This article offer reasons why academics should feel compelled to play a more direct role in the alleviation of global poverty, specifically through participation in a new international network, Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP). Academics have the specialized training and knowledge, and the societal role, that make them particularly well equipped to make a significant contribution. They also have responsibilities to answer sometimes spurious or misleading claims made about aspects of global poverty by others in the profession, and to highlight ways in which their own governments are implicated in the perpetuation of severe global poverty. By joining forces with like-minded others in a group such as ASAP, they can enhance their own impact on poverty dialogue and policy outcomes. Those academics already playing prominent direct roles—for example, as government consultants, in public discourse, or through leadership in professional associations—can deepen their influence through sharing their insights and expertise with other ASAP members

This article examines the nature of the wrongs that are inflicted on individuals and groups who have been expelled from the land that they previously occupied, and asks what they might consequently be owed as a matter of corrective justice. I argue that there are three sorts of potential wrongs involved in such expulsions: being deprived of the moral right of occupancy; being denied collective self-determination; and having one's property rights violated. Although analytically distinct, all of these wrongs are likely to be perpetrated when people are expelled from their homelands. Although there is substantial literature on corrective justice dealing with such cases, most of that literature focuses on the expropriation of property only, and is therefore unlikely to grasp the full implications of the wrong done or to reveal the full extent of what might be owed to people as a matter of corrective justice.

This introduction to the roundtable “The Responsibility to Protect in a Changing World Order: Twenty Years since Its Inception” argues that the geostrategic configuration that made the responsibility to protect (RtoP) possible has changed beyond recognition in the twenty years since its inception.

Communities most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, such as reduced access to material resources and increased exposure to adverse weather conditions, are intimately tied to a considerable amount of cultural and biological diversity on our planet. Much of that diversity is bound up in the social practices of Indigenous groups, which is why these practices have great long-term value. Yet, little attention has been given to them by philosophers. Also neglected have been the historical conditions and contemporary realities that constrain these practices and devalue the knowledge of their practitioners. In this essay, we make the case for preserving a diverse range of social practices worldwide, and we argue that this is possible only by strengthening the communities of practitioners who enact them in the contexts in which they are adaptive. By concentrating on Indigenous communities, we show how focusing on practices can transform how Indigenous and other local communities are represented in global climate-change conversations and policy as a matter of justice. More specifically, we argue that practice-centered thinking and local practices provide critical insights for determining the extent to which climate policies protect and enable transformative change.

As part of a roundtable on “Balancing Legal Norms, Moral Values, and National Interests,” this essay describes the humanitarian diplomacy of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) by comparing it conceptually with other forms of advocacy and illustrating it with the ICRC's recent experience in the Yemen crisis. Humanitarian diplomacy is examined as one particular way of balancing legal norms, moral values, and national interests in the pursuit of greater respect for international humanitarian law (IHL) and principled humanitarian action in armed conflicts. The essay looks back to ancient history for archetypal forms of humanitarian advocacy in various cultural traditions. It then describes humanitarian diplomacy's practice of discreet diplomacy and confidential dialogue with all parties to a conflict, and compares its relatively “quiet” approach with the “loud” approach of outrage activism focused on “naming and shaming,” which tends to be the norm today. The essay argues that there is an important and complementary place for the ICRC's style of humanitarian diplomacy alongside other forms of advocacy even in the face of criticism that the ICRC is sometimes publicly silent about what it knows of atrocities and avoids naming and shaming.

This essay is a discussion of Reinhold Niebuhr's 1932 classic Moral Man, which critiques the Liberal Movement up to the 1930s. Little reviews some of the books fundamental conclusions. First, according to Niebuhr, to believe that individual self-interest is fulfilled in a collective good is to subscribe to a “utopian illusion”. He faults liberals for allowing themselves to be victims of the Enlightenment, i.e. being incurable optimistically rational about morals and politics. Second, he addresses the issue of the will for power inevitably dominating the will for good. Liberalism, in the sense of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and John Locke, lends itself as a venue for this to occur through its condonation of egoism as the intrinsic element of total social harmony. Little develops on Niebuhr's theory of conscience where there is a sharp distinction between individual and collective morality, the latter being much less susceptible to liberal morality than the former. Where individuals are endowed with an emotional sense of sympathy and consideration toward their kind, groups or nations would find this difficult, if not impossible due to their inclusive nature. Finally, he points out the mixture of morality and power in national life: where politics, while being inseparable from virtue and legitimacy, still abuses those beliefs in the interests of “national egoism”. When moral language is used in international politics without application of self-criticism, it diverts attention from the real motives of the statesmen who use it. Little does indicate deficiencies in Niebuhr's attempts to recover liberalism in his later writings toward the end of the essay.

This essay explores the ethical and legal implications of prioritizing the militarization of cyberspace as part of a roundtable on “Competing Visions for Cyberspace.” Our essay uses an ideal type—a world that accepts warfighting as the prime directive for the construction and use of cyberspace—and examines the ethical and legal consequences that follow for (i) who will have authority to regulate cyberspace; (ii) what vehicles they will most likely use to do so; and (iii) what the rules of behavior for states and stakeholders will be. We envision a world where states would take on a greater role in governance but remain constrained by law, including jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria, but also sovereignty, nonintervention, and self-determination. We ask if the net result would mean states causing less harm than they do in kinetic conflicts. Ultimately, our essay takes no position on whether cyberspace should be a militarized domain (let alone one where warfighting is the prime directive). Rather, our goal is to situate a warfighting cyber domain within the reality of a pluralist cyberspace, where ethical imperatives compete or coalesce to support specific governance mechanisms.

In Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (1946), Hans Morgenthau celebrated the noble role of the statesman, whose tragic destiny entailed accepting the agonizing moral burden of committing lesser evils as the inescapable price for securing the greater good. In this elitist vision, the statesman is primarily accountable to personal conscience rather than to the poorly informed, undisciplined judgment of any democratic electorate. In focusing on the statesman's pivotal role, Morgenthau glossed over the ways the New Deal and the Second World War had transformed the institutional context within which American presidents made foreign policy. As he shifted his attention to American policy toward Vietnam in the late 1950s and the 1960s, however, his view of presidential leadership and the executive branch changed significantly. Morgenthau came to see the growth of the national security state and the unaccountable exercise of executive power as a twin threat to the foundations of republican government. His critique emphasized the pathologies of policymaking insulated within this state apparatus. He learned that one problem with the lesser-evil approach is that the moral distinctions on which it is predicated are relative and contingent in practice: that which was once proscribed from the policymaker's toolbox can readily become the prescribed instrument after the justifying precedent has been established.

Technology has an outsized impact on the modern world; it is how we have tamed our frontiers. But that role is largely ignored when it comes to the Arctic frontier. Emerging technologies, especially AI, can enable desperately needed services and infrastructure—but they can also challenge ethics, law, and policy, as they usually do. For instance, autonomous icebreaker ships pose a dual-use dilemma since they can be used for both humanitarian and military purposes. As a lesson for other frontiers, this article will broadly introduce the potential role of AI in the changing Arctic and some of the ethical concerns that deserve attention before that future arrives.

As part of the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” this essay focuses on the role of institutions as agents of peaceful change from a perspective that emphasizes the importance of a wide spectrum of human emotions to better understand the less quantifiable but nevertheless important conditions for being able to sustain initiatives for peaceful change. It aims to throw light on the often overlooked psychological and emotional hurdles standing in the way of agents’ ability to undertake and sustain action designed to lead to peaceful change. To do so, the essay returns to the pioneering work of Ernst Haas and his important concept of “spillover.” The essay shows that the neofunctional understanding of spillover was a theoretically important innovation, but that it was missing three essential elements: an understanding of the need for positive emotions and ontological security; an understanding of the link between values and identity; and a realization of the importance of a shared vision for the “good life.” To illustrate the problems with Haas's version of spillover, but also to highlight the significant potential of the theory, the essay turns to the crisis of the liberal international order as an example of a forum where the agency to undertake peaceful change seems to be faltering. The essay concludes that the ability of the liberal order to effect peaceful change is currently hampered because the order is characterized by negative emotions, contested values, and a vision of the good life that is seen as mainly a benefit for the cosmopolitan elite.

The recent proposal by the Independent Expert Panel of the Stop Ecocide initiative to include the crime of ecocide in the International Criminal Court's Rome Statute has raised expectations for preventing and remedying severe environmental harm through international prosecution. As alluring as this image is, we argue that ecocide prosecutions may be the most difficult, perhaps even impossible, in precisely the cases that the ICC would need to be concerned with; namely, the gravest global incidents of environmental harm, including those associated with planetary climate change. We explore a series of questions about the panel's formulation of ecocide that resonate with longer debates around criminalizing environmental harm but take on new dimensions amid the Anthropocene and after twenty years of ICC trials. Ecocide must contend with the hard lessons learned concerning the ICC's limitations in realizing justice in a fraught international political context and also with fundamental challenges to knowledge and legitimacy arising from the uncertainty and dynamic socioenvironmental context of the Anthropocene. The proposed amendment, if adopted, risks ineffective prosecutions or even perverse outcomes for the environment itself. This risk, however, may characterize any effort to prosecute ecocide internationally in the Anthropocene unless the terms of international criminal law are fundamentally rethought.

On September 9, 2013, diplomats and civil society activists gathered in a ballroom in New York to welcome Jennifer Welsh as the UN Secretary-General's new Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP). In her first public appearance in that role, Special Adviser Welsh explained that one of her top priorities would be “to take prevention seriously and to make it meaningful in practice.” “In the context of RtoP,” Welsh added during the discussion, “we are talking about crimes, and crimes have implications in terms of how we deal with them. You'll hear me say that a lot.” Welsh's approach of treating RtoP as a principle that is primarily concerned with prevention and is firmly linked to international crimes neatly captures the evolution of RtoP since its formal acceptance by states at the 2005 UN World Summit. Paragraphs 138 to 140 of the World Summit's Outcome Document not only elevated the element of prevention to a prominent place within the principle of RtoP but also restricted the scope of RtoP to four specific crimes under international law: genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. The crime and prevention–focused version of RtoP has subsequently been defended and promoted by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and by UN member states. This article seeks to systematically explore some of the implications of linking RtoP to the concept of international crimes, with a particular focus on the preventive dimension of RtoP, the so-called responsibility to prevent. What, then, are the consequences of approaching the responsibility to prevent as the prevention of international crimes?

In order to systematically examine this question, this article turns to literature from criminology. While the criminological perspective has so far been neglected in debates on RtoP, the prominent criminologists John Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond argue vehemently that “criminology is crucially positioned to contribute understanding and direction to what the United Nations has mandated as the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ groups that are threatened with mass atrocities.” For the purpose of this article, the label “criminology” comprises domestic criminology, supranational criminology, and international criminal law. While insights from supranational criminology and international criminal law are directly applicable to international crimes, translating knowledge generated in relation to crimes at the domestic level to atrocity crimes at the international level is, of course, not without challenges. Reasoning by analogy is an important method in this regard, though given the anarchical nature of international society some analogies will inevitably be imperfect. The benefits of such an approach, if carefully employed, however, outweigh the risks.

As part of the roundtable “Economic Sanctions and Their Consequences,” this essay examines unilateral coercive measures. These types of sanctions are applied outside the scope of Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, and were developed and refined in the West in the context of the Cold War. Yet the eventual collapse of the Berlin Wall did not herald the demise of unilateral sanctions; much to the contrary. While there are no incontrovertible data on the extent of these measures, one can safely say that they target in some way a full quarter of humanity. In addition to being a major attack on the principle of self-determination, unilateral measures not only adversely affect the rights to international trade and to navigation but also the basic human rights of innocent civilians. The current deterioration of the situation, with the mutation of embargoes into blockades and impositions on third parties, is a threat to peace that needs to be upgraded in strategic concern.

Just war thinking serves a social and psychological role that international law cannot fill. Law is dispassionate and objective, while just war thinking accounts for emotions and the situatedness of individuals. While law works on us externally, making us accountable to certain people and institutions, just war thinking affects us internally, making us accountable to ourselves. Psychologically, an external focus leads to feelings of shame, while an inward focus generates feelings of guilt. Philosophers have long recognized the importance of these two moral emotions. Recently, psychologists have found that feelings of guilt are linked to positive social outcomes, such as the desire for reconciliation and reparation, while shame generates anger and hostility. Just war thinking, as an inward-looking tradition, has a special relationship with guilt. By focusing on moral emotions, just war thinking can move beyond the law in four ways, by developing an ethic of accountability, by providing a foundation for addressing moral injury, by providing a common language for discussing the costs of war, and for identifying ethical problems in radically new contexts.

The 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment brought world leaders together for the first time to discuss the environmental challenge. Since Stockholm, environmental diplomacy has addressed many issues, with varying results. Some success has been achieved, but in general the record shows the inadequacy of international cooperation to meet the environmental challenge.

One of the justifications offered by European imperial powers for the violent conquest, subjection, and, often, slaughter of indigenous peoples in past centuries was those peoples’ violation of a duty of hospitality. Today, many of these same powers—including European Union member states and former settler colonies such as the United States and Australia—take increasingly extreme measures to avoid granting hospitality to refugees and asylum seekers. Put plainly, whereas the powerful once demanded hospitality from the vulnerable, they now deny it to them. This essay examines this hypocritical inhospitality of former centers of empire and former settler colonies and concludes that, given that certain states accrued vast wealth and territory from the European colonial project, which they justified in part by appeals to a duty of hospitality, these states are bound now to extend hospitality to vulnerable outsiders not simply as a matter of charity, but as justice and restitution for grave historical wrongs.

The 1993 World Human Rights Conference, only the second UN-sponsored global conference on human rights ever held, provides an appropriate occasion to reflect on the state of the study of international human rights. The first global human rights conference, held in Tehran in 1968, came on the heels of the rise of the Third World to a position of international prominence. The Tehran Conference helped to initiate an era in which issues of economic, social, and cultural rights and development received steadily increasing attention in international human rights discussions. The 1993 Vienna Conference reflected the new international context characterized by the end of the Cold War and the global trend toward political liberalization and democratization. Substantively, the Vienna Conference was perhaps most notable for its emphasis on the university of international human rights—an emphasis, as I will argue below, that is reflected in the development of the academic human rights literature as well.

The controversies over the “National History Standards” and the Smithsonian's abortive effort to mount a fiftieth anniversary exhibit on the decision to drop the atomic bomb, along with insights drawn from the opening of former Soviet and Eastern European archives, highlight the “moral equivalency” debate being waged over the writing and teaching of Cold War history. Gaddis suggests the need for historians to rethink some of their academic approaches to this subject, using a moral as opposed to a materialist framework.