In order to advance a neatly deductive argument, Christopher J. Preston must make a number of assumptions and framing decisions that exclude important practical points from the scope of his analysis. We do not criticize him for doing so, as these simplifications allow him to advance a concise argument about an ethically complex subject. However, as scholars of politics and law, we are interested in what this ethical argument means—and does not mean—for the messy politics of climate engineering. Accordingly, in our response we unpack the political implications of some of Preston's assumptions and framing decisions in an effort to add a layer of practical richness to the abstraction of Preston's analysis.

Thomas Weiss's essay is a fine contribution to the current conversation within the humanitarian international, but there is a worrying absence of a broader, extra-humanitarian context in the discussion. There is no question that “Human Rightsism” has become the dominant political ideology of the international new class, and the common currency of UN treaties, academic conferences, and charitable foundation mission statements.

What remains open to question is whether, in the field, where humanitarians and human rights activists do their work, this revolution is real, or whether it is instead a fiction well-intentioned Westerners have chosen to believe in because otherwise the realities of the contemporary world would seem too bleak. It is an ironic reality that humanitarian workers and human rights activists have become the last interventionists. But should the humanitarian movement be embarking down the path of demanding more political action and, when necessary in order to allow humanitarians to do their work, military intervention? Should, as relief agencies insist, humanitarian considerations always take pride of place? There are unexamined assumptions here that need to be thought through more rigorously than those engaged in the debate have seemed willing to do.

Today's international community may well view covert action and democracy as mutually exclusive policies. This article examines the practice of covert action in American foreign policy in light of events of the mid-1970s and 1980s, focusing on the scandalous misuse of executive authority and lack of accountability associated with covert means. Often manipulative and sometimes anonymous, covert operations raise critical morality concerns in a democratic society. Whether “any form of accountability is likely to be sufficient to bring the unauthorized use of executive power under control” is the crucial issue to be addressed when examining the practicality of covert actions by the executive branch.

This essay characterizes the main actors and how they operate during a buildup of government foreign debt and after a default on payments. These actors are the borrowing governments, domestic and foreign commercial banks, purchasers of government bonds, other governments lending to the debtor, and multilateral institutions (the International Monetary Fund and development banks). As there is no international sovereign analog to national court-supervised bankruptcy in the case of countries, the workout from crises, mainly hitting poorer economies, occurs without legislated rules or an enforcement mechanism, although the IMF (sometimes with the World Bank) serves as an informal umpire for the global financial community.

The United States and China have recently been called upon to exercise more leadership in developing an effective international policy response to climate change, but without giving attention to either the risks inherent in taking on such a role or the mechanism by which leading can mobilize others to act in response. Here, I understand leadership as action by a sufficiently powerful actor in a cooperative scheme that is capable of triggering reciprocal actions by followers on behalf of that scheme, and argue that such leadership can be coaxed by potential followers through pledges of reciprocal action that are made conditional upon prior action undertaken by a leader. In the context of the current international impasse over post-Kyoto climate change mitigation commitments, I identify means by which leadership by the U.S. or China might be induced by such conditional pledges, potentially allowing some obstacles to international collective action on climate change mitigation to be overcome.

Inclusive trade is taking hold in various forms in international organizations and in the trade policy of national governments. Absent empirical evidence that will take time to generate, it can be difficult to assess the achievements of this new approach to trade. Nancy Fraser's three justice idioms provide a conceptual entry point for evaluating the potential of the inclusive trade agenda. Fraser argues that the contemporary global justice conversation must acknowledge claims for recognition, representation, and redistribution. Applying this conceptualization to the inclusive trade agenda shows that trade agreement provisions intended to favor women and Indigenous peoples go some distance in addressing claims for recognition and representation but accomplish less in remedying injustices associated with maldistribution. Therefore, the inclusive trade agenda does significantly advance global justice for marginalized groups, but works primarily in ways that are political and cultural, not economic.

“Defining down sovereignty” refers to the normative thesis that sovereignty should not grant a state absolute protection against armed intervention in its internal affairs by other states, and that instead the international community should condition such immunity on states living up to particular standards. This essay suggests two modifications to this thesis. First, the international community should spell out the kinds of failures to protect civilians that can justify armed interventions by other states, as well as which agency has the authority to determine when such failures have occurred. In other words, the international community should determine how low to set the bar for intervention, and who makes the rules. Second, the international community needs to establish an additional international responsibility, namely, a responsibility to prevent international terrorism. The essay treats both of these modifications as shared international normative understandings; it does not attempt to translate these changes into international law.

Today we live in a world where the majority of wars are no longer interstate, a development that over the last few decades has often left the international community, in particular the United Nations as it was originally conceived, ill equipped to respond. The nimble action required for contemporary conflict resolution and peacebuilding now primarily lies in the hands of local actors and states, sometimes supported by international actors. But it is not always clear who these local actors are or what they need in order to achieve sustainable peace. As part of the roundtable “World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It),” this essay looks in more detail at what we mean by “local” in conflict-affected contexts and asks how local is local enough when resolving conflicts and building peace. It identifies tensions and concerns such as the need for the international community to have a well-defined and easily identified “local agenda” when, in reality, there are often several competing local agendas. The essay presents the Everyday Peace Indicators project as a vehicle that can be used to help communicate these local needs to international actors, and argues for the importance of understanding people's perceived realities in addition to, if not more than, their actual realities when trying to understand peace and conflict trends. In order to do this, we need to more effectively problematize peacebuilding for positive conflict disruption.

This essay steps back from the more detailed regulatory discussions in other contributions to this roundtable on “Competing Visions for Cyberspace” and highlights three broad issues that raise ethical concerns about our activity online. First, the commodification of people—their identities, their data, their privacy—that lies at the heart of business models of many of the largest information and communication technologies companies risks instrumentalizing human beings. Second, concentrations of wealth and market power online may be contributing to economic inequalities and other forms of domination. Third, long-standing tensions between the security of states and the human security of people in those states have not been at all resolved online and deserve attention.

Although retribution for past human rights violations has its place in post-conflict processes of transition and reconciliation, there are many present and foreseeable circumstances in which the case for immunity, amnesty, or sheer forbearance is significantly stronger than Juan E. Méndez' approach to this question can admit.

Disagreement about justice is an ineradicable part of political life and a leading cause of violent conflict. Reconciliation cannot always presuppose or await a shared moral understanding; frequently enough, it requires an agreement to disagree, even about fundamental principles – at least with respect to their retrospective application. Where the parties to violent conflict have seen fit to set aside issues of retrospective justice in the service of peace and reconciliation, outsiders, who do not bear the costs of conflict and instability, should second-guess that decision only with the greatest reluctance. They should not look to international human rights standards and mechanisms for a universal solution.

It is widely alleged that President Putin's regime attempted to exercise influence on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It is known that its Soviet predecessors funded Western communist parties for decades as a means to undermine noncommunist regimes. Similarly, the United States has a long history of interfering in the institutions and elections of its Latin American neighbors, as well as (at the height of the Cold War) its European allies. More recently, many believe that, absent U.S.-driven assistance, the Democratic Opposition of Serbia would have lost the 2000 Yugoslavian presidential election to Slobodan Milošević. As those examples suggest, attempting to subvert the democratic elections of a putatively sovereign country is a time-honored way of bending the latter's domestic and foreign policy to one's will. In this paper, I focus on the state-sponsored, nonviolent, nonkinetic subversion of nationwide elections (for short, subversion) through campaign and party financing, tampering with electoral registers, and conducting disinformation campaigns about candidates. I argue that, under certain conditions and subject to certain constraints, subversion is pro tanto justified as a means to prevent or end large-scale human rights violations.

It is curious to note the evolution of discussions about the moral and legal rules that apply in the fight against terrorism. Immediately after September 11, when it was clear that the United States was going to focus its new war within Afghanistan, the first question that arose was how the United States was going to assess the deaths of Afghan civilians as collateral damage . A second, major set of legal and ethical issues developed around the Bush administration's declaration that those captured in the war would face trial before military tribunals. And as the major campaigns of the war have come to a close, the celebrated issue has become the present and future legal status of the quite different fighters, supporters, and operatives of al-Qaeda and the former Taliban government who are in U. S .custody.

What is political about political refugeehood? Theorists have assumed that refugees are special because their specific predicament as those who are persecuted sets them aside from other “necessitous strangers.” Persecution is a special form of wrongful harm that marks the repudiation of a person's political membership and that cannot—contrary to certain other harms—be remedied where they are. It makes asylum necessary as a specific remedial institution. In this article, I argue that this is correct. Yet, the connection between political membership, its repudiation, and persecution is far from clear. Drawing on normative political thought and research on autocracies, repression, and migration studies, I show that it is political oppression that marks the repudiation of political membership and leads to various forms of repression that can equally not be remedied at home. A truly political account moves away from persecution and endorses political oppression as the normative pillar of refugeehood and asylum.

Scott Sagan asked me to revisit Nuclear Ethics, a book I published in 1986, in light of current developments in world affairs. In doing so, I found that much had changed but the basic usability paradox of nuclear deterrence remains the same. As do the ethical dilemmas. To deter, there must be some prospect of use, but easy usability could produce highly immoral consequences. Some risk is unavoidable and the moral task is how best to lower it. Nuclear weapons pose moral problems but nuclear use is the greater evil. Abolition may be a worthy long-term goal, but it is unlikely in the short-term relations among the nine states now possessing nuclear weapons. Drawing on just war theory, I examine the three dimensions of intentions, means, and consequences to outline a ten-point agenda for just deterrence that seeks to lower risks of nuclear war. The world has changed since the book was published but the basic moral dilemmas remain the same.

The analytical tension between legal norms, moral values, and national interests seems no uncharted territory in political science, but has found very little interest in legal academia. For lawyers, moral values and national interests are largely “unknowns,” dealt with by other disciplines. Looking a bit deeper, the picture becomes more nuanced, however. As part of a roundtable on “Balancing Legal Norms, Moral Values, and National Interests,” this essay argues that norms, values, and interests are not different universes of legal normativity, morality, and specific interests, but are interrelated concepts. Values clearly influence norms and often underpin them, while seemingly concrete norms (rules) are themselves often fragile constructs trying to balance competing interests. Value systems are quite diverse within societies, and this is even truer for interests; each society is a dynamic system of social interaction where conflicting interests are constantly playing out. In a way, underlying conflicts of values and interests are constantly being renegotiated in the legal system, with the norms enshrined in the text of statutes and treaties serving to constitute transitory reference points.