Intervention

This paper offers a revised political conception of human rights informed by legal pluralism and epistemic considerations. In the first part, I present the political conception of human rights. I then argue for four desiderata that such a conception should meet to be functionally applicable. In the rest of the first section and in the second section, I explain how abstract human rights norms and the practice of specification prevent the political conception from meeting these four desiderata. In the last (...) part of the paper, I argue that full-fledged tolerance in the international order – that is tolerance-as-non-intervention and tolerance-as-respect – should be attached to (1) compliance with jus cogens norms and to; (2a) a political community recognizably organized as a community of inquiry that is; (2b) committed to the specification and incorporation or expression of the idea of human rights within its local legal system. (shrink)

This paper examines the impact of the introduction of Western (European) technical civilization on regional cultures in Nigeria, using Igboland in South-EasternNigeria as a test case. It begins with a discussion of some general features of Western technical civilization whose evolution has been profoundly influenced by technological advances in Europe and her cultural colonies in North America and elsewhere. Consequences of the contact between Western technical civilization and traditional Igbo culture are also examined. The paper concludes by discussing the challenging (...) problem of Africa’s contribution to technical civilization. (shrink)

Edited by Nieves Zúñiga García-Falces. In 15 years, the international community has been blamed for resorting too easily to the use of force on some occasions (Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo), and also it has been blamed for intervening too late or not at all in other crises (Rwanda, Bosnia and today Sudan and Congo). Even today, one of the most contested questions of international politics is the legitimacy for the use of force. David Chandler, Professor of International Relations at the University (...) of Westminster (UK) and Daniele Archibugi, a research director at National Research Council (Italy) and Professor at Birkbeck College (University of London), discuss about the use of force, how the theory and practice of warfare and humanitarian intervention have evolved in the contemporary world and the international responsibility of states. In his Empire in Denial: The Politics of State-building (Pluto Press), David Chandler has forcefully argued that Western interventions are destablizing exercises of power without responsibility. Daniele Archibugi has been equally critical of these armed interventions, although in his The Global Commonwealth of Citizens. Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy (Princeton University Press), he urges for a cosmopolitan responsibility based on non-violence and inclusion. (Published: 19 May 2009) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2009, pp. 155-169. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v2i2.1974. (shrink)

Allen Buchanan has argued that a widely defended view of the nature of the state – the view that the state is a discretionary association for the mutual advantage of its members – must be rejected because it cannot adequately account for moral requirements of humanitarian intervention. This paper argues that Buchanan’s objection is unsuccessful,and moreover, that discretionary association theories can preserve an important distinction that Buchanan’s alternative approach to political legitimacy cannot: the distinction between “internal” legitimacy (a state’s ability (...) to morally justify itself to its own members) and “external” legitimacy (a state’s ability to morally justify itself to humanity more broadly). (shrink)

In recent years, the debate on the problem of causal exclusion has seen an ‘interventionist turn’. Numerous non-reductive physicalists (e.g. Shapiro and Sober 2007) have argued that Woodward's (2003) interventionist theory of causation provides a means to empirically establish the existence of non-reducible mental-to-physical causation. By contrast, Baumgartner (2010) has presented an interventionist exclusion argument showing that interventionism is in fact incompatible with non-reductive physicalism. In response, a number of revised versions of interventionism have been suggested that are compatible with (...) non-reductive physicalism. The first part of this paper reconstructs the definitional details of these modified interventionist theories. The second part investigates whether the modification proposed in Woodward (2011) is not only compatible with, but moreover supports non-reductive physicalism. In particular, it is examined whether that newest variant of interventionism allows for empirically resolving the problem of causal exclusion as envisaged by Shapiro, Sober and others. (shrink)

This paper responds to recent criticism from Alejandro Agafonow. In section I, I argue that the dilemma that Agafonow points to – while real – is in no way unique to liberal peacebuilding. Rather, it arises with respect to any foreign involvement in post-conflict reconstruction. I argue further that Agafonow’s proposal for handling this dilemma suffers from several shortcomings: first, it provides no sense of the magnitude and severity of the “oppressive practices” that peacebuilders should be willing to institutionalize. Second, (...) it provides no sense of a time frame within which we can hope that endogenous liberalization should emerge in the local political culture. Finally, it provides no suggestion for what the international community should do if the desired liberalization should fail to materialize within that time frame. In section II, I show that Agafonow’s argument resonates poorly with the concepts and ideas that he claims to adopt from Rawls’s Political Liberalism. Instead, his argument evokes the guiding ideas behind Rawls’s later work The Law of Peoples. I offer a critical perspective on these ideas, focusing specifically on Rawls’s treatment of women’s rights. Section III applies this critical perspective to Agafonow’s arguments, before closing with an example of a more constructive and empirically informed approach that critical studies of post-conflict reconstruction could take. (shrink)

This paper addresses a recent wave of criticisms of liberal peacebuilding operations. We decompose the critics’ argument into two steps, one which offers a diagnosis of what goes wrong when things go wrong in peacebuilding operations, and a second, which argues on the basis of the first step that there is some deep principled flaw in the very idea of liberal peacebuilding. We show that the criticism launched in the argument’s first step is valid and important, but that the second (...) step by no means follows. Drawing a connection between liberal peacebuilding and humanitarian intervention, we argue that the problems that the critics point to are in fact best addressed within the framework of liberal internationalism itself. Further, we argue that the development of the notion of human security marks a dawning awareness within liberal internationalism of the kinds of problems that the critics point to, however difficult it may still be to embody these ideas in practice. (shrink)

Just War Theory raises some of the most pressing and important philosophical issues of our day. This book brings together some of the most important essays in this area written by leading scholars and offering significant contributions to how we understand just war theory.

How should we determine which nations have a responsibility to remedy suffering elsewhere? The problem is pressing because, following David Miller, ‘[it] is morally intolerable if (remediable) suffering and deprivation are allowed to continue . . . where they exist we are morally bound to hold somebody (some person or collective agent) responsible for relieving them’. Miller offers a connection theory of remedial responsibilities in response to this problem, a theory he has been developing over the last decade. This theory (...) is meant to serve as a guide on how we can best determine which nations are remedially responsible for alleviating suffering and deprivation elsewhere. Miller’s theory entails our following a procedure in order to determine remedial responsibility for nations. The problem is that there is an important flaw in this procedure, a flaw that previous critiques have overlooked. This essay will explain this flaw and how Miller’s theory might be reformulated into a two-tiered procedure that would take better account of this problem. Keywords: Global justice; nationalism; Miller; identity; distributive justice; severe poverty (Published: 16 September 2011) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 4 , No. 3, 2011, pp. 195-202. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v4i3.7140. (shrink)

Which political principles should govern global politics? In his new book, Simon Caney engages with the work of philosophers, political theorists, and international relations scholars in order to examine some of the most pressing global issues of our time. Are there universal civil, political, and economic human rights? Should there be a system of supra- state institutions? Can humanitarian intervention be justified?

Machine generated contents note: 1. Molding the institutions of governance: theories of state formation and the contingency of sovereignty in fragile polities; 2. Imposing states: foreign rivalries, local collaboration, and state form in peripheral polities; 3. Feudalizing the Chinese polity, 1893-1922: assessing the adequacy of alternative takes on state-reorganization; 4. External influence and China's feudalization, 1893-1922: opportunity costs and patterns of foreign intervention; 5. The evolution of foreign involvement in China, 1923-52: rising opportunity costs and convergent approaches to intervention; 6. (...) How intervention remade the Chinese state, 1923-52: foreign sponsorship and the building of sovereign China; 7. Creating Indonesia, 1893-1952: major power rivalry and the making of sovereign statehood; 8. Siam stands apart, 1893-1952: external intervention and rise of a sovereign Thai state; 9. Domesticating international relations, externalizing comparative politics: foreign intervention and the state in world politics. (shrink)

The doctrine of the moral equality of combatants holds that combatants on either side of a war have equal moral status, even if one side is fighting a just war while the other is not. This chapter examines arguments that have been offered for and against this doctrine, including the collectivist position famously articulated by Walzer and McMahan’s influential individualist critique. We also explore collectivist positions that have rejected the moral equality doctrine and arguments that some individualists have offered in (...) its favor. We defend a non-categorical version of the moral equality doctrine, according to which combatants on either side of a just war sometimes (but not always) have equal moral status. On our view, some degree of culpability is necessary for liability, and non-culpable combatants may therefore sometimes remain non-liable even when they fight for an unjust cause. (shrink)

The world's political and military leaders are under increasing pressure to intervene in the affairs of sovereign nations. Although the sovereignty of states and the corollary principle of nonintervention have been part of the foundation of international law, there is some latitude for states, as well as collective security organizations, to intervene in another state's domestic and foreign affairs, thus making sovereignty and the principle less than absolute. In this paper I first sketch a reasonable foundation for sovereignty of states (...) and the principle of nonintervention. Second, I offer a decision-making procedure for justified intervention. Finally, I argue that there is an important difference between the strategic argument and the humanitarian argument, a difference that may have profound implications for the future use of the latter argument by our political leaders. (shrink)

When official representatives of more than 170 countries adopted the principle of the responsibility to protect (RP) at the September 2005 World Summit, Darfur was quickly identified as the test case for this new doctrine. The general verdict is that the international community has failed the test due to lack of political will. This article argues that the failure is real but that it is more fundamentally located within the doctrine of RP itself. Fulfilling the aspiration of RP demands an (...) international protection capability that does not exist now and cannot be realistically expected. The critical weakness in RP is that the responsibility to react has been framed as coercive protection, which attempts to be a middle way between classic peacekeeping and outright military intervention that can be undertaken without the consent of the host government. Thus far, theoretical and practical attempts to create this intermediate space for coercive protection have failed to resolve basic strategic and operational issues. In addition, the very act of raising the prospect of external military intervention for human protection purposes changes and distorts the political process and can in fact make a resolution more difficult. Following an introductory section that provides background to the war in Darfur and international engagement, this article examines the debates over the RP that swirled around the Darfur crisis and operational concepts developed for the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) and its hybrid successor, the UN African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID), especially during the Abuja peace negotiations. Three operational concepts are examined: ceasefire, disarmament and civilian protection. Unfortunately, the international policy priority o bringing UN troops to Darfur had an adverse impact on the Darfur peace talks without grappling with the central question of what international forces would do to resolve the crisis. Advocacy for the RP set an unrealistic ideal which became the enemy of achievable goals. (shrink)

Avia Pasternak argues for a right that democracies have to sanction other democracies. This paper reconstructs her argument and objects to one of its premises.

This chapter argues that, because humanitarian intervention typically involves the military of one state attempting to overthrow another state ’s government, it gives rise to different moral questions from simple cases of interpersonal defensive violence. State sovereignty not only protects institutions within a society that contribute to the satisfaction of individuals’ interests and that cannot be easily restored once overthrown; it also plays a role in the constitution of those interests, which cannot be assumed to be invariant across different forms (...) of social life. As a result, humanitarian intervention will frequently give rise to incommensurability between the pre-intervention and post-intervention states of affairs. The reasons against violating sovereignty, together with reasons for conservativism in action that arise in circumstances of incommensurable value, mean that the threshold for the moral permissibility of humanitarian intervention is high. The chapter concludes by outlining how humanitarian intervention might be internationalized, making it easier to justify. (shrink)

This article presents a new understanding of the problem of cosmopolitan motivation in war, comparing it to the motivational critique of social justice cosmopolitanism. The problem of cosmopolitanism's “motivational gap” is best interpreted as a political one, not a meta-ethical or ethical one. That is, the salient issue is not whether an individual soldier is able to be motivated by cosmopolitan concerns, nor is it whether being motivated by cosmopolitanism would be too demanding. Rather, given considerations of legitimacy in the (...) use of political power, a democratic army has to be able to motivate its soldiers to take on the necessary risks without relying on coercion alone. Patriotic identification offers a way to achieve this in wars of national defense, but less so in armed humanitarian interventions (AHIs). Two potential implications are that either AHIs should be privatized or that national armies should be transformed to become more cosmopolitan. This article presents a new understanding of the problem of cosmopolitan motivation in war, comparing it to the motivational critique of social justice cosmopolitanism. The problem of cosmopolitanism's “motivational gap” is best interpreted as a political one, not a meta-ethical or ethical one. That is, the salient issue is not whether an individual soldier is able to be motivated by cosmopolitan concerns, nor is it whether being motivated by cosmopolitanism would be too demanding. Rather, given considerations of legitimacy in the use of political power, a democratic army has to be able to motivate its soldiers to take on the necessary risks without relying on coercion alone. Patriotic identification offers a way to achieve this in wars of national defense, but less so in armed humanitarian interventions (AHIs). Two potential implications are that either AHIs should be privatized or that national armies should be transformed to become more cosmopolitan. (shrink)

Preface : twenty theses on cosmopolitan social theory -- Taking the "ism" out of cosmopolitanism : the equivocations of the new cosmopolitanism -- Confronting reputations : Kant's cosmopolitanism and Hegel's critique -- Cosmopolitanism and political community : the equivocations of constitutional patriotism -- Cosmopolitanism and international law : from the law of peoples to the constitutionalisation of international law -- Cosmopolitanism and humanitarian military intervention : war, peace and human rights -- Cosmopolitanism and punishment : prosecuting crimes against humanity -- (...) Cosmopolitanism and the life of the mind : the critique of reason. (shrink)

Palace of the End is a dense triptych of monologues exploring alternative narratives - albeit based in real facts - behind the events and the headlines surrounding the war in Iraq. Borrowing its title from the former royal palace where Saddam Hussein’s torture chamber was located, Thompson’s docudrama is structured as a chain of monologues telling three real-life stories set in the context of the war in Iraq. The play conveys three unconventional interpretations of the realities of war: that of (...) a young American soldier convicted for her misconduct at Abu Ghraib, the prison that stands as one of the most controversial symbols of the American-led Iraq invasion; a British scientist and weapons inspector who denounces what he understands as the false arguments given by his country’s leaders for engaging in a distant war; and an Iraqi mother whose life was shattered firstly by Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime, and later by the American first Gulf War. Each story is an enthralling and gut-wrenching reflection of one of the contemporary world’s most studied and controversial conflicts. The play gives voice to three different kinds of war victims, insofar as their political subjectivities and their moral conundrums are concerned. (shrink)

This dissertation explores a family of theoretical models of humanitarian military intervention. A number of recent theorists, including Tesón, Caney, Buchanan, Orend, Moellendorf, and Wheeler, build their models from a perspective called ‘cosmopolitanism.’ They offer arguments based on the moral supremacy of human rights, the arbitrary character of territorial boundaries, and the duty to protect individual human beings exposed to serious and systematic violence by their own governments. I develop a model of intervention that recognizes the moral significance of political (...) self-government. To the extent that international society should countenance a ‘duty to protect’ human rights, the duty ought to be constrained by a commitment to the values of self-government. The model developed in this dissertation also recognizes the significance of international law enforcement. Insofar as we should permit a role of enforcement for international human rights, that role should be constrained by formally accepted global principles and in particular by positive obligations to prevent and punish actions regarded as international crimes. These other global values are viewed with suspicion by cosmopolitan theorists, who tend to construe them in stark contrast to the vision of global responsibility for human rights protection. But I will show how these other values emerged simultaneously with cosmopolitanism and share many of its underlying intuitions. Because self-government and law enforcement are linked politically to the cosmopolitan vision, these two distinctive global values can be utilized as tools to fortify or expand cosmopolitanism by enlarging the global sense of responsibility for human rights. The aim of this project is to explain how these other values came to be neglected by cosmopolitan theorists, and why they should not be forgotten. (shrink)

Should states use force to bring about regime change? International law recognizes no such grounds. This article seeks to provide guidance from moral theory. The aim of this paper is to identify the moral grounds for the use of armed force by one state or a group of states, against another state, when the intention of the intervening states is to achieve a fundamental change in the character of the political and legal institutions of the other state. Lawyers tend to (...) place the argument for regime change intervention within putative humanitarian intervention doctrines. The moral justification for humanitarian intervention is in a moral principle I call the Human Rights Principle, which provides that states may intervene militarily to stop egregious violations of basic human rights or prevent such violations when they are imminent. The Human Rights Principle does not support regime change intervention. I argue that an alternative moral principle, the Self Governance Principle, provides the moral justification for regime change intervention. Under the Self Governance Principle, legitimate states (and legitimate states only) have a collective obligation to intervene to assist citizens in an illegitimate state to bring about regime change only if a substantial likelihood exists that the citizens of the illegitimate state will form a new government in a manner meeting the conditions for national self determination, which includes the conversion of the state into a legitimate state, and post-conflict reform will a bring about a legal system meeting the conditions for the law to have practical authority to the state's population. States may comply with their collective obligation by providing just and efficacious institutions to support regime change. If the conditions in the Self Governance Principle are not met, then states must refrain from using force for regime change purposes. The conditions in the Self Governance Principle are strict and rarely met. The Iraq invasion, for example, did not meet them. Though this article is not directly about international law, it elucidates moral principles that can inform international law. (shrink)

The idea of “promoting democracy” is one that goes in and out of favor. With the advent of the so-called “Arab Spring”, the idea of promoting democracy abroad has come up for discussion once again. Yet an important recent line of thinking about human rights, starting with John Rawls’s book The Law of Peoples, has held that there is no human right to democracy, and that nondemocratic states that respect human rights should be “beyond reproach” in the realm of international (...) relations. This is, for obvious reasons, a controversial view, especially given the powerful and important arguments purporting to show that democracies do significantly better than nondemocracies in promoting internal peace and equality, and in engaging in peaceful international cooperation. Both proponents and opponents of the Rawlsian view of human rights have argued that the view implies that democracies may not “promote democracy” in nondemocratic societies. But, given that all parties to this dispute agree that democracy is necessary for justice, and given the important instrumental goods provided by democracy, the Rawlsian view has seemed deeply implausible to many. -/- In this paper I blunt this challenge to the Rawlsian view by showing how, even if there is no human right to democracy, we may still rightfully promote democracy in a number of ways and cases. Showing this requires investigation of what it means to “promote democracy”, and a more careful inspection of when various methods of promoting democracy are appropriate than has been done by most political theorists working on human rights. When we look carefully, we can see that in some instances acceptable forms of promoting democracy are compatible with the Rawlsian view of human rights, and that this view is therefore not vulnerable to the “instrumentalist” challenge. We also see how, if political philosophy is to be useful, it must be less abstract and look closely at actual cases. -/- This paper posted by permission of the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. For information visit the Stanford University website. (shrink)

Legal philosophers have given relatively little attention to international law in comparison to other topics, and philosophers working on international or global justice have not taken international law as a primary focus, either. Allen Buchanan's recent work is arguably the most important exception to these trends. For over a decade he has devoted significant time and philosophical skill to questions central to international law, and has tied these concerns to related issues of global justice more generally. In what follows I (...) review Buchanan's new collection of essays, Human Rights, Legitimacy, and the Use of Force, paying special attention to Buchanan's argument that the philosophy of international law must be more empirically informed than it has been so far, and also to his claim that greater emphasis must be placed on the role of institutions. While these are important claims, I show that Buchanan often does not take the first far enough, and that appealing to institutions cannot do as much as Buchanan hopes or needs if his substantive conclusions are to be correct. (shrink)

Over the last several years asylum cases relating to activities of criminal gangs have greatly increased in frequency. Cases involving Central American gangs, the so-called maras, have attracted the most attention but similar cases have arisen out of South Eastern and Eastern Europe as well. Applicants in such cases face a number of difficulties as their cases do not fit into paradigm categories for asylum claims. These cases almost always involve non-state actors, for example, acting for reasons that are not, (...) at least at first glance, clearly political. Additionally, the reasons why gangs target particular individuals often do not obviously fit into one of the traditional protected grounds. If applicants fleeing gang activity are to successfully apply for asylum they will have to overcome these apparent difficulties. In this paper, a contribution to the University of Memphis Law Review Spring Symposium on immigration reform, I break down gang-related asylum claims into three main categories and show how at least some cases in each category fit within the area set out for protection by asylum and refugee law. I briefly discuss a conceptual framework which explains how some gang-related cases should be seen as falling in the area that asylum law seeks to protect (thereby providing a concrete example of the sort of protection that I claim in my dissertation refugee law is meant to provide) and give advice to practitioners about how to formulate meritorious claims. (shrink)

This article problematizes the concept of ‘mission’ in international interventions, who is entitled to missionize and how the missionized subject is conceptualized. By looking at the international missions in Kosovo , we problematize how the EU mission in Kosovo is entrenched in a trajectory of ‘missionizing’ that makes it bear the stigma of a structure non-responsive and non-sensitive to the local. Employing Derrida’s deconstruction, we explain that the criticism of international missions relates not so much to how they operate in (...) their host countries, or to the policy choices they make. Rather, looking at the path dependency of missions in the Western historical and civilizational trajectory, we maintain that the problem derives from the idea and very concept of ‘mission’ as intervention in itself. (shrink)

Political legitimacy and causal responsibilities are not the trumps they may appear to be in considering the justifiability of foreign intervention. Indeed, the major determinants that should guide the international laws and their enactors regarding justifiable foreign intervention are: the negative duty not to partake in an unjust system that oppresses the people of another country, moral uncertainty, and the realities of the agents in question. These jointly work to constrain the redesign of international law to a narrower scope than (...) in an ideal game-theoretic scenario. (shrink)

This article examines when economic sanctions should be imposed on liberal democracies that violate democratic norms. The argument is made from the social-liberal standpoint, which recognises the moral status of political communities. While social liberals rarely refer to the use of economic sanctions as a pressure tool, by examining why they restrict military intervention and economic aid to cases of massive human rights violations or acute humanitarian need, the article is able to show why they are likely to impose strong (...) restrictions on the use of economic sanctions as well. After reconstructing the social-liberal case against economic sanctions, the article develops the argument that liberal democracies have reasons to support sanctions on other liberal democracies, even when they perpetrate injustices on a smaller scale. Liberal democracies share especially strong ideological, cultural and institutional bonds, and these peer group relations open them to mutual influence. When one liberal democracy commits serious injustices while still proclaiming allegiance to the democratic ethos, it can adversely affect the vitality of the democratic culture in those other liberal democracies with which it maintains close relations. Other liberal democracies therefore have the right and the obligation to condemn this behaviour, in order to preserve their allegiance to their values. The article defends the use of economic sanctions in light of some recent critiques, and concludes by providing an overall assessment of the factors which liberal democracies ought to take into account when they consider imposing economic sanctions on other liberal democracies. (shrink)

We investigate how the just cause principle is applicable to contingency planning about armed interventions in civil wars that are somewhat likely to occur in the future. According to a 2005 peace agreement that formally ended a civil war between the Sudanese government in Khartoum and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, a referendum on South Sudan independence is to be held no later than January 9, 2011. Close observers of Sudan warn that this promise of an independence referendum might not (...) be correctly fulfilled, and that a North-South civil war is somewhat likely to recur. Focusing on the case of Sudan, we discuss the following key question, from the temporal standpoint of August 2010, the month this paper was completed: How may the just cause principle be used prospectively to decide whether there would be a just cause for armed intervention in Sudan, if a renewed North-South civil war were to occur there during the years 2010–2014? To illuminate this question of application, we also discuss a question of theory. What is the just cause principle? A core thesis is that the deterrent threat of armed intervention is an essential tool for preventing such a civil war. By means of deterrent threats of limited forms of armed intervention—for instance, the deterrent threat of imposing no-fly zones—the balance of cost/benefit calculations by the Sudanese government about the prospect of civil war might be tipped in favor of acceptance of South Sudan independence. We recommend that responsible actors in the international community should plan contingently about such armed intervention in Sudan, with the goal of preventing a renewed North-South civil war there. (shrink)

An examination of the applicability of conventional and revisionist just war principles to the global war on terror.

US military intervention and covert action is a significant contributor to global injustice. Discussion of this contributor to global injustice is relatively common in social justice movements. Yet it has been ignored by the global justice literature in political philosophy. This paper aims to fill this gap by introducing the topic into the global justice debate. While the global justice debate has focused on inter-national and supra-national institutions, I argue that an adequate analysis of US military and covert action must (...) focus on domestic institutions of the US. I describe many such institutions including industry lobbying, the ubiquity of US military bases abroad, US programs for training foreign militaries, secrecy of the intelligence and military agencies, pliant news media and government propaganda.<br>. (shrink)

While cosmopolitans are right to think that state sovereignty is derived from individuals, many cosmopolitan accounts can be too demanding in their expectations for illiberal regimes because they do not account for the attitudes of the persons with who will subject to the intervention. These ‘objectivist’ accounts suggest that sovereignty is wholly a matter of a state’s conformity to the objective demands of justice. In contrast, for ‘subjectivist’ accounts, the attitudes of citizens do matter. Subjectivist cosmopolitans do not deny the (...) objective demands of liberal justice, but argue that state sovereignty is at least partly a matter of the subjective attitude of citizens toward their state. This paper will highlight the reasons why such coercive impositions are troubling, and diagnose why objectivist theories characteristically fail to recognize them. It seeks to articulate a moderate kind of subjectivist cosmopolitanism that balances a liberal concern for rights with a worry about the imposition of political institutions or practices on a people that does not accept them. (shrink)

This chapter examines the role played by derogatory terms (e.g., ‘inyenzi’ or cockroach, ‘inzoka’ or snake) in laying the social groundwork for the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994. The genocide was preceded by an increase in the use of anti-Tutsi derogatory terms among the Hutu. As these linguistic practices evolved, the terms became more openly and directly aimed at Tutsi. Then, during the 100 days of the genocide, derogatory terms and coded euphemisms were used to direct killers (...) to their victims. Understanding these speech acts helps to illuminate the important ways that power is enacted through discourse, how speech acts can prepare the way for physical and material acts, and how speech generates permissions for actions hitherto uncountenanced. Studying the role of speech acts and linguistic practices in laying the groundwork of the genocide illuminates how patterns of speech acts become linguistic practices that constitute permissibility conditions for non-linguistic behaviors. Further, the analysis presented here helps to make sense of the view that a steady, deep, and widespread derogation of a group can be part and parcel of genocide, not only an antecedent to it. (shrink)

Can we ever justly critique the norms and practices of another culture? When activists or policy-makers decide that one culture’s traditional practice is harmful and needs to be eradicated, does it matter whether they are members of that culture? Given the history of imperialism, many argue that any critique of another culture’s practices must be internal. Others argue that we can appeal to a universal standard of human wellbeing to determine whether or not a particular practice is legitimate or whether (...) it should be eradicated. In this paper, I use the FGC eradication campaigns of the 1980s to show that the internal/external divide is complicated by the interconnectedness of these debates on the international level. As the line blurs between internal and external criticism and interventions, new questions emerge about the representativeness of global institutions. (shrink)