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121. Two Cheers for Humanitarianism

Author:
Tom Farer
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Over the last two decades a spate of books, led by the ones cited in this essay, have illuminated and debated the bristly questions confronting contemporary “humanitarianism.” The definitional or, one might say, foundational question is whether the adjective “humanitarian” should be limited to only those independent agencies that are engaged (without reference to a political context) in the impartial delivery of emergency relief to all those in existential need—or, in the unique case of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), engaged in monitoring the application of the Geneva Conventions to armed conflict. An answer in the affirmative could be considered the “classic” position of the humanitarian, and one still championed by the ICRC. Today, however, many NGOs, such as CARE, OXFAM, and Catholic Relief Services, which certainly regard themselves as humanitarian agencies, engage in a broad range of rehabilitative and developmental activities and continue to deliver emergency relief, and they are prepared to do so under circumstances where their work has conspicuous political implications. The same is true of such UN agencies as UNICEF, UNHCR, and the World Food Programme, which are not infrequently involved in complex peace operations that have clear political goals as specified by the Security Council. Further, well-known humanitarian activists and writers, notably Bernard Kouchner and Samantha Power, also reject the ICRC's definitional canon. The unsettled boundaries of what properly constitutes humanitarianism brings a number of difficult questions to the surface, including: Should relief be provided even if it could prolong a conflict, or could indirectly assist a belligerent, or possibly identify the relief giver with a government's political ends? And should the nature of those ends influence relief efforts? Should relief agencies also assist in addressing the causes of humanitarian emergencies by joining in efforts to resolve a conflict, foster economic development, rebuild state institutions, and strengthen the protection of human rights? Should such agencies accept funds from governments where governments specify how the funds are to be used? Where necessary, should they advocate armed intervention to protect their personnel as well as the recipients of their aid? In terms of the way they organize and structure themselves, should nonprofit agencies dedicated to humanitarian relief follow private-sector models? Can organizations dedicated to the effective provision of emergency relief pursue that end without creating a culture of dependence, without discouraging local initiative, and without violating the liberal “right” to participate in life-shaping decisions? Finally, how does humanitarianism relate to human rights, the other leading expression of what I would call “the humanitarian impulse”?
Topic:
Security
Political Geography:
Geneva and United Nations

122. Echoes of a Forgotten Past: Mid-Century Realism and the Legacy of International Law

Author:
Oliver Jütersonke
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Those studying the work of Hans J. Morgenthau, widely considered the “founding father” of the Realist School of International Relations, have long been baffled by his views on world government and the attainment of a world state—views that, it would appear, are strikingly incompatible with the author's realism. In a 1965 article in World Politics, James P. Speer II decided that it could only be “theoretical confusion” that explained why Morgenthau could on the one hand advocate a world state as ultimately necessary in his highly successful textbook, Politics Among Nations, while writing elsewhere that world government could not resolve the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States by peaceful means. According to Spee Morgenthau posits at the international level a super-Hobbesian predicament, in which the actors on the world scene are motivated by the lust for power, yet he proposes a gradualist Lockean solution whereby the international system will move, through a resurrected diplomacy, out of a precarious equilibrium of balance-of-power anarchy by a “revaluation of all values” into the “moral and political” bonds of world community, a process whose capstone will be the formal-legal institutions of world government.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
United States and Soviet Union

123. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

Author:
Jack Snyder
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Francis Fukuyama, the author of “The End of History,” one of the most discussed political essays in recent decades, here travels back to prehistory to look for the key to understanding political order. Fukuyama is frustrated by the difficulty of building stable, order-keeping states in the contemporary developing world. What is the historical secret leading to stable political orders, such as Denmark's, he asks, and can that secret be shared with the Somalias and Afghanistans of the world?
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, France, Denmark, and Somalia

124. The Problem of Harm in World Politics: Theoretical Investigations

Author:
Andrew Hurrell
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
There are few books that both change our field of vision and open up a new and far-reaching research agenda. This is one of them. Linklater here engages in a sustained reflection on the core theoretical issues surrounding the problem of harm in world politics. His goal, as he puts it, is to theorize harm, not to develop a theory of harm. This is the first of three projected volumes. As he writes at the outset, “A central aim of the overall project is to understand whether, or how far, the modern world has made progress in making harm a key moral and political question for humanity as a whole”.

125. The International Human Rights Movement: A History

Author:
Samuel Moyn
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Aryeh Neier has written a fluent and engaging “history” of the international human rights movement, of which he is a senior statesman. Neier, following a prominent career in advocacy, most recently as president of the Open Society Institute, has successfully summarized his own understanding of the movement for a lay audience of those—and I would think they are many—who might like to hear his thoughts on where things stand today. At the moment of his retirement, at seventy-five years of age, it is generous of Neier to offer up this volume to mark the occasion.

126. Humanity's Law

Author:
Martti Koskenniemi
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
In his draft of the opening speech for Sir Hartley Shawcross, the British prosecutor at Nuremberg, Hersch Lauterpacht wrote that the establishment of the tribunal meant that the “sovereign State” had finally been arraigned before the law. In Lauterpacht's mind, Nuremberg signaled the end of the political system of statehood. With other interwar internationalists, Lauterpacht viewed the First World War, and now the Second, as outcomes of an out- dated and dangerous idea of sovereignty that put the egoistic values of the nation over those of a universal humanity. But when Shawcross received Lauterpacht's draft, he coolly crossed out the latter's wording. It is not that difficult to understand why he did so. After all, Hitler's opponents had struggled fiercely, at the cost of many lives, to defend the sovereignty of their own countries. The allied forces that finally crushed Nazi Germany were composed of military and economic resources that had been gathered, organized, and operated by states. The last thing the English, the Russians, or the French wanted to hea was that they would now condemn precisely the sovereignty they had spent five years fighting to protect.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
Russia and Germany

127. Democratic Legitimacy: Impartiality, Reflexivity, Proximity

Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
In his new volume, the historian Pierre Rosanvallon argues that, far from being self-evident, the relationship between democratic ideals and the precise origin of democratic institutions ' legitimacy is continually fraught. In constructing a genealogy of democratic legitimacy, he works to reveal the complicated and often counterintuitive origins of democratic legitimation, and identifies important ways in which democratic legitimacy continues to change today.

128. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict

Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
The authors of Why Civil Resistance Works present empirical evidence that, contrary to conventional wisdom, nonviolent resistance campaigns succeed at overthrowing regimes twice as often as violent campaigns, even in cases of a highly repressive state. Erica Chenoweth, an assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University, and Maria Stephan, a strategic planner with the U.S. Department of State, raise an original question and then employ quantitative and qualitative methods to reach their surprising findings. Unlike previous studies that focus solely on either violent or nonviolent campaigns, this book asks which type of campaigns are more successful at overthrowing regimes, ousting occupations, or facilitating secessions. The authors analyze 326 violent and nonviolent campaigns between 1900 and 2006 , and they offer more in-depth study of the Iranian Revolution ( 1977 – 1979 ), the First Palestinian Intifada (1987 – 1992 ), the Philippine People ' s Power Movement ( 1983 – 1986 ), and the Burmese Uprising ( 1988 – 1990 ) — providing a range of scenarios where violent and nonviolent campaigns succeeded, partially succeeded, or failed. The authors de fi ne a successful campaign as one that discernibly results in the achievement of its own stated goals of regime change, anti-occupation, or secession within a year of peak activities.
Political Geography:
United States and Iran

129. Editors' Note

Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
The Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs will turn one hundred years old in February 2014. Andrew Carnegie founded the Council in 1914 with a specific purpose in mind: he thought it was possible to avoid the Great War that he and many others believed was on the horizon. In fact, he approached the project with considerable optimism, confident that the barbarity of industrial war would become a thing of the past. Humanity was evolving, becoming more civilized with each passing decade. Common interests and common sense would surely make large-scale war a relic of bygone days, similar to other uncivilized practices, such as slavery and dueling. Sadly, it was not to be.

130. Reimagining a Global Ethic

Author:
Michael Ignatieff
Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
"Reimagining a global ethic" is a project worthy of Andrew Carnegie and of the Carnegie Council's upcoming commemoration of his founding gift in 1914. As a collaborative research project stretching forward over the next three years, it ought to be integrative and reconciliatory: that is, it must try to understand the globalization of ethics that has accompanied the globalization of commerce and communications and to figure out what ethical values human beings share across all our differences of race, religion, ethnicity, national identity, and material wealth. When human beings do disagree morally, the search for a global ethic becomes an attempt to elucidate by analysis what exactly people are disagreeing about, so that, after arguing out our differences, we can either agree to disagree or work together to find common ground. Finding common ground on large ethical matters and understanding more deeply why, in some instances, we remain at odds with each other is worthwhile in itself, but it might also further Andrew Carnegie's original goal in founding the Council, which was to reduce the amount of conflict and violence in the world.
Topic:
Globalization