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111. End This Depression Now!

Publication Date:
06-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
It has been five years since the crash of the U.S. housing market plunged the global economy into a deep recession. And while the "Great Recession" has technically ended in the United States-the National Bureau of Economic Research, the official scorekeeper, determined that it did so in mid-2009-both the U.S. and global economies remain in a precarious state. Millions of people find themselves unemployed or underemployed, and for many who have jobs wages remain well below pre-recession levels. The net effect of this protracted period of subnormal economic activity has been nothing short of an "immense human disaster," writes Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics.
Political Geography:
United States

112. Author's Response to Martti Koskenniemi's Review of Humanity's Law

Author:
Ruti Teitel
Publication Date:
06-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
In his review of Humanity's Law in the Fall 2012 issue of this journal, Martti Koskenniemi invokes Carl Schmitt's notion of sham universalism, presenting my account of the rise of human-centered discourse in international law as a fable of liberal cosmopolitanism, which purports to endow a set of contestable values with historical inevitability and global reach. According to Koskenniemi: "In the last years of the twentieth century . . . the language of universal humanity spread throughout diplomacy and international institutions. The cost of this has been the abstraction of political discourse. . . . The language of the universal also tends to lift the speaker's values to an altogether exalted position-as the position of "humanity"- suggesting that the political game was over before it even began."

113. Hunger, Food Security, and the African Land Grab

Author:
Richard Schiffman
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
If you were organizing dinner parties for the world, you would need to put out 219,000 more place settings every night than you had the night before. That is how fast the Earth's population is growing. But global agricultural production is currently f ailing to keep pace. A June 2012 report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) sees trouble looming ahead, warning that "land and water resources are now much more stressed than in the past and are becoming scarcer."
Political Geography:
Africa

114. Nonproliferation: A Global Issue for a Global Ethic

Author:
J. Bryan Hehir
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
A global ethic for the twenty-first century will be different from that of the twentieth century. While themes of normative and political continuity will exist, humankind's main moral challenges have changed. Between the two centuries lie the end of the cold war, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the global financial crisis, and the double transformation of the structure of power in world politics and the norms of sovereignty and intervention. Nuclear weapons will remain high on the agenda of a global ethic, but they will not hold as dominant a place as they did in the past century. This essay, focused on the continuing moral challenge of nuclear weapons, recalls the intellectual and moral lessons of the last century and identifies three leading issues in nuclear ethics today: post-cold war challenges to nonproliferation and deterrence, the new challenges posed by the terrorist threat, and recent proposals for Going to Zero.

115. "Just Business: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights"

Author:
Ralph Steinhardt
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Any analysis of the role that international human rights law plays-or ought to play-in the decisions of multinational corporations must confront a range of skepticisms. Among the most persistent is that every branch of international law is unenforced and unenforceable, and that, even when it works, international human rights law constrains the conduct of governments, not businesses. In the skeptic's view, if companies have any legal responsibility, it is the obligation to maximize the return on shareholders' investment, and doing well by that measure may have little to do with doing good. On those rare occasions when companies do announce an intention to abide by human rights law, skeptics see it as a public relations move and not as a genuine response to some legal or ethical obligation.

116. "The Human Right to Health"

Author:
Joia S. Mukherjee
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
The modern day notion of human rights was shaped significantly by World War II and the subsequent Nuremberg Trials of 1948, which sparked a movement to codify a new standard of human dignity. The postwar campaign for a universal standard for all humans regardless of nationality, race, or religion produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). And while the Declaration itself does not have the legal weight of a treaty or covenant, it nonetheless has served as a yardstick against which rights are measured. Notably, the Declaration gives weight to two aspects of the rights paradigm of the twentieth century: the need for a government not to restrict the rights of or discriminate against its citizens, and the need for a government to deliver to its citizens a basic set of services, including education and health.

117. "Kant and the End of War: A Critique of Just War Theory" and "Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship"

Author:
Alyssa Bernstein
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Since the last decade of the twentieth century, Immanuel Kant has become central to academic discussions of international relations f or various reasons, including the end of the cold war (which renewed many people's hopes f or worldwide peace and democracy) and the publication of writings by the prominent neo-Kantians Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls and their followers and critics, as well as by a number of Kant scholars writing about war, humanitarian intervention, democracy, international law, peace, and cosmopolitanism. Kant and the End of War, by Howard Williams, and Kant and Cosmopolitanism, by Pauline Kleingeld, are new books by two of the foremost contemporary scholars of Kant's political philosophy, and the theme of international peace is central to both.

118. The Peculiar Politics of Energy

Author:
Ann Florini
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Imagine that you could wave a magic wand and provide everyone in the world with easy access to clean and affordable energy. In one stroke you would make the world a far cleaner, richer, fairer, and safer place. Suddenly, a billion and a half of the world's poorest people could discover what it is like to turn on an electric light in the evening. The looming threat posed by climate change would largely disappear. From the South China Sea to the Middle East to the Arctic, geopolitical tensions over energy resources would fade away. Human health would benefit, too, as vaccines and perishable foods could be refrigerated the world over. And many of the world's most corrupt government officials could no longer enrich themselves by bleeding their countries dry of revenues from fossil fuel sales.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
China and Middle East

119. Limiting the Killing in War: Military Necessity and the St. Petersburg Assumption

Author:
Henry Shue and Janina Dill
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Over the last decade, conventional just war theory has been systematically and thoroughly unraveled by a group of philosophers sometimes collectively referred to as the“revisionist critics.”Given the antagonism between the conventional and the revisionist camps, it is rarely recognized that their most prominent representatives, Michael Walzer and Jeff McMahan, respectively, share the assumption that the form of the rules of war can be explained byan underlying retention or forfeiture of moral rights by individual persons. Walzer treats combatants on both sides as morally equal—that is, equal in moral rights; and McMahan treats them as morally unequal as a result of their own individual conduct—that is, as displaying different degrees of moral liability to defensive harm as a result of features of their decision to participate in war and of their conduct in that war. Both maintain that there can be a rational connection between the moral status of individuals (moral equality for Walzer and differential “moralliability to defensive harm”for McMahan) and how they are permitted to be treated during combat.
Topic:
War

120. International Rescue and Mediated Consequences

Author:
Ned Dobos
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
One of the most commonplace worries about humanitarian intervention relates to the perverse incentives that it might create, or the adverse reactions that it might provoke. For instance, it is sometimes said that by weakening the norm of sovereignty humanitarian intervention can encourage unscrupulous states to wage aggressive wars of self-interest using human rights as a pretense. It is feared, in other words, that humanitarian intervention — even when it has the purest motives — might ultimately do more harm than good by inciting unwanted reactions from other states or substate groups. I will refer to these kinds of knock-on effects as the mediated consequences of intervention. They are brought about via the interceding agency of parties other than the intervener.
Topic:
Human Rights