When faced with security threats from terrorism and other forms of nonstate political violence, how should liberal-democratic states respond? Finlay discusses books by Tamar Meisels, Seumas Miller, and Timothy Shanahan.
This book provides not only an exhaustive treatment of the benefits and drawbacks of cosmopolitan democracy, but also the most detailed statement to date of how some form of cosmopolitan democracy could be realized, writes reviewer Luis Cabrera.
The lesson of the first 100 days of Guantanamo is not one of how truth and justice triumphed, but of how efficiently a bureaucratic machine on a war footing circumvented ethical norms and suppressed dissent, writes reviewer Petra Bartosiewicz.
This book adds several new elements to the relation between war and the risk society. They are anxiety, complexity, and the future, writes reviewer Claudia Aradau.
The ever-expanding literature on the responsibility to protect (RtoP) could now fill a small library. The number of graduate theses alone devoted to the topic has been nothing less than staggering. RtoP's contribution to both conceptual thought and policy planning concerning how to prevent genocide and other mass atrocities, therefore, is beyond question. But RtoP was not envisioned as an academic or planning exercise. Nine years after the principle was first articulated by the independent International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) and five years after it was refined and adopted by the 2005 World Summit,1 some are beginning to ask whether, where, and how the concept has made a difference in terms of international and state policy and, more important, in terms of preventing such horrific crimes in the first place. Understandably, many of these early assessments are skeptical. As the official charged with developing the conceptual, political, and institutional elements of RtoP for United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, I have followed this growing assessment literature with keen attention. One of the more thoughtful and constructive contributions to this genre appeared in a recent volume of this journal.2 In ''The Responsibility to Protect—Five Years On,'' Alex J. Bellamy provides a balanced, cogent, and—as the following suggests—provocative analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of RtoP as a policy tool.
The article critically examines domestic political concerns about the competitive disadvantages and possible carbon leakage arising from the introduction of domestic emission trading legislation and the fairness of applying carbon equalization measures at the border as a response to these concerns. I argue that the border adjustment measures proposed in the emissions trading bills that have been presented to Congress amount to an evasion of the U.S.'s leadership responsibilities under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). I also show how the "level commercial playing field" justification for border measures that has dominated U.S. domestic debates is narrow and lopsided because it focuses only on the competitive disadvantages and direct carbon leakage that may flow from climate regulation while ignoring general shifts in the production and consumption of emissions in the global economy, which have enabled the outsourcing of emission to developing countries.
In order to achieve more ethical global health outcomes, health policies must be driven by health priorities and should take into account broader health policy requirements, including the needs of specific national health systems. It is thus important to recognize that the division of interests in key policy areas are not necessarily between the priorities of rich and poor countries, but between (1) pharmaceutical industry interests and health policy interests, and (2) national industrial and trade policy interests and public health policies. I argue that these issues are not solely the concern of developing countries because the diminishing national policy space for health in pharmaceutical policies presents a challenge to all governments, including rich ones.
Responsibility to Protect: The Global Effort to End Mass Atrocities, Alex J. Bellamy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 249 pp., $70 cloth, $25 paper. The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All, Gareth Evans (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2008), 349 pp., $37 cloth, $20 paper. Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect: Who Should Intervene?, James Pattison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 284 pp., $95 cloth. In June 2010 intercommunal violence exploded in Kyrgyzstan's southern cities of Osh and Jalalabad, resulting in the dramatic scene of thousands of ethnic Uzbeks fleeing their homes to avoid persecution by groups of ethnic Kyrgyz (allegedly backed by government troops). Reports of arson, rape, and other atrocities were widespread, accompanied by varying accounts of the number of civilians killed.1 The response to the persecution and displacement followed a pattern that we have seen before: calls for urgent international action by nongovernmental organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group, followed by a muted response on the part of international organizations (in this case, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the United Nations Security Council). While both Russia and the United States were active in supporting efforts to organize humanitarian assistance to those affected by the violence, neither state was prepared to tackle the political and logistical challenge of deploying military forces to the region to protect civilians.
In this provocative volume, Ayelet Shachar puts forward an account of birthright citizenship as analogous to inherited property, and proposes a birthright privilege levy on citizenship inheritance that citizens of affluent countries should contribute to alleviate global inequalities of wealth and opportunity. By drawing an analogy with property inheritance, Shachar questions a widespread intuition that citizenship assignment based on birth is unproblematic. The recipients of political membership in prosperous and politically stable societies, she notes, inherit a valuable bundle of rights, benefits, and opportunities. Since the place of one's birth is a circumstance beyond one's control, birthright citizens of a well-off society have a duty to transfer some of their chance gains to those who were born in a society with greatly diminished life opportunities.