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91. The Missing Ethics of Mining

Author:
Shefa Siegel
Publication Date:
02-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
In the middle of the 1980s the pastoralists of Essakane, Burkina Faso, were dying. Drought gripped the drylands of West Africa, crippling peoples' semi-nomadic livelihoods of millet farming and goat herding. When rain finally returned after three years, the earth had hardened like concrete and water skimmed across the floodplain, barely penetrating the surface. Without arable land the people faced famine-until they discovered gold. Instead of a disaster area, Essakane transformed into a commercial oasis: a mining town of 10000miners and traders where gold is processed and exchanged for food, cloth, spices, and animals.
Political Geography:
West Africa

92. Editor's Note

Publication Date:
02-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
On January 5, 1914, Andrew Carnegie published his New Year Greeting in The Independent magazine. His message was as simple as it was optimistic. This was to be the year to end war forever.

93. Introduction: Thinking Ethically about the Use of Force

Author:
Cian O'Driscoll
Publication Date:
02-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
The articles gathered in this special section are the products of two years of discussion among the contributing authors, but also the result of an extended conversation between the authors and the wider community of scholars working on matters pertaining to the ethics of war. In June 2 on, Iwrote to the authors in question, inviting them to participate in a panel discussion on the theme of what I then called "The Just War Tradition and its Critics." It was quickly agreed that we would gather at the following year's International Studies Association (ISA) convention to reflect upon what we, as scholars of the just war tradition, have to learn from its critics. Our aim was to broker a meaningful con¬versation between (to borrow Professor James Turner Johnson's phrase) "the friends and enemies of the just war tradition." This, we hoped, would supplant the dialogue of the deaf that had hitherto defined relations between these two camps.

94. Contemporary Just War Thinking: Which Is Worse, to Have Friends or Critics?

Author:
James Turner Johnson
Publication Date:
02-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
The increasingly widespread and energetic engagement with the idea of just war over the last fifty years of thinking on morality and armed conflict-especially in English-speaking countries-presents a striking con¬trast to the previous several centuries, going back to the early 1600s, in which thinkers addressing moral issues related to war did so without reference to the just war idea.

95. Divisions within the Ranks? The Just War Tradition and the Use and Abuse of History

Author:
Cian O'Driscoll
Publication Date:
02-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
lato wrote in the Republic that quarrels between fellow countrymen are wont to be more virulent and nasty than those between external enemies. Sigmund Freud (and latterly Michael Ignatieff and Toni Erskine) have similarly cautioned of the malice and excess that can attend conflicts that are fuelled not by antithetical oppositions, but by the "narcissism of minor difference." Bearing these warnings in mind, scholars of the ethics of war would be well advised to consider the implications of James Turner Johnson's acute observation in his contribution to this special section of Ethics International Affairs that their field of study is currently beset not so much by external opposition as by divisions within the ranks. The principal antagonism within the field, at least as I understand it, is the rift that has emerged between what I shall call historical and analytical approaches to the subject. Laying my cards on the table, the work that I have done in the past connects more clearly with the former than the latter. However, it has struck me, as it must have struck others, that the historical approach has in recent years come to assume a rather scuffed and unfashionable, even outré, appearance. It has been the subject of numerous curt dismissals, but has also, more interestingly, been tarnished by a few powerful critiques. This article will elucidate four of the most hard-hitting charges levied at the historical approach, and evaluate its continuing utility in light of them. The question then is: Have the critics of this approach landed it a knock-out blow, or can the historical approach withstand the bricks and bats that have been hurled its way?

96. Just War Thinking as a Social Practice

Author:
John Kelsay
Publication Date:
02-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
The abstract for the International Studies Association panel that gave rise to this special section of Ethics International Affairs referred to the "triumph" of just war theory. However, I think we ought rather to speak of just war discourse as occupying a particular niche. This is especially so with respect to discussions about policy: when and where governments should make use of military force, what type, and so on. In that context, appeals to the criteria of jus ad bellum and jus in bello complement (or sometimes compete with) thinking that draws on international law, various strategic doctrines (for example, counterinsurgency warfare, or COIN), notions of reciprocity between states, and a host of other considerations. The notion of "triumph" claims too much. At the same time, for advocates of the just war framework, the kind of recognition indicated by presidential and other official mentions of the idea is worthy of note. Some of these are due to constituency politics-that is, to the idea that "institutional" advocates of just war (say, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops) may influence blocs of voters. Other invocations are better interpreted as a recognition that the vocabulary of just war can serve (along with other ways of speaking) in the attempt to craft wise policy.
Political Geography:
United States

97. From Jus ad Bellum to Jus ad Vim: Recalibrating Our Understanding of the Moral Use of Force

Author:
Daniel Brunstetter and Megan Braun
Publication Date:
02-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
In the preface of the 2006 edition of Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer makes an important distinction between, on the one hand, "measures short of war," such as imposing no-fly zones, pinpoint air/missile strikes, and CIA operations, and on the other, "actual warfare," typified by a ground invasion or a large-scale bombing campaign. Even if the former are, technically speaking, acts of war according to international law, he proffers that "it is common sense to recognize that they are very different from war." While they all involve "the use of force," Walzer distinguishes between the level of force used: the former, being more limited in scope, lack the "unpredictable and often catastrophic consequences" of a "full-scale attack." Walzer calls the ethical framework governing these measures jus ad vim (the just use of force), and he applies it to state-sponsored uses of force against both state and nonstate actors outside a state's territory that fall short of the quantum and duration associated with traditional warfare. Compared to acts of war, jus ad vim actions present diminished risk to one's own troops, have a destructive outcome that is more predictable and smaller in scale, severely curtail the risk of civilian casualties, and entail a lower economic and military burden. These factors make jus ad vim actions nominally easier for statesmen to justify compared to conventional warfare, though this does not necessarily mean these actions are morally legitimate or that they do not have potentially nefarious consequences.

98. The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian

Author:
Charli Carpenter
Publication Date:
02-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
In the " human security " era (since approximately the end of the cold war), a burgeoning literature in political science has debated both the effects of the civilian immunity norm and the tensions in the concept, ostensibly to better understand how to protect civilians in armed conflict. Yet as Helen Kinsella rightly tells us, there has been too little critical attention to the concept of the civilian itself. Her sweeping historical genealogy of the "civilian" not only debunks various myths about the concept but also exposes certain problems and tensions that may be at the root of the current crisis in the civilian immunity norm itself.

99. Poverty and Morality: Religious and Secular Perspectives

Author:
Deen K. Chatterjee
Publication Date:
02-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
This latest in the Ethikon Series in Comparative Ethics offers a valuable collection of articles for understanding the normative dimensions of poverty. Covering the six major religious traditions and such secular perspectives as classical liberalism, contemporary liberal egalitarianism, Marxism, and feminism, the book also contains a chapter on the natural law tradition and an opening chapter by Sakiko Fukuda-Parr on the nature and trends of global poverty and inequality from the perspective of developmental economics.

100. The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

Publication Date:
02-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
"Suddenly," observes Robert D. Kaplan, "we were in a world in which the dismantling of a man-made boundary in Germany had led to the assumption that all human divisions were surmountable". Following the triumph of the West in the cold war, many, including Kaplan, believed that human agency and its various constructs - including human rights, free markets, democracy, science and technology, and even humanitarian intervention - would emerge as the single most important force in shaping world events and would lead to freedom and prosperity across the globe. But the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Kaplan says, have revealed a much darker reality: while many societies have indeed become more democratic and prosperous, this often occurred on the heels of bloody civil wars and periods of mass murder, among other atrocities. The horror of the Rwandan genocide offers a case in point. Where did our understanding go wrong?
Political Geography:
Germany