As part of the special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward,” this essay connects the past of the United Nations to its future from the perspective of the Global South. When the UN was created, most developing countries were colonies that played no role in writing the rules and designing the architecture of the post-1945 UN-centric global multilateral order. Today, countries in the Global South command a majority of the UN membership, but still mostly function as norm takers and are severely underrepresented in the UN Security Council—which functions as the geopolitical cockpit—and also in the senior ranks of the UN system, in the key posts in the Secretariat, and in the UN's funds and agencies. Gradually, however, these countries are using their numerical strength to give voice to their distinctive preferences, priorities, and values. This essay provides a broad-brush sketch of the changing nature of the North-South partnership on the UN's four overarching normative mandates of security, development, environment, and human rights. It includes a brief comment on the coronavirus pandemic within the framework of its main narrative of the continuing need for a UN-centric North-South partnership.

Hans Morgenthau's The Purpose of American Politics was published in 1960, at the end of the Eisenhower administration and on the eve of the civil rights movement and military intervention in Vietnam. It is Morgenthau's first attempt to author a book primarily about the United States, exploring opposing American political traditions and their implications for foreign policy. In the process, he comments on past and present domestic and foreign crises and the ways they are refracted by Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian understandings of the national purpose. Morgenthau is drawn to the Hamiltonian approach, which is realist in its assumptions; but he is nevertheless sympathetic to the Jeffersonian emphasis on freedom, which differentiates America, in his view, from other countries. The book represents Morgenthau's coming to terms with America, lauding the purposes for which the country was founded, but the overall argument is pessimistic. Morgenthau contends that America has lost its sense of purpose, on the home front and abroad. When read next to his Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, published in 1946, the book reveals a significant shift in his intellectual and political orientations.

What does authority mean under international law? There are various actors with different forms of authority, but no overarching concept of what characteristic endows an actor with authority, and even less of a coherent conception of legitimacy as a requirement for such authority. In fact, international law recognizes different authorities for different causes and different contexts, allocated to different actors, who base their authority on different characteristics (state legitimacy, representativity, military power, control). After disaggregating the concept of authority and outlining some of the consequences that follow from each type, this article highlights a number of different actors and describes the various authorities each has under international law. For instance, under jus in bello, nonstate actors can create a state of armed conflict in which they can often continue to use military means without legal sanction. While jus ad bellum may still in principle require legitimacy (in the formal sense of being a state), current jus in bello covers a range of non-state actors. Thus, from a practical point of view, the jus in bello regulations undermine any jus ad bellum requirement of legitimate authority.

Kratochwil argues that a social-scientific study of the behavior of regimes, and how they exercise power, is a useful method to challenge the exaggerated view of international relations as a “normless anarchy.” By showing how “expectations” dictate action in international affairs, his method asserts the existence of a universal force among nations.

Should United Nations forces step up their efforts to pacify Mogadishu or should they pull out of Somalia altogether? Does the international community have the right (or the obligation) to force Haiti's military rulers to relinquish their grip on power, and how much suffering should we he willing to inflict upon that country's already impoverished people to accomplish that goal? Should the outside world intervene militarily to stop the carnage in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Angola, Burundi, or Nagorno-Karabakh? If so, who should intervene? How?

This review essay contrasts two of the most notable recent contributions to literature on space and society: Daniel Deudney's Dark Skies (2020) and Brian Patrick Green's Space Ethics (2022). The Green volume is a course textbook, geared to giving students an overview of some of the key ethical issues concerning space and how the arguments on these matters are shaping up. Its aim is to provide an overview rather than a specific line of argument. Deudney's text, by contrast, is an example of a book proposing space skepticism. It argues that we should relinquish many of our current ambitions for space expansion on the grounds that they will increase the already significant degree of extinction-level risk that we face. The essay marks the distinction between these texts by contrasting normal- and special-domain approaches. Normal-domain approaches seek to extend familiar ethico-political issues into the discussion about space expansion without regarding space expansion as the road to utopia or extinction. Special-domain approaches hold to some such optimistic or pessimistic view. The essay goes on to highlight the way in which Green's text would benefit from more social critique, along the lines of Deudney. Ultimately, the normal-domain approach presupposed by Green and rejected by Deudney is upheld.

Justifications and criticisms of empire have often focused on the effects of empire on imperial “subjects.” But an older criticism of empire equally focuses upon the way the possession of empire transforms the identity of the imperial state itself by altering its constitution, implicating its people in projects that happen elsewhere, and forcing them to define their relationship to applications of power in a radically new way. On this view the real danger of empire often is the effect it has on the state possessing the empire. In our times in particular, empire is thought to have a profound impact on the functioning of democracy in the imperial state itself. This article seeks to recover the moral sensibility that lies behind this form of moral criticism. It also seeks to examine, briefly, whether America is vulnerable to the “corruptions” of empire and the weight we should place on this moral consideration.

Risk and liability change the initially stipulated terms of contracts, overruling their otherwise binding nature. Risk encourages careful assessment of debtors' abilities to service debts. Errors and negligence in assessment, and even external shocks, make creditors suffer losses. Disregarding one's duty of care or professional standards, or engaging in tortious or illegal behavior makes actors liable to compensate for any resulting damage—a necessary systemic element of the framework markets need to function well. Neither mechanism was allowed to work properly in sovereign lending.

This essay analyzes why risk and liability are necessary mechanisms of well-functioning markets, and discusses how risk can be handled. In the United States, inappropriate regulatory norms hindered providing against risk in the case of sovereign debt. The absence of liability—a market imperfection—has produced debts no decent legal system would recognize as legitimate domestic debt, thus aggravating the sovereign debt problem, and giving rise to concepts such as criminal, odious, and illegal debts. Discriminating sovereign debtors and disobeying the rule of law caused market distortions, resulting in not only grave damages to debtors, but also losses to creditors that the mechanisms risk and liability would have avoided. Finally, I briefly present proposals to repair these shortcomings in order to avoid the disasters of the past.

Although often overlooked, positive incentives can play a key role in tackling aggression, human rights abuses, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. In this essay, I focus on one form of positive incentives: covert incentives. First, I argue that covert incentives are preferable to overt incentives since they enable policymakers to eschew the shackles of public opinion and avoid worries of moral hazard and the corruption of international society. Second, I argue that covert incentives are often more justifiable than covert force since they do not involve problematic methods and do not make it easier to undertake military action. Accordingly, I conclude that there is a prima facie duty to employ covert positive incentives as opposed to overt incentives and covert force.

At a time when some informed Muslims believe Islam to be “set on a collision course with the West” and some Christians warn of a “perhaps irrational but surely historical reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage,” it may be helpful to ask what both traditions teach about current issues of joint concern. One of the most urgent of these issues is the question of forcible humanitarian intervention. Setting aside broader questions of interpretation, such as the extent to which Islam can be identified with political radicalism and Christianity with Western political interests, this essay compares Muslim and Christian teachings on this issue. Both traditions have had to confront questions of political violence, suffering, and war since at least the time of the conversion of Constantine in one case (1,600 years ago) and the founding of the first Islamic state at Medina in the other (1,300 years ago). The central argument in this essay is that there is a surprising measure of agreement between the two traditions on the question of forcible humanitarian intervention, enough to provide the basis for a shared doctrine.

In his recent article “The Law of Peoples,” John Rawls attempts to develop a theory of international justice. Paden contrasts “The Law of Peoples” with Rawls's “A Theory of Justice,” reconstructing Rawls's new theory to be more consistent with the earlier work. Paden finds Rawls's new theory inadequate in its response to communitarian criticisms, those that advocate a different theory of good than that of liberal societies. Paden goes back to “A Theory of Justice” to state that all societies seek one good, that is, the protection of their just institutions. In so doing, he provides a more expansive view of the interests of societies, which, he argues, is more consistent with “A Theory of Justice” than “The Law of Peoples,” yet avoids the flaws identified in the original argument.

David Rodin's book, War and Self Defense, is a subtle and provocative analysis of the claim of self-defense and its relation to modern war. Building on his analysis, I raise some further issues about self-defense as a justification of modern nation state war. Principal among these is what I call the conscription paradox: if the state's right to make war is grounded in the right of its citizens to self-defense, how do we explain the right of modern states to conscript its citizens into the military – and order them to die, if need be? This problem has been acknowledged by liberal individual thinkers over the years, but not solved. It raises questions of whether a coherent account of current nation state military practice can be grounded in individual self-defense.

Academics are not a natural kind. They have varied expertise and aims, and most have no expertise that is particularly relevant to problems of poverty and development. This presumably is why the essay in this issue by Thomas Pogge and Louis Cabrera—a virtual “manifesto” of the newly formed Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP)—shifts to and fro between addressing “academics” and addressing “poverty-focused academics.” Even those academics whose work touches on poverty and development—a quite small minority—are mostly expert in some but not in other aspects of these topics. Some are expert in international law, but not in economics; others know about international trade, but not about aid; some study corruption, but know nothing about nutrition—and so on. A few know a lot about normative argument, but their credentials are sketchy when it comes to empirical evidence. Many more are interested in empirical evidence, usually of a specific sort, but are uncritical of or confused about normative argument. (I suspect that many suffer from a lingering positivist hangover, which suggests that there is no intellectually respectable way to support normative claims, and indeed that this fear may lie behind the appeals to the importance of academic neutrality that Pogge and Cabrera discuss.)

It is a commonplace to say that the world has changed since the tragic events of September 11. This also holds true for those dedicated to humanitarian action—to the prevention of death and the alleviation of suffering during crisis and conflict, irrespective of any consideration other than need. The cause of the change for us, however, is not so much the attacks themselves or their vicious character. Sadly, such great loss of life and willingness to inflict death indiscriminately upon innocent civilians is nothing new, as those of us who have worked in areas of conflict know only too well.

What has changed is that, as a result of these attacks, the leading international power, the United States, has declared a new global war on terrorism. This war, as it has been defined, pits terrorism against freedom, and those who would imperil humanity against those who stand to defend it. While the main focus, thus far, has been on Afghanistan, the repercussions have swiftly embraced the entire planet. Like the Cold War, this is an open-ended, global fight defined to uphold both interests and values. Yet unlike the Cold War, it is one in which alliances are constantly shifting, the enemy consists primarily of an ill-defined set of nonstate actors as well as their purported state sponsors, and territorial control is not necessarily an aim.

The U.S.–led war on terrorism poses a number of challenges for independent humanitarian action and the principles that underpin it. First, it seeks to subordinate humanitarianism to its broader purpose, undermining the ability of humanitarian actors to impartially reach out to all victims. Second, by questioning the applicability of international humanitarian law, the antiterrorism campaign could well threaten the fundamental restraints on the conduct of warfare, thus weakening the protection and assistance to which civilians are entitled. Third, there is a shift in attention to conflicts worldwide, and the victims they generate, making it more difficult to respond to crises at the margins of current priorities.

UN peace operations have increasingly focused on the importance of “local ownership.” The logic is simple. For peace operations to succeed in helping war-torn states to create accountable, democratic institutions grounded in the rule of law, peace operations need to internalize democratic principles by making UN missions accountable to different domestic constituencies—crossing ethnic, religious, racial, social, and gender lines—within the war-torn country. As part of a special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward,” this essay argues that while there is widespread consensus among UN member states and UN bureaucrats that local ownership is necessary, UN peace operations have faced significant obstacles to creating true local ownership. These obstacles include the UN's focus on host-government ownership; the challenge of creating trust with different domestic constituencies that represent diverse perspectives; the supply-driven nature of UN intervention; and the mismatch between the UN's ideal post-conflict state and the preferences of post-conflict societies. To make UN peace operations more responsive to post-conflict societies, UN staff often have to bend or break rules established only to hold them accountable to their member states.