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151. Navigating Between Extremes: Academics Helping to Eradicate Global Poverty

Author:
Roger C. Riddell
Publication Date:
07-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Academics have been involved in development and poverty issues in poor countries since at least the 1940s. Most academics and practitioners who work professionally in the world of development engage in the ! eld not as dispassionate observers but with the explicit intention of trying to rid the world of extreme poverty. But we are now witnessing something new. For a number of years, a small band of academics from other fields, perhaps most notably from the disciplines of ethics and political and moral philosophy, have been interested in and have tried to promote a wider interest in " development ethics. " More recently, their numbers have been swelled by an ever-larger group of academics from these disciplines who are convinced of the moral obligation to respond to the problem of world poverty and are driven by the need to do more. The engagement of any individual or group concerned with quickening the end of extreme poverty is clearly both welcome and encouraging. However, before moving too quickly to promote new attempts to eradicate poverty, it is necessary to examine carefully the work that academics and development professionals have done and are currently doing in this area, the way that this work has been and is being used by policy-makers, and how these same academics understand and analyze the impact of their work, including their understanding of why they have not been more successful. The purpose of this article is to contribute to the debate and discussion about how concerned academics and individuals might add particular value to the work already being done.
Topic:
Poverty
Political Geography:
South Asia

152. Beyond Charity: Helping NGOs Lead a Transformative New Public Discourse on Global Poverty and Social Justice

Author:
Martin Kirk
Publication Date:
07-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
This article looks at the role that Northern nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can play in engaging domestic publics in efforts to eradicate mass global poverty. In doing so, it makes two assumptions about this relationship that are important to outline. First, it is assumed that what the public in Northern countries think or understand about mass global poverty is a relevant factor in alleviating or overcoming it. In other words, it is important that people in Ohio or the Scottish Highlands understand why, for example, a billion people live in absolute poverty in a world that has the physical resources to provide for all of humanity's basic needs. As long as Northern states dominate the G7, the G8, and the Bretton Woods institutions; dictate many of the terms of international trade; and consume far more than an equitable share of global resources, the social norms of these countries will directly inform global efforts against mass poverty. Further, the idea that the fight against mass global poverty is the job only of politicians and business leaders, and that the attitudes of the general public are not at all instrumental in or relevant to their decision-making, is clearly untenable. Indeed, public support for the policies that would bring transformational change is essential. As Paul Collier writes in The Bottom Billion , "Without an informed electorate, politicians will continue to use the bottom billion merely for photo opportunities, rather than promoting real transformation"
Topic:
Poverty
Political Geography:
Africa

153. How Academics Can Help People Make Better Decisions Concerning Global Poverty

Author:
Keith Horton
Publication Date:
07-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
As other contributions to this special issue amply demonstrate, there is a variety of ways in which academics could have a greater impact on global poverty than they do today. In this essay I focus on just one of those ways: by doing more to help people make wise decisions about issues relevant to such poverty. Many different groups of people have to make such decisions, including those who work for certain international organizations, policy-makers and government employees of various kinds, and the global poor themselves. Many of those decisions involve difficult issues that academics generally have more time and other resources than others to study. If academics conduct the right kind of research on those issues, then, and share what they have learned with the relevant decision-makers in accessible ways, those decision-makers should be able to make better decisions. And this in turn should have a positive impact on global poverty. Moreover, given that doing so would only require academics to perform activities that are already taken to be a standard part of their role — conducting research and disseminating what they have learned — this seems one of the most straightforward and least controversial ways in which academics could have a greater impact on global poverty.
Topic:
Poverty
Political Geography:
United States and United Kingdom

154. The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays

Author:
Michael Blake
Publication Date:
07-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
This volume collects eleven of Joshua Cohen's essays, each of which deals in some way with the nature and role of political justice and its relationship to ideals of democratic self-government. Within this general set of interests, the essays range over a variety of topics, from commentary on specific democratic thinkers to the morality of international political institutions. If the essays are diverse in their subject matter, they are linked by the sensibility of the author, who is rightly celebrated as one of our most insightful and subtle political thinkers. Although I disagree with parts of Cohen's argument, none of these disagreements diminish my admiration for his project; those of us who care about justice, whether at home or abroad, would do well to give his ideas a closer examination.
Political Geography:
United States

155. Hegemony in International Society

Author:
Barry Buzan
Publication Date:
07-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
This book is the third in a series, following Legitimacy in International Society (2005) and International Legitimacy and World Society (2007), in which Ian Clark has applied the concept of legitimacy to the English School's way of thinking about both international society (the society of states) and world society (global civil society mainly in the form of nonstate actors). For Clark, legitimacy is what defines both rightful conduct and rightful membership in society. Following the English School tradition, his main focus in terms of rightful conduct is on the primary institutions of international society: such deep practices as sovereignty, nationalism, diplomacy, the balance of power, great power management, and the like that constitute both the actors and the rules of the game of international society. This approach contrasts with the focus on secondary institutions—intergovernmental organizations, regimes, and other consciously constructed, instrumental entities—that is characteristic of liberal approaches to International Relations.
Topic:
International Relations and Diplomacy
Political Geography:
United States

156. The Invention of International Relations Theory: Realism, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the 1954 Conference on Theory, Edited by Nicolas Guilhot

Author:
Robert E. Williams Jr.
Publication Date:
07-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
The Conference on International Politics, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and convened in Washington, D.C., in May 1954, brought together many of the leading lights of postwar realism: Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Lippmann, Paul Nitze, and Arnold Wolfers, among others. A young Kenneth W. Thompson organized the meeting and participated in the discussions; an even younger Kenneth Waltz served as the group's rapporteur. Rockefeller Foundation president Dean Rusk presided. The meeting was to international relations theory what that summer's All-Star Game in Cleveland, featuring Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson, and Stan Musial, was to baseball—or it would have been, if its documentary record had not been buried in the Rockefeller Foundation archives for over half a century.
Political Geography:
Washington

157. Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II by Michael Burleigh

Author:
Cathal J. Nolan
Publication Date:
07-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Michael Burleigh is a prolific writer on issues of ethics in history, notably the crimes of Nazi Germany and other totalitarian regimes. In this popular survey of some of the larger moral demands and dilemmas of fighting World War II, he is never boring and quite often right. He is also, far too frequently, surprisingly uninformed.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
Germany

158. From the Editor

Author:
Joel H. Rosenthal
Publication Date:
05-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
What is it about a twenty-fifth anniversary that seems to demand that we pay attention to the occasion? The obvious response, of course, is the issue of longevity—that someone or something has endured the various travails of a quarter century and, by all appearances, is continuing onward. But surely there is something else, something more essential at issue than merely endurance. There is, I think, the issue of recognition that is of importance here—the recognition that something has been sufficiently valued and appreciated as to warrant perpetuation. That, I suspect, is what we are celebrating when wetake this moment to reflect on our achievements and recommit ourselves to our stated mission.
Topic:
Globalization
Political Geography:
Iran

159. Middle-Ground Ethics: Can One Be Politically Realistic Without Being a Political Realist?

Author:
Terry Nardin
Publication Date:
05-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Thinking about international affairs has oscillated between idealism and realism throughout the modern period. Moralists continue to search for a way to combine what is reasonable in each in an ethically defensible middle between those extremes.

160. Face Reality? After You!--A Call for Leadership on Climate Change

Author:
Henry Shue
Publication Date:
05-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
In Joseph Heller's comic war novel, Catch-22, the catch-22 of the title refers to a supposed military regulation that allowed one to be relieved of military service if one was insane, but further provided that no one who realized he would be better off out of military service could possibly be insane. Humanity's so far leaderless approach to dealing with rapidly accelerating climate change embodies a similar, but profoundly tragic, catch-22 that has, among other twists and contradictions, transmuted justice into paralysis. Many thought that the natural global leader of the effort to gain control of global climate change would be the United States, with its splendid cadre of scientists and its history of technological innovation. But our politicians have failed to be worthy of our scientists or of the trust we citizens have placed in them. Facing reality appears to be increasingly unpopular among those who pass as our national political leaders. Those who refuse to face reality often find that what they ignore may come back to bite them, and worse, it may hurt others who trust them with their well-being. It is unclear which members of the U.S. Senate have sold their souls to the fossil-fuel interests and which have simply closed their minds. But the effect is the same: the facts on the ground—and in the air, water, and ice of the planet—are racing further and further ahead of the faltering U.S. political efforts to respond to them. And the American failure of political leadership is one major factor that is crippling efforts to negotiate multilateral action at the international level.
Topic:
Climate Change
Political Geography:
United States and America