"The Idea of Justice" summarizes and extends many of the themes Amartya Sen has been engaged with for the last quarter century: economic versus political rights, cultural relativism and the origin of notions such as human rights, and entitlements and their relation to gender equality.
Ten years have passed since the United Nations member states committed themselves to the Millennium Development Goals, central among which are the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger worldwide by 2015. Two recent books, Gillian Brock's Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account and Darrel Moellendorf's Global Inequality Matters, serve as timely reminders that progress toward meeting these morally urgent goals has been minimal. Rich with empirical detail, these books bridge the gap between theory and practice in presenting carefully crafted accounts of the obligations we have to non-compatriots and by offering practical proposals for how we might get closer to meeting these obligations.
Calin Trenkov-Wermuth's "United Nations Justice" provides a thoughtful and useful contribution to the understanding of how UN governance operations have evolved.
This edited volume moves beyond the more common analyses of what works and what does not in building sustainable peace in order to raise deeper theoretical questions, such as what can be realistically expected of peacebuilding efforts
Gabriella Slomp's "Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Hostility, Violence and Terror" examines Schmitt's work as a whole, but sets out in particular to draw out contradictions and tensions in Schmitt's theoretical endorsement of authoritarian state power.
The UN Security Council's approach to counterterrorism, which the United States has greatly shaped, has generally shown a marked human rights deficit. The process for seizing the assets of and imposing travel bans on suspected terrorists and their financiers must be reformed.
The Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) has become a prominent feature in international debates about preventing genocide and mass atrocities and about protecting potential victims. Adopted unanimously by heads of state and government at the 2005 UN World Summit and reaffirmed twice since by the UN Security Council, the principle of RtoP rests on three equally weighted and nonsequential pillars: (1) the primary responsibility of states to protect their own populations from the four crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, as well as from their incitement; (2) the international community's responsibility to assist a state to fulfill its RtoP; and (3) the international community's responsibility to take timely and decisive action, in accordance with the UN Charter, in cases where the state has manifestly failed to protect its population from one or more of the four crimes. The principle differed from the older concept of humanitarian intervention by placing emphasis on the primary responsibility of the state to protect its own population, introducing the novel idea that the international community should assist states in this endeavor, and situating armed intervention within a broader continuum of measures that the international community might take to respond to genocide and mass atrocities. As agreed to by states, the principle also differed from the proposals brought forward by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty by (among other things) emphasizing international assistance to states (pillar two), downplaying the role of armed intervention, and rejecting criteria to guide decision-making on the use of force and the prospect of intervention not authorized by the UN Security Council. Five years on from its adoption, RtoP boasts a Global Centre and a network of regional affiliates dedicated to advocacy and research, an international coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), a journal and book series, and a research fund sponsored by the Australian government. More important, RtoP has made its way onto the international diplomatic agenda. In 2008, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon challenged the UN membership to translate its 2005 commitment from ''words to deeds.'' This challenge was taken up by the General Assembly in 2009, when it agreed to give further consideration to the secretary-general's proposals. RtoP has also become part of the diplomatic language of humanitarian emergencies, used by governments, international organizations, NGOs, and independent commissions to justify behavior, cajole compliance, and demand international action.
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) involved in rule making on labor rights are as varied as the companies they seek to influence. Many of these NGOs consist of little more than a handful of staff cramped in a small office in New York or London, armed with an Internet connection, a list of contacts in developing countries, and a limited budget. Others have bigger budgets, more staff, wider networks of contacts, and greater public renown. Some focus only on the labor rights practices of a single corporation, while others seek to engage companies across a whole industry sector, country, or region. Regardless of their differences, NGOs involved in rule making on labor rights share a willingness to work astride a series of divides: the divide separating the for profit and not-for-profit sectors; separating governmental and nongovernmental entities; and separating the production of goods with ''public'' characteristics (such as environmental protection or public health) from the production of private goods (such as consumer durables).