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44061. Chronology

Author:
Michele K. Esposito
Publication Date:
05-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This is part 113 of a chronology begun in Journal of Palestine Studies (JPS) 13, no. 3 (Spring 1984). Chronology dates reflect North American Eastern Standard Time. For a more comprehensive overview of regional and international developments related to the peace process, see the Quarterly Update on Conflict and Diplomacy in JPS 163.
Topic:
Security
Political Geography:
Israel, Palestine, and North America

44062. Editors' Note

Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
The Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs will turn one hundred years old in February 2014. Andrew Carnegie founded the Council in 1914 with a specific purpose in mind: he thought it was possible to avoid the Great War that he and many others believed was on the horizon. In fact, he approached the project with considerable optimism, confident that the barbarity of industrial war would become a thing of the past. Humanity was evolving, becoming more civilized with each passing decade. Common interests and common sense would surely make large-scale war a relic of bygone days, similar to other uncivilized practices, such as slavery and dueling. Sadly, it was not to be.

44063. Reimagining a Global Ethic

Author:
Michael Ignatieff
Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
"Reimagining a global ethic" is a project worthy of Andrew Carnegie and of the Carnegie Council's upcoming commemoration of his founding gift in 1914. As a collaborative research project stretching forward over the next three years, it ought to be integrative and reconciliatory: that is, it must try to understand the globalization of ethics that has accompanied the globalization of commerce and communications and to figure out what ethical values human beings share across all our differences of race, religion, ethnicity, national identity, and material wealth. When human beings do disagree morally, the search for a global ethic becomes an attempt to elucidate by analysis what exactly people are disagreeing about, so that, after arguing out our differences, we can either agree to disagree or work together to find common ground. Finding common ground on large ethical matters and understanding more deeply why, in some instances, we remain at odds with each other is worthwhile in itself, but it might also further Andrew Carnegie's original goal in founding the Council, which was to reduce the amount of conflict and violence in the world.
Topic:
Globalization

44064. Local Priorities, Universal Priorities, and Enabling Harm

Author:
Christian Barry
Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
"National communities," Michael Ignatieff writes in his thoughtful essay on the prospects for a global ethic, "have some good reasons, as well as some not so good ones, to privilege local ahead of universal priorities and interests." And he goes on to explain the clash of local and universal priorities as rooted in a conflict between the values of "justice and democracy." I would rather suggest that the conflict is an internal one-a conflict inherent in our thinking about what justice requires. But in any case, he is surely right that providing a compelling account of how to distinguish good from bad reasons for privileging local priorities, and identifying how weighty the good reasons for local priorities are, is fundamental to developing a plausible global ethic.

44065. A Global Ethic and the Hybrid Character of the Moral World

Author:
Nicholas Rengger
Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
In the lead essay of this symposium, Michael Ignatieff offers a characteristic blend of philosophical acuteness and political good sense on a topic that, we can all agree, is central to many of the most important questions on the contemporary political and international agenda. His analysis is prescient, challenging, and deserves pondering at some length; thus, in this short response I cannot deal with it in anything like the detail it deserves. But the enforced brevity is perhaps an advantage as well, in that it forces me to concentrate on where I differ from Ignatieff and on my own sense of what we might imply when we use such a term as "a global ethic."

44066. Toward a Global Ethic

Author:
David Rodin
Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
We are one humanity, but seven billion humans. This is the essential challenge of global ethics: how to accommodate the tension between our universal and particular natures. This tension is, of course, age-old and runs through all moral and political philosophy. But in the world of the early twenty-first century it plays out in distinctive new ways. Ethics has always engaged twin capacities inherent in every human: the capacity to harm and the capacity to help. But the profound set of transformations commonly referred to as globalization-the increasing mobility of goods, labor, and capital; the increasing interconnectedness of political, economic, and financial systems; and the radical empowerment of groups and individuals through technology-have enabled us to harm and to help others in ways that our forebears could not have imagined. What we require from a global ethic is shaped by these transformative forces; and global ethics-the success or failure of that project-will substantially shape the course of the twenty-first century.
Topic:
Economics, Globalization, and Politics

44067. The Dialogue of Global Ethics

Author:
Cheyney Ryan
Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
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.

44068. A Brief Response to Michael Ignatieff

Author:
Michael Joseph Smith
Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
In his elegant essay on the tension between a singular global ethic and global ethics in the plural, Michael Ignatieff invites us to "think harder about the conflicts of principle between them." He is certainly right that harder thinking is needed: advocates of both versions of a global ethic sometimes seem locked into mutual self-righteousness. What we might call singular, or universal, ethicists often accuse pluralists of parochial atavism, while the partisans of plural, usually national, ethics think that the universalists are naive at best, arrogant at worst. Both are utterly convinced that they are right.

44069. Introduction

Author:
Antonio Franceschet
Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
Within a short period the International Criminal Court (ICC) has become central to world politics. The dramatic diplomatic process that produced the Rome Statute in 1998 was followed by an unexpectedly rapid succession of state ratifications and the establishment of the court in 2002. As of late 2011 the ICC has indicted twenty-six individuals related to seven official investigations, all in Africa. Proceedings against one of these individuals were dismissed. Two other indictments, including one for Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, became moot because the individuals were killed before arrest or trial. The remaining list includes a sitting head of state, Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, as well as Kenya's sitting deputy prime minister, Uhuru Kenyatta. The United Nations Security Council referred both the Sudan and Libya situations to the court; three African states requested investigations of their own situations. The ICC prosecutor independently started an investigation in Kenya. Despite efforts by Kenyan state officials to halt ICC proceedings related to the widespread violence and killings following the 2007 national elections, opinion polls suggest that 73 percent of Kenyans want the ICC to remain involved.
Topic:
Security
Political Geography:
Kenya, Africa, Sudan, Libya, and United Nations

44070. Why the ICC Should Operate Within Peace Processes

Author:
Kenneth A. Rodman
Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
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.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution and Peace Studies