What interests do states have in assisting and protecting vulnerable populations beyond their borders? While some political leaders and commentators promote a circumscribed understanding of the national interest that rules out accepting substantial risks and costs for the sake of the distant vulnerable, others endorse an “enlightened” conception of the national interest that recognizes the long-term utility to be gained by helping them. However, while this notion of “enlightened” self-interest gives states reason to act in some instances, it fails to prompt action in other cases where the suffering of strangers is less strategically important. Some leaders and commentators have responded to this problem by reaching for some other, less material conception of the national interest to justify assisting the distant vulnerable, but they have often struggled to find the language they need. This article finds a solution in the debates about self-interest waged in seventeenth-century Europe. Dissatisfied both with Hobbes's narrow understanding of self-interest and Pufendorf's more “enlightened” understanding, Leibniz defended a more generous and “disinterested” conception, grounded not in considerations of material utility but in the pleasure to be derived from helping those in need. This article demonstrates two ways in which this “disinterested” conception of self-interest can be of use today. First, it provides resources for explaining why states already sometimes act in “disinterested” and altruistic ways. Second, it provides leaders with a tool for persuading people to help the distant vulnerable, even when it appears to be in neither their narrow nor their “enlightened” interests to do so.

Since 1989 we have witnessed a proliferation of efforts to develop international norms of the rights of ethnocultural minorities, such as the UN's 1992 Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, the Council of Europe's 1995 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, and the Organization of American States' 1997 draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This activity at the level of international law is reflected in a comparable explosion of interest in minority rights among normative political theorists.

In this context, Michael Walzer's work occupies an important but somewhat anomalous role. On the one hand, he was arguably the first political theorist, at least in the postwar era, to take seriously the issue of minority rights. Nonetheless, Walzer's work has had surprisingly little enduring impact on multiculturalism debates in either academic political theory or international law.

One explanation for this puzzle is that Walzer's substantive discussion of minority rights seems to sit uneasily with his more foundational theory of justice, laid out in Spheres of Justice. I want to suggest a distinct (but complementary) explanation for why Walzer's work has not permeated the debate, focusing less on metaethical worries about his account of common meanings, and more on the practicalities of how he categorizes ethnic diversity. Walzer's state-differentiated but minority-undifferentiated approach simply does not connect to the governing premises of the larger academic and public debate, which treat minorities as differentiated and states as undifferentiated. I believe it is Walzer's idiosyncratic approach to categorization—more than his controversial theory of justice-as-common-meanings—which explains his relatively marginal role in the multiculturalism debate.

Most of the significant philosophies of history, ” Pitirim Sorokin observed, and “most of the intelligible interpretations of historical events…have…appeared either in periods of serious crisis, catastrophe, and transitional disintegration, or immediately More or alter such periods.” The twentieth century has been an age of continuing crisis in world politics. In terms of lives sacrificed to political idols, our century, in almost every interpretation, has been a profound catastrophe. This century's last decade is indeed a time of transitional disintegration.

A prominent feature of American political consciousness is a desire to propagate democracy throughout the world. In our enthusiasm to share what we enjoy, Jacques Barzun sees that little attention is paid to exactly what we are trying to distribute. Through a brief historical survey of democracy, he shows that our popular conception of the term does not correspond with any particular definition. U.S. democracy has no central text and is distinctly different, in theory and in practice, from the democracy of other states, both historical and contemporary. Democracy is an abstract ideal that is a function of time. Its present incarnation in the United States emphasizes freedom and equality through the means and language of specific personal rights. Barzun sees an internal tension in this formulation, one that ultimately threatens both freedom and equality if exported to the rest of the world.

Against the celebratory view of globalization comes the charge that globalization represents a kind of empire. But this charge requires a framework in which we can identify the power at work in apparently voluntary processes, such as learning English or joining the World Trade Organization. I advance a concept of “network power” to explain the dynamic that drives many key aspects of globalization. A network is united via a standard, which is the shared norm or convention that enables coordination among its users, such as a language that allows communication among its speakers. A widely used standard is more valuable than a less used one, simply because it governs access to a larger network of people. The idea of network power generalizes this fact to describe globalization as the rise to global dominance of standards that have achieved critical mass in language, high technology, trade, law, and many other areas. It also characterizes the rise to dominance of a successful standard as involving a form of power. While these new standards allow for global coordination, they also eclipse local standards, rendering them unviable to the extent that they prove incompatible with dominant ones. Therefore many of the choices driving globalization are only formally free and, in fact, are constrained because the network power of a dominant standard makes it the only effectively available option. It is this dynamic that generates much of the resentment against globalization and the criticism that it reflects a new imperialism.

This review essay examines three important new contributions to the water governance literature, which provide important overviews of the changing water governance structures over time, and advance the call for a new water ethic. Furthering this work, I suggest that the need for a water ethic is globally important, but it is particularly urgent for indigenous communities. Settler expansion, fixed political boundaries, and subsequent colonial framings of land and water ownership have affected indigenous communities throughout the world and have led to severe environmental and social justice disparities. Although the books under consideration provide examples of indigenous rights associated with water protection, the theme is largely underdeveloped. Thus, I suggest that insights from indigenous communities’ more holistic and long-term relationship with water could help define and move forward the adoption of a new global water ethic. These insights are gleaned from work with indigenous communities throughout North America, particularly those in the Salish Sea and the Great Lakes regions. A new water ethic could incorporate three precepts: (1) treat water as sacred; (2) consider rights and responsibilities together; and (3) practice hydrophilia (love and know your waterways).

Even though it has been more than a year since I left the service of the United Nations, the one question people have not stopped asking me here in India is when our country, with 1.2 billion people and a booming economy, is going to become a permanent member of the Security Council. The short answer is “not this year, and probably not the next.” But there are so many misconceptions about this issue that a longer answer is clearly necessary.

The response to COVID-19 demonstrates an inclusive and dispersed form of global health security that is less reliant on the UN Security Council or the World Health Organization (WHO). While WHO remains central to fighting the pandemic, the dispersed global health security addressing the crisis is inclusive of the wider UN system, civil society, and epistemic communities in global health. As part of the special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward,” this essay argues that instead of facing crisis or criticism like WHO, this inclusive and dispersed form of global health security provides mechanisms of resilience and support to the UN at the height of global political tensions surrounding COVID-19.

Concerns beyond borders was not a new idea in 1919 when the League of Nations became the institutional guardian of such concerns. The freedom of action implied in the concept of sovereignty had always been subject, at least in theory, to the restraint of judgment by some external standard such as divine or natural law. In the system of international protection administered by the League, a number of standards external to the sovereign state were given explicit formulation and put on a contract basis in treaties and in the League Covenant itself. The standards were not universal in application. They were to be applied only in mandated territories and in states bound by specific minority treaties. Within those geographic limits the standards were detailed and non-negotiable. They concerned civil and political rights, equal protection before the law, religious freedom, economic development, and protection from exploitation. How well did this system of protection function? What was the League of Nations able to do in the twenty years between two world wars when it was responsible for the maintenance of these international norms?

Preventive intervention, though an old practice, has recently come under widespread discussion due to concerns about international terrorism and the potential availability to rogue states or terrorists of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). With the 2003 war in Iraq, the Bush administration made preventive intervention part of United States military policy. In a recent issue of Ethics & International Affairs, Allen Buchanan and Robert Keohane argued that the preventive use of military force may be justified in some circumstances. In this essay I take issue with their argument.

It may come as a surprise to many that the ICRC was the first agency established representing the International Red Cross and Red Crescent network to protect and assist victims of war and victims of politics. This article explores the ineffective consequences of international laws overseeing such victims and argues that proper implementation of these laws requires policy, without which laws can never be executed. ICRC has often coordinated relief for victims in such places as Somalia and Bosnia, in fact more than all the UN agencies combined, when the rest of the world was still ignoring them. When law is silent, and often during war time it is, human rights policies must be built on ethical choice.

Proliferation of major conventional weapons (MCW) in larger numbers, at greater levels of sophistication, and to more actors is at best a waste of valuable resources and at worst fuel for more and bloodier conflicts. Given a track record of violence, repression, and corruption, norms against exporting weapons to active conflicts and human rights abusers, as well as norms in favor of transparency in weapons transfers, have grown more salient in recent years. Yet international efforts such as the UN Conventional Arms Trade Treaty show little promise for mitigating these ills. This article finds an alternate route toward moderating global arms transfers. It shows, with supporting data, how the United States, pursuing its own political interests, leverages its massive market power to slow the proliferation of dangerous technology, reduce resources spent in the developing world on weapons, stymie the deadweight losses of corruption in the arms industry, and lower the rewards for human rights abusers.

Social inequalities can only be understood through the interaction of their multiple dimensions. In this essay, we show that the economic and environmental impacts of natural resource extraction exacerbate gendered disparities through the intensification and devaluation of care work. A chikungunya epidemic in the refinery city of Esmeraldas, Ecuador, serves to highlight the embodied and structural violence of unhealthy conditions. Despite its promises of development, the extraction-based economy in Esmeraldas has not increased its vulnerable populations’ opportunities. It has, instead, deepened class and gendered hierarchies. In this context, the most severe effects of chikungunya are experienced by women, who bear the burden of social reproduction and sustaining lives under constant threat.

Fernando R. Tesón replies to Terry Nardin's critique

During the past decade there has been a resurgence of interest in the concept of recognition in international theory. Once the narrow concern of social theorists, the concept of recognition is nowadays invoked in at least three different senses in order to explain three different things. First, it is commonly used to explain how states and their identities are shaped by interaction, and how the modern international system has emerged as a cumulated consequence of such patterns of interaction. In this context, the concept of recognition is used to explain how states are individuated and differentiated from each other, how the international system thereby becomes stratified along status lines, as well as why conflicts over status are possible or even inevitable. Second, although the concept of recognition has long enjoyed wide currency within international legal theory, where it is used to account for what makes states legal persons and equal members of international society, recent scholarship has done much to complicate this view by pointing out how practices of inclusion often have gone hand in hand with practices of exclusion, and how this has led to an informal stratification of international society. Third, the concept has most recently been invoked to suggest how the undesirable consequences of international anarchy can be mitigated or even avoided through mutual recognition between political communities.

There is no body that has the legal right to exercise agency on behalf of international society (IS), even though the notion of “society” encapsulated in IS is, in principle, close to that conveyed by bodies such as clubs and associations that can be represented by, for example, a board of directors or governing committee. Some have argued that the UN or the Security Council can exercise agency on behalf of IS, but in view of the “underinstitutionalization” of IS in the UN, a more interesting possibility is that groups of states may authorize themselves to act on the behalf of IS as “coalitions of the willing.” However, the contrasting experience of the Gulf War of 1990/91 and the Kosovo campaign of 1999 suggest that the degree of ideological coherence of the coalition in question is an important variable here - in 1999, NATO was able with some plausibility to represent the wider international society because of its commitment to certain core democratic values, while in 1991 the Gulf War coalition could only act conservatively in restoring the status quo because of its diverse nature.

International systems have historically come in two forms: those based on the balance of power and those of a revolutionary nature, including systems organized around bipolar competition. Hoffmann finds the world order of 1987 to contain both these systems and judges it both ambiguous and original. While the tension of these extremes can make the world appear “anarchical,” there are certain agreed upon rules by which the superpowers interact. These rules ultimately preserve order by embracing competition between the United States and the Soviet Union; superpower confrontation is prevented by each nation holding to their own ideals and sovereignty while embracing nuclear deterrence. Having revealed the rules of the superpower game, Hoffmann then subjects them to ethical judgment. Despite the historic duration of peace between superpowers that seems to have been sustained by these rules, Hoffmann finds them both ethically flawed and ultimately unstable. Turning to a brief consideration of United States foreign policy, he points to particular moral difficulties in U.S. stances and urges the development of superpower rules that are effective and ethical.

Abstract: Many societies are now having to live with the impacts of climate change and are being confronted with heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and rising sea levels. Without radical action, future generations will inherit an even more degraded planet. This raises the question: How can political institutions be reformed to promote justice for future generations and to leave them an ecologically sustainable world? In this essay, I address a particular version of this question; namely: How can supra–state institutions and transnational political processes be transformed to realize climate justice for future generations? The essay seeks to make two contributions. First, it considers what criteria should guide the evaluation of proposals for reform. It proposes four criteria, and analyzes how they should be interpreted and applied. Second, it considers a raft of different proposals, commenting on their strengths and weaknesses. It presents ten proposals in all, including, among others, establishing a UN high commissioner for future generations, appointing a UN special envoy for future generations, creating a UN agency mandated to protect future generations, instituting representatives for the future in all key UN bodies, ensuring greater youth participation in transnational political decision-making processes, and further developing a global citizens’ assembly. In short, my aim is to outline some of the options available and to defend a normative framework that we can use to evaluate them.