a moral one. It comes about because people—especially the rich and powerful—are unwilling or unable to care about those on the receiving end of climate hardship. This insensitivity generates complacency, or at least confusion, about how to build institutions and shape widespread behavior in the service of climate protection. A Perfect Moral Storm is Gardiner's most extensive and detailed statement to date on this theme.
Topic:
International Relations, Climate Change, and Environment

38. Recovering International Relations: The Promise of Sustainable Critique

Author:
Richard Shapcott
Publication Date:
02-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
One of the virtues of International Relations (IR) as a discipline is that it periodically engages in bouts of reflection upon its methods and directions. Daniel Levine's book is a contribution to this self-reflective practice. Like P. T. Jackson's recent work, The Conduct of Enquiry, Levine's Recovering International Relations seeks to acknowledge the diversity and strengths of various approaches to the study of IR and to simultaneously build something constructive out of this pluralism— in other words, to be both critical of the status quo and yet not reject it altogether. Levine's goal is to “recover” IR's original vocation, or calling, and to reinvigorate it via the idea of “sustainable critique”—a project inspired by the work of Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School.
Topic:
International Relations

39. On Complicity and Compromise

Author:
Hugo Slim
Publication Date:
02-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Chiara Lepora, an Italian doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières, and Robert Goodin, an American philosopher based at the Australian National University in Canberra, have joined forces to produce an elegant and exceptional book. With humanitarian ethics as its starting point, On Complicity and Compromise elaborates a sophisticated and practical approach to complicity that will be profoundly useful to a much wider audience than humanitarians alone. The rigor and simplicity of this book will be of real value to anyone grappling with difficult ethical choices in politics, business, diplomacy, policing, or social services.
Topic:
Politics
Political Geography:
America, Australia, and Italy

40. The Contemporary Relevance of Buddha

Author:
Amartya Sen
Publication Date:
04-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
The great poet and novelist Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941 once remarked that he was extremely sad that he was not alive when Gautama Buddha was still around. Tagore very much wished he could have had conversations with Buddha. I share that sentiment, but, like Rabindranath, I am also immensely grateful that, even now, we can enjoy—and learn from—the ideas and arguments that Buddha gave us twenty-five hundred years ago. Our world may be very different from what Buddha faced in the sixth century BCE, but we can still benefit greatly from the reasoned approach to ethics, politics, and social relations that Gautama Buddha brought to the world of human understanding.