In an article titled “Reforming the Security Council through a Code of Conduct: A Sisyphean Task?” (Ethics & International Affairs 32, no. 4, pp. 463–82), Bolarinwa Adediran argues that efforts to establish a code of conduct at the UN Security Council amount to energy misspent—for reasons both of practicability and effectiveness. While it is true that the proposed codes of conduct do not offer any shortcuts or magic answers to the dilemmas surrounding efforts to prevent atrocity crimes and protect populations, I disagree with the assessment that these initiatives will ultimately prove to be “unhelpful.” I examine the initiatives on three levels of analysis: (1) their effect on political and normative movement toward giving increased attention to human security considerations, (2) their effect on Security Council decision-making, and (3) their effect on atrocity prevention and protection on the ground. The proposed codes have both downside risks and upside potential on all three levels, but it is on the first level that my assessment most sharply diverges from that of Adediran.

This brief essay contrasts two modes of constitutional change: abusive constitutional projects that seek to erode democracy and restorative constitutional projects that aim to repair eroded democratic constitutional orders. Constitutional democracies are eroded and restored via the same mechanisms: formal processes of constitutional amendment and replacement, legislative amendment, changes to executive policies and practices (or respect for conventions), and processes of judicial decision-making. Under the right conditions, abusive uses of these mechanisms for antidemocratic ends can be reversed by prodemocratic or restorative uses. The more difficult question is what kinds of political discourses are most likely to sustain successful processes of democratic rebuilding. In recent work, we have pointed to the role sometimes played by liberal democratic discourses as purported justifications for processes of abusive constitutional change: we label this the rise of “abusive constitutional borrowing.” Less well understood are the kind of discourses likely to sustain successful democratic healing or rebuilding. Often, the most popular discourse is a restorative one, which focuses on repairing damage caused by authoritarians and returning to a constitutional status quo ante. In this essay, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of restorative constitutionalism as a response to prior episodes of democratic erosion.

During the final months of Sri Lanka's 2006–2009 civil war, Sri Lankan armed forces engaged in a disproportionate and indiscriminate shelling campaign against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which culminated in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. Conventional wisdom suggests that Sri Lanka undermined international humanitarian law (IHL). Significantly, however, the Sri Lankan government did not directly challenge such law or attempt to justify its departure from it. Rather, it invented a new set of facts about its conduct to sidestep its legal obligations. Though indirect, this challenge was no less significant than had Sri Lanka explicitly rejected those obligations. Drawing on Clark et al.'s concept of denialism, this article details the nature of Sri Lanka's challenge to the standing of IHL. At the core of its denialist move, Sri Lanka maintained that while the LTTE was using civilians as human shields, government forces were adhering to a zero civilian casualty approach. With this claim, Sri Lanka absolved itself of any responsibility for the toll inflicted on civilians and sealed its conduct off from the ambit of IHL. This case illustrates how actors can considerably undermine the law using strategies of contestation far more subtle than direct confrontation.

Is it ethical for the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) to consider political factors, such as peace processes, in selecting situations to investigate or cases to prosecute? During the early years of the court, a number of documents and statements from the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) suggested that there were occasions when it was. Two OTP policy papers issued in 2003 recommended that the prosecutor assess “all circumstances prevailing in the country or region concerned, including the nature and stage of the conflict and any intervention by the international community,” and whether prosecution might “exacerbate or otherwise destabilize a conflict situation.” In the same spirit, the ICC's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, referred to his decision-making as a “dialogue between many actors” with a “strategic dimension . . . [that] involves all stakeholders.” This language suggested a process of consultation and coordination with local and international actors involved in conflict resolution to adapt international criminal justice to on-the-ground political realities.

The ethics of whistleblowing are complex and challenging. On the one hand, there are a strong set of moral reasons why someone ought to blow the whistle when he or she learns of wrongdoing. On the other hand, such actions typically come at a significant cost to the whistleblower and may not bring about any significant change. Both aspects prompt us to ask, why would I be a whistleblower? Emanuela Ceva and Michele Bocchiola's Is Whistleblowing a Duty? answers that question by arguing that one has an organizational duty to blow the whistle. Kate Kenny's Whistleblowing: Toward a New Theory reframes the question, showing how hard it has been for members of the international financial industry to blow the whistle and bring about any effective change to that industry. In this review essay, I suggest that analyses of whistleblowing need to take into account evolving technologies, the importance of loyalty, and special contexts such as whistleblowing in the national security sector.

The message of Michael Ignatieff's reflections on reimagining a global ethic is a comforting one for political philosophers. It is vital, he writes, for philosophers to keep doing what they have been doing: addressing the injustices of globalization from a perspective of strict impartiality that treats every human being as the object of equal moral concern. Philosophers should continue to elaborate this “one world” perspective against those partial perspectives arising from the claims of one's particular country or particular religious faith. But their aim should not be to replace the one with the other, but to prompt an ongoing critical dialogue in which more particularistic doctrines of country or faith are called to justify themselves before the one-world ethic's impartial standards—thus prompting the kind of critical self-reflection that is essential to moral change. And in so doing, the one-world ethic cannot be uncritical of itself, for there are different ways of conceiving a global ethic, each of which must answer to the others.